Lexitronics

I’ve often wanted to create a ‘word cloud’ of high frequency words from a text that I want to use in class. I love the BNL2709 vocabulary profiling tools on Tom Cobb’s Lextutor website, but students find tabulated data boring and hard to interpret.  So, when I recently came across the WORDLE website I was very excited. What is more, it is terribly easy to use as you can see from the voicethread below:

WORDLE is the brainchild of Jonathan Feinberg, who has made it freely available on the Internet.  Thanks Mr Feinberg!  Here is an example of a wordle of words from quotes taken about teachers’ attitudes towards new developments in educational technology.  When do you think these quotes were made?

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Nilgun, Steve and John’s articleThrough the Looking Glass and Into the Land of Lexico-Grammar has now been published in English for Specific Purposes, Vol. 27, No. 4. (2008), pp. 459-479.  Good news, since this article really does provide the research background to much of Lexitronics.