WORDLE: How to use it in the EFL classroom.

One of my favourite WEB 2.0 tools is WORDLE because it is really easy to use and you can create word clouds in a few simple steps. However, I was not sure in what way it could be effectively used in an EFL classroom. "The Teacher's Magazine" Nº 127 (August 2010) gave me some useful ideas. According to the magazine, Word clouds can be created to revise vocabulary and grammar and to develop different skills such as Reading and Writing.

In order to revise Vocabulary, the teacher can create a word cloud with five or six words, all but one of which have something in common in order to make the students find the odd one out. Or s/he can show the students a cloud with words belonging to a certain semantic field (food, animals, etc) and ask them to make sentences. Or the teacher can ask students to find pairs of opposites/synonyms in a word cloud.

For Grammar, word clouds can be created with scrambled sentences for students to put the words in the right order. Or they can identify words and classify them as nouns, verbs or adjectives.

For developing Reading skills, word clouds can be used to brainstorm ideas about the text before reading it. Or they can retell the story read using only the words in the word clouds.

For Writing, they can create or predict the ending of a story using the words given or they can write their own stories.

These are some of the ideas given in the article. They can be adapted to different ages and levels. I think they are great ideas and they can help the teacher to make lessons more attractive. And what's more important, designing this teaching material is not time-consuming!!!!
Source: Starc, M. (2010, August). WEB 2.0 tools for EFL teachers. WORDLE. The Teacher's Magazine, (127), 24, 25.

Source: http://teacheng.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gatsby2wordle.png