What is this?
It is an excellent tool to learn English in a playful and interesting way. It can automatically select the most important words from a text and then transfer them to a map of tag cloud. When clicking each tag, students can easily check the meaning, synonyms or its relationship with other words by the online dictionary “Visual Thesaurus”, which is combined in the website. Besides, there are also some pictures in association with every tagged word.
The website is suitable for every English teacher.
Why is it good for language learning?
l Students share the responsibility of learning instead of relying on the teachers since they can easily look up the new words which are introduced in an organized way in the on-line visual thesaurus.
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| Visual Thesaurus |
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l Students might find it more easy to memorize the vocabulary since the images of the selected vocabulary are also shown on the left bar.
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Google images of "revolution" |
l Students can not only learn the meaning of the tagged vocabulary but also learn how to use them since they can find example sentences in the article once they click on those words.
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| Example sentences when clicking the tag word "selection". |
l The file of tag cloud can be saved and be printed out for future use so that teachers don’t always have to use the computer to do the pre-reading activities.
Classroom use
There are two ways to use the tag words.
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l Teachers can use the tag cloud as warm-up activities and have students guess what they are about to read or listen either individually or as a group/pair
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l Teachers have students click on the tag word which they don’t know and read the example sentences, guessing the meaning of the word.
l If students still have problem understanding the meaning the word, they can check it in the visual thesaurus dictionary or the images searcher by Google on the web page and take notes.
l Then teachers can have students listen to the text or read the text silently by themselves and compare their guessing with the text
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l Teachers can have students choose several tag words to practice making sentences as a pair.
2. Teachers can do the activities mentioned above in different order.
l Teachers can have students listen to the text or read the text first. During the listening/reading, teachers can have students write down whatever the key words they think important.
l Later teachers show them the tag words made by Wordsift, which students compare their answers to. Afterwards, teachers make students read/listen to the text again.
l Teachers have students look up the new words and read the example sentences as what I have suggested in the previous section.
Limitations
l The key vocabulary selected automatically by the system is not always meaningful and useful to predict the main ideas of an article. For example, some statistics like 20 or 1000 will be highlighted.
l There should be enough computers.
l Students might get distracted by the images of tag words.
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