Why are word clouds useful for language teaching? This plug-in is usually free and can be easily installed on your computer if it is not already. Many of the websites use a ‘Java’ software plug-in which works inside your web browser. You can produce a word cloud like the one above using a number of free websites.
Others colour-classify words according to their relationship to themes or word type, so it’s good to think about the type of tool you use to create your word cloud and the types of activities you want to use it for.
Some word clouds, like the one above, analyze the frequency that words appear in the text and make them bigger. This text was created from a part of the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.Īs you can see, it produces an attractive visual which can be very useful in forming the basis of many different types of activities both inside and outside the classroom. Word clouds are usually generated from some kind of text.
A word cloud is a colourful and often random arrangement of words which have been taken from a text and formed into a shape.
