Whats in a Wordle Vocabulary Learning Made Fun

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Whats in a Wordle?Vocabulary Learning Made Fun

• Tilly Harrison
• University of Warwick

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Dedicated to Tim Johns, a great teacher and huge
inspiration to me
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Overview

• Looking at a Wordle
• Relation to Corpus Linguistics
• What is Wordle?
• How to make a Wordle
• Teaching ideas using Wordle
• Discussion

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Text Focus

• Look at Wordle on the green handout which has the
  words in large letters our and university
• Discuss these questions with your neighbour
• Which university is it talking about?
• What kind of text do you think it came from?
• with was a frequent word in the text - can you
  identify any words that went with it?
• Can you identify any likely phrases from the
  text?
• Can you make a sentence with these words that
  could have come from the text?
• What language activities could you do with this
  Wordle?

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Text Focus

• http//www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/704389/Cardiff_
  University
• http//www.cardiff.ac.uk/welcome/index.html
• http//www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_el
  tcs/als/als2008/wordles

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What is a Wordle?

• A beautiful word cloud
• Made by IBM software engineer, Jonathan Feinberg
• Free to use, graphics made are yours to keep
• Any text can be used
• More frequent words are larger
• Very quick and flexible

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Corpus Linguistics

• The Idiom Principle (Sinclair, 1991) suggests
  that much of language is semi-preconstructed
  phrases
• Collocation illustrates the idiom principle and
  is an essential aspect of word knowledge
• Language should be studied in authentic attested
  instances of use (Stubbs 1996 23)
• Frequency in the corpus is observable evidence
  of probability in the system (Halliday, 1991
  Stubbs, 2007)

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Relation to Corpus Linguistics

• Wordle invites you to work with authentic texts
  (instances of use)
• Wordle shows frequency
• Wordle encourages focus on collocation and
  chunking
• Wordle is fun and visually attractive -
  concordance lines are not!

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Wordle Creation

• Language
• Font
• Layout
• Colour
• Publishing to the Gallery
• How to Capture your Wordle

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How to make a Wordle 1
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How to make a Wordle 2
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Including Common Words 1
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Including Common Words 2
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Changing the Font
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Restricting the number of words
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Adding Colour
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Publishing to the Gallery
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Teaching Suggestions

• Text Focus
• Text Comparison
• Concept Focus
• Word Focus
• List Focus
• Grammar Focus

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Text Focus

• http//www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/707110/What_mak
  es_a_Good_Essay
• http//www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_el
  tcs/als/als2008/goodessays/
• http//www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_el
  tcs/als/als2008/wordles/essaytext

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References

• Halliday, M.A.K. (1991) Corpus studies and
  Probabilistic Grammar in Aijmer and Altenberg
  English Corpus Linguisitcs London Longman
• Sinclair, J. (1991) Corpus, Concordance,
  Collocation Oxford OUP
• Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Analysis.
  Oxford Blackwell.
• Stubbs, M. (2007) in Hoey, M., M. Mahlberg, M.
  Stubbs and W. Teubert Text, Discourse and
  Corpora theory and Analysis London Continuum