Transcript What`s in a Wordle? - University of Warwick

What’s in a Wordle?
Vocabulary
Learning Made Fun
Tilly Harrison
University of Warwick
Dedicated to Tim Johns, a great
teacher and huge inspiration to me
Overview
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Looking at a Wordle
Relation to Corpus Linguistics
What is Wordle?
How to make a Wordle
Teaching ideas using Wordle
Discussion
Text Focus
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Look at Wordle on the green handout which has the words
in large letters ‘our’ and ‘university’
Discuss these questions with your neighbour:
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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?
Text Focus
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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
What is a Wordle?
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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
Corpus Linguistics
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‘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)
Relation to Corpus Linguistics
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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!
Wordle Creation
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Language
Font
Layout
Colour
Publishing to the Gallery
How to Capture your Wordle
How to make a Wordle 1
How to make a Wordle 2
Including Common Words 1
Including Common Words 2
Changing the Font
Restricting the number of words
Adding Colour
Publishing to the Gallery
Teaching Suggestions
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Text Focus
Text Comparison
Concept Focus
Word Focus
List Focus
Grammar Focus
Text Focus
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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/wordles/essaytext
References
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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