1. Wordle and Wordsift: Vocabulary Learning Made Fun Tilly Harrison University of Warwick

2. Overview Looking at a Wordle Relation to Corpus Linguistics What is Wordle? How to make a Wordle Teaching ideas using Wordle Wordsift compared to Wordle Discussion

3. 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

6. 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)

7. 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!

10. Wordle Creation Text input Include common words? Excluding single words Changing Font Restricting the number of words Adding Colour Publishing to the Gallery How to Capture your Wordle

11. How to make a Wordle 1

12. How to make a Wordle 2

13. Including Common Words 1

14. Including Common Words 2

15. Changing the Font

16. Restricting the number of words

17. Adding Colour

18. Publishing to the Gallery

22. Teaching Suggestions Text Focus Text Comparison Concept Focus Word Focus List Focus Grammar Focus

23. Text Focus

30. Wordsift http://www.wordsift.com/

31. Wordsift output

32. A workspace to collect words and images

33. A Visual Thesaurus showing word associations

34. Images harvested from the Internet

35. 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