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Have fun with language in a creative way!
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What are Wordles?
www.wordle.net is a free online tool for people to create graphics from text they upload.
What’s in a Wordle? [email protected]
What’s in a Wordle?
Interesting features for language teachers:
• More frequent words are increased in size.• Common words (the, and, of, etc.) are excluded by default, although they can be included if the teacher wishes so.• The ‘randomize’ feature creates new versions of a particular text instantly, making it easy to make a number of different wordles for a text.• You can customize colous, for instance, if you want mostly grey with one bright colour to highlight a certain word.• You can restrict the number of words which can appear to 30, ensuring that all the key words are large enough to be legible, really useful with long texts.• You can simply print a number of versions of a text for the class or you can also publish the graphic into a web page (click ‘publish to gallery’).• You can also save your wordle as a pdf file.
What’s in a Wordle? [email protected]
How to make a wordle?
1. Find the text you want to use, select and copy it.2. Go to www.wordle.net3. Click ‘Create’. Paste the text into the box which says ‘Paste in a bunch of
text.’4. Click ‘Go’.5. If you want to customize your wordle to suit your needs, the buttons at
the top allow you to do it.
Note: You can also exclude some words by right click, such as ‘the’.
What’s in a Wordle?
Possible activities:
1. It is a quick, easy way to make short texts and word lists look funny.2. Students could summarize the plot of a reader.3. Ask students to recreate sentences from the wordle: Sentence
pattern.4. Provide them with wordles from a text that will be read in class or for
homework. The aim is to make the students curious about the content of a text, so that they will read it with more concentration when it is handed out.
5. Use a wordle to pre-teach important vocabulary from a text.6. Look at the wordle: What is the text about?7. Collocations and phrasal verbs: Make students find the verbs which
usually go with a certain noun, since wordles allow the frequent collocates of the word to appear around it.
What’s in a Wordle?
Useful websites with extra ideas:
• www.groups.google.com/group/wordleusers/about• www.skillsworkshop.blogspot.com/2008/07/using-wordle-in-classroom.html
The whole point of wordle is to allow creativity and customise it to your own context…
so plunge in and have a go!
Tilly Harrison, University of Warwick
