The Word

Words are obviously the staple of the English language classroom. Yet words tend to be studied in terms of their utility: their ability, across whole sentences, passages, or texts, to evoke, instruct or persuade.

Students who self-identify as writers or readers will often tell you that they ‘love words’. They love finding new words and finding new ways to showcase their existing words. Is this a key? Can we encourage more ‘writers’ and ‘readers’ if we find engaging ways to study The Word? Also, by focusing on individual words, and particularly those in high use, we can move straight to the heart of a text.

I want to explore here the possibilities for showcasing The Word offered by an incredibly simple tool: www.wordle.net

Wordle.net is an online tool for creating ‘word clouds’ – a cloud or bouquet of words. The user simply types or copies a piece of text into a text field and hits ‘Go’. Wordle.net then generates a cloud. The words are removed from their previous sequence and placed randomly within the cloud, at different angles and in different colours.

If the text provided is brief, the word cloud will include all the words; if the text is long, Wordle.net will select the most common words.

The clouds emphasise words that appear more frequently, by increasing their size in relation to the other words. This provides a visual indicator of significant words

The website describes the tool as a ‘toy’ and it does have a playful quality. Text can be altered in terms of the font type, text colour or word layout. The results are striking, with different cloud options evoking different moods or symbolic messages.

Immediacy

It is quick and simple to create a cloud. This enables the creation of clouds during a lesson, providing students with immediate results to view and discuss. This can be particularly powerful if the lesson is aiming to compare ideas across a specific class discussion – to show similarities and differences in students’ ideas and responses. The tool also offers an engaging ‘reveal’ when the cloud is created, with its explosion of randomised colours, fonts and layout. The immediate ‘text’ is a striking visual object; a second later, it is registered by viewers as a set of words to explore.

‘Here’s one I made earlier’

The teacher can create clouds prior to a lesson and utilise them as a discussion point. If talking on a particular topic, they may collect words from a text being studied, or from secondary sources that might illuminate thinking around a topic. Or they might record classroom discussion in words and use this to illustrate some of the ideas the class has covered.

Group feedback

The teacher may produce a cloud based on the collective written tasks of students to demonstrate key or diverging ideas or whether students are addressing an assessment task adequately. The teacher may also collate the feedback provided to all students, to give guidance to the class as a whole on some of the most common issues students may be having and/or the best aspects of their work.

The Word as jewel

Finally, it is possible to utilise Wordle.net as a jewellery box for gorgeous words. Students may create clouds out of their favourite poem, or poem stanza, or favourite block of text. The word cloud illuminates individual words and encourages the student to reflect on them. This can be done to foster student thinking around the meaning of significant words, such as their cultural or personal power, or their ambiguous, conflicting or varying meanings. 
Alternatively, the activity could be purely aesthetic. Students could be asked to reflect on the appeal of a particular word or series of words. They might discuss what thoughts, emotions or memories the word evokes, or they may simply comment on the pleasure of uttering the word!

Word clouds as artefacts

The word clouds can be saved online or printed for display or distribution. The online gallery allows anonymity but provides students with the pleasure of seeing their clouds ‘published’ alongside other Wordle.net users around the world.

Finally, here IS one I created earlier, based on the text of this blog entry…