Meaningful Word Web

For English language learners, vocabulary development is especially critical for their ability to read and comprehend texts. Therefore, teacher needs to teach students the vocabulary so that they can enrich their store of vocabulary. One interesting way to teach vocabulary is by using graphic organizer. It helps students to visualize the relationship between words and their possible meaning. Today’s post will introduce readers with Visuwords, a web tool that uses graphic organizer for teaching vocabulary.

Link: http://www.visuwords.com/

General Description

Visuwords is a dictionary/thesaurus/etymology visualisation tool that uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an open source database built by University students and language researchers. This tool uses a web design to show users the definitions of words and the connections between words. These definitions and word connections are presented through colour-coded system to indicate relationships such as ‘a kind of’ and parts of speech such as ‘noun’. To use Visuwords, just type a word into the search box and Visuwords will generate a web of related words. Place the cursor over any of the words and the definition appears. Besides, the users need to use the colour-coded key to understand the connections between the words in any web. The following screenshot shows an example of the definition and connections for the word ‘technology’.

Level and Age

This tool can be applied to both primary and secondary schools students ranging from the age of 9-17 years old.  It suitable to be utilized by learners at all levels of English proficiency because it a visual friendly tool, easy to use, and comprehensible. Furthermore, this is also a great tool for adult learners to use.

How To Use Visuwords For Teaching English?

There are a few ways of using the tool with students suggested by Barrett (2007)

1. Define key vocabulary form learning objectives: After sharing the learning objectives to the students, teacher would want to clarify any vocabulary that students need to know. Hence, the teacher can have a link from that word to the site. For example, explore the meaning of significant from the Literacy Framework objective: Read and compare stories by significant children’s authors. 
2. Play a word journey game: The children are given a starter word and they take it on a journey, thinking of a connected word and recording each step. Then, teacher asks for where they ended up. For example, students started with GIANT and ended up with FACTORY. Then, both teacher and students check this out with Visuwords and see if the students can get to the word FACTORY. This sits nicely with Visuwords because users can expand the visual network by double clicking on a node.
3. Show the depth and complexity of meaning: Teacher can display to students how some words in the English have a broad range meanings and possible uses. In the results, the teacher can highlight to the children how many different shades of meaning there are for a simple word. For example, the word ‘say’ is very simple on the outset, but if run a search, we can see that it is complex in its meaning. 
4. Explore new vocabulary: Teacher and students lists new word that they find from their reading. They search for the words using the Visuwords, and then discuss the words’ relationships and meanings as a class.

Evaluation

Advantages:

1. Visuwords using web design to display the definition of words and their connections. This graphic organizer is one way of scaffolding learning through visuals. By providing them contextual support, the meaning can be easily acquired by the students. 
2. Visuwords does not only give students mere definition. It also gives them connections between words. This allows students to understand connections and gives them a diagram to visually 'see' the word.
3. It can be used to support metacognition. It helps students to make connections in their minds between the word that they are studying and other words that are related. Using it in this manner, students would be aware of their thinking of learning the meaning of the words through making connections. 
4. It appeals to students' multiple intelligences, especially visual learners and language smart students.
5.  It is an easy to use tool. It requires no registration and is free. This makes it applicable for students to use.

Disadvantages:

1. This tool requires access to the internet for users to be able to use. Hence, without connection to the internet, this tool is useless. 
2. It cannot be printed out for handout. Thus, its uses are limited only to the multimedia classroom and online learning.

Reference:

Barrett, T. (2007). Using Visuwords in The Classroom. ICT in My Classroom. [blog] 15 November. Available at: <http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2007/11/15/using-visuwords-in-the-classroom/ > [Accessed 15 November 2011].