1. What’s in a Wordle? Vocabulary Learning Made Fun Tilly Harrison University of Warwick

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

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

4. 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?

5. Text Focus http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/704389/Cardi ff_University http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/704389/Cardi ff_University http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/welcome/index.html http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba _eltcs/als/als2008/wordles http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba _eltcs/als/als2008/wordles

6. 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

9. 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)

10. 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!

13. Wordle Creation Language Font Layout Colour Publishing to the Gallery How to Capture your Wordle

14. How to make a Wordle 1

15. How to make a Wordle 2

16. Including Common Words 1

17. Including Common Words 2

18. Changing the Font

19. Restricting the number of words

20. Adding Colour

21. Publishing to the Gallery

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

26. Text Focus http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/707110/What_makes _a_Good_Essay http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/707110/What_makes _a_Good_Essay http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_eltcs/al s/als2008/goodessays/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_eltcs/al s/als2008/goodessays/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_eltcs/al s/als2008/wordles/essaytext http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/courses/ba_eltcs/al s/als2008/wordles/essaytext

33. 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