Two+innovative+ELT+techniques+and+applications+by+Yun+Ding+2

= New Teacher Boot Camp Week 1 - Using Wordle  =

In Lisa Michelle Dabbs’ paper, the word wordle is used for the method which also can be called as word cloud. Moreover, it is also a free tool to create different chunks of words in a way that is similar to cloud. The font of the chunks depends on the significance or the frequency that the word appears in the target passage. According to Lisa “ Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of political speeches, blog posts, [|twitter feeds] , news articles and more, but there are additional educational uses worth considering.” Some of the advantages that I can think of, first of all, it is free of charge, everybody can use it, the instructions are easy to follow. If you are in university, you could even share it with your students; teach them how to use it in their projects. Furthermore, visual learners will totally benefit from this method, because it is very attractive. Lastly, this program allows designer to change the size of the words, students may guess the meaning by looking at them, at least have a gist of the target passage. You may also choose the colors that are appealing to you or your students. Some of the disadvantages might be, I have used it once in my presentation, and one of the problems I have encountered was that it was pretty difficult to save it as PDF. Another thing is that downloading the software can lead to a failure sometimes. Apart from these two, the rest of the program is just perfect, for example, one of the common usages of word cloud is teaching literature.

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