Wordsift: Play with Beautiful Word Clouds

Wordsift is an useful site to create graphical images of words. Wordsift not only makes the words look prettier than other word cloud generators such as Wordle, Tagxedo, it constitutes many different options which make it a compelling tool for ELT students to learn new words and their different contextual meanings. No doubt it can make you the smartest teacher in the school who can manipulate learners' thoughts using quick and easy-to-create digital images.

 I have created this colourful word cloud using Wordsfit and it amazed me when I found out that each word, if the cursor hovered around it, says it frequency in the text from which it is drawn.

You might be wondering what is the basic premise of a word cloud? It is an image made up of words where the the size of the word indicates the frequency of it occurence in the given text. For instance, the word 'vocabulary' has occured in the text 11 times, which is the highest, therefore, the word is sized the biggest in this cloud. Interesting facts like this can stimulate students' thinking and provoke them to find out more about words and their frequencies in any text they read.

Creating a Word Cloud in Wordsift

Creating a word cloud is literally a matter of a minute or two. You select the text you want to see as a word cloud. Paste it on the box in wordsift and select 'sift' - in a second you will see a visualization of your text on screen. The beauty if this site does not end here - it will take you to a new page and give you an array of options from which you can color code and choose interesting styles and layouts for your cloud.

Great Features

•  Interesting visualizations are offered by Wordsift. It works more like a theasaurus by displaying anytonyms, synonyms of a given word. If you click on a specific word from this web, it will take you to another lexical set specifically based on that word only. It is useful to broaden students' vocabulary repertoire in general.
• It shows a suggestion box titled 'Image/videos for ---(the most frequently occured word)'. It displays suitable images and images from Google. This feature could be of great use to check students' unerstanding. Teachers can ask students to find out which pictures best suit the given word and why.
• Wordsift also has a wonderful section where all contexts of any given word are displayed. It is one of the most useful features of this tool because it allows you to know many different uses of a single word in the same text. While reading, we usually don't pay attention to different uses of a single word. This box helps us recall and relate those contexts. What more, any sentence in this box, if clicked, will take you to the actual paragraph or sentence of the text which gives even better understanding of the usage of that word. This could a reliable way to engage students in learning different uses of the same word.

Theoretical Underpinning

Teaching vocabulary in classes in often a challenging and time-consuming job for teachers because it entails those same basic rules of looking for meaning, connecting examples and finally using it in sentence. But if these steps can be complemented by digital visualizations, better retention can be guaranteed. Associating images, videos, contexts along with colorful word cloud will not only enhance their motivation to learn and practice new vocabulary, but also generate advance thinking about the different contextual uses of those words. Any learning if made entertaining, can ensure better outcomes.

Sample Activities

• Word clouds can be used to warm up the class. Students can be asked to predict the topic of the lesson from the word cloud and associate ideas together.
• Students can be asked to create a word cloud based on an excerpt of a novel of a text they read in class. After they create the cloud, they can work in pairs to find out the different uses of any chosen word and create some sample sentences on their own.
• Students can be taught useful verbs and nouns using word clouds. Teachers can show a cloud on the board and each student has to come up with a synonym or antonym of that word instantly. If the student can get it right, they will get an extra point if they can make a sentence with that new word. This could be a creative way to expose students to a wide range of words.
• Students can brainstorm ideas using word cloud in class. They call also come up with stories or sentences using words from the cloud.

Wordsift in Bangladeshi Classrooms

• Wordsift can be a great tool to engage learners in vocabulary use and learning in EFL classrooms. Teachers can ask students to create posters on word clouds on different themes and highlight the key words. The class can then come up with a sentence on that word.
• Teachers can use word cloud in powerpoint presentations to help students predict and generate useful ideas on the given topic.

Overall, Wordsift is an interesting site to play with words in class. It provides a different dimension to learning vocabulary and improve English of EFL students. Of course, teachers can make it simpler or complex, depending on their students' levels. And surprisingly, wordsift provides a detailed chart on the reading and difficulty level of your chosen text and words. So, its all easy now. I hope you enjoy using Wordsift with your students!

Courtesy: Wordsift.org