Cloud The Words

A word cloud is a visual representation of the word content of a website, blog or simply plain text. Word cloud creation tools will look for the most frequently used words or tags and display them as a random pattern, with the more common words or tags appearing larger in the cloud. There are many tools for creating word or tag clouds, but this post will focus readers to only one of them. The tool is called WordSift.

Link: http://www.wordsift.com/

General Description

WordSift is a web tool that allows users to transform a text into a word cloud. The great thing about this tool is that it does not only provide users with a word cloud, but it also has other beneficial features. The features are: visual thesaurus, images, videos, and examples from source. Therefore, by clicking on any word that appears in the word cloud, the users will be able to search for the word definition in the thesaurus, images and videos of the word, and instances of the occurrence of the word in the text.  To get started, users need to copy and paste the text passage into the box of the website, and click on ‘sift’. Within seconds, they will get a word cloud which consists of a variety of words taken from the text. The following is an example of a word cloud from the text entitled Television’s Impact on Kids. You can read the text here. 

Based on the example above, there appear different words taken from the text. If you observe carefully, it is sorted out alphabetically. Nevertheless, users can change this order into what they like. The size of the words presented in the WordSift depends on the frequency of the words in the text. For instance, the word ‘child’ and ‘tv’ appears in large and bold size which makes them the most common words in the text. This also gives us an important clue about the content of the text even before we start reading it. We can predict that the text is about children who have got something to do with watching TV.

Level and Age

Wordsift is mainly used for teaching vocabulary visually. Hence, it is applicable for all students at all levels of English proficiency because all of them need vocabulary knowledge. Besides, it is easy to be used and the input is understandable even for the beginners. Teachers can apply this tool for both students in primary and secondary schools ranging from the age of 10-17 years old. WordSift is also beneficial to be used by adult learners to enrich their vocabulary knowledge.

How To Use WordSift For Teaching English?

As a suggestion, the web tool can be used as follows:

1. Pre-reading activity: Teacher finds a text to be taught and create a word cloud by using the tool. Then, the word cloud will be printed out and distributed to the students. In pairs, students will be asked to discuss and predict what the text is about. Next, teachers will explain some of the important words (key words or difficult words) taken from the word cloud. After that, students will have to skim the original text in order to get the gist of the text and thus get the answer for the prediction that they have made earlier. 
2. Pre-writing activity: Word cloud can be used for brainstorming ideas which will be used in writing. Teachers choose a particular issue and find an appropriate text. Then, teacher has to word cloud the text and distribute the printed version to the students. After that, teacher leads a discussion about the issue and some additional ideas can be added to the word cloud. 
3. Speaking activity: Teacher create a word cloud to some topics that students might find interesting to talk about. Distribute the word clouds to the students and either ask them to make questions based on the prompts or (advanced learners) simply to ask questions to their partner using the words in the cloud as prompts. This naturally leads into content and language feedback.
4. Listening activity: Teacher create a word cloud based on the text taken from BBC news. Teacher hand out some copies of the word clod to the students and they will be asked to predict the content of the text. Teacher will get some feedback from students and some important vocabularies will be explained. Then, students will have to listen to the key words and makes notes to help them remember the content of the text. In pairs, students need to compare the stories they heard and sum up the key ideas. Finally, they can read out the original text at a natural pace and thus getting the exact content.

Evaluation

Advantages

1. Scaffolding learning. It focuses on the meaning of the text in which it highlights the most important words necessary for text understanding. 
2. It helps to activate students’ schemata. This is parallel to the idea of schema theory in which knowledge is based on abstract pictures that we have in our mind about concepts and the relations between these concepts.
3. It appeals to the multiple learning styles-especially visual learners or auditory learners (through the use of video). 
4. It helps to enrich students’ vocabulary knowledge where they can learn the words in context through the example provided, and they can even develop deeper understanding of the words by using the visual thesaurus, images, and videos.
5. It assists students in developing multiple skills in language, especially writing, reading, speaking, and listening skills.

Disadvantages:

1. The word cloud produce by WordSift is generated by a computer-programme. Hence, users might have words that they don’t like or even need them, and WordSift does not allow these unnecessary words to be deleted. 
2. Wordsift presents the word cloud in such a plain way. So, it might be boring to look at. Compared to another word cloud tool such as Wordle, it has colourful words, and horizontal and vertical orientation of the words.
3. It accepts only limited characters (65k) of a text. Hence, it is not appropriate to be used for long texts.