Wordsift

Word Sift is a quick and an easy tool that sifts the frequently used words in the article. Thus, making it a very useful tool to get the gist of the article quickly.

What is amazing about it :

1. The layout used in word sift is clear and the colours used are not too distracting thus making it great  for learning.

2. It is not limited to only the English language but other languages as well can be used.

3. It has a thesaurus application where the common words highlighted in the text, if we click on them, they would show a chain of words linking the possible words that may mean the same.

4. We can also learn words from context for the tool would highlight from which sentence the word was taken out from. By clicking on the word, one would get to see how it functions in the particular sentence.

Limitations :

1. The words collected in the word cloud could not be categorized into word class. It would have been really good if it could do that. Would really help in a language learning process in identifying word classes.

2. Numbers or dashes from an article are also taken into the word cloud after being sifted. It does not remove them which actually might only be a distraction.

3. This tool could not also remove the use of foreign language from the word cloud. It might be troublesome if one would only want to focus on words in one specific language only.

How it is used in the language classroom (suggestion) : 

1. This tool could really be great for a pre-reading activity for the teachers could ask the students to get the gist of the article through the word cloud. This would also resemble a top down reading strategy for it is from a general view to a specific one.

2.Teachers could actually make use of the tool to get the students create sentences on their own using the words highlighted in the word cloud. Then, they could compare their sentences with the sentences used in the article and thus they could learn the usage of it in context.

3. Teachers could also ask students to summarize the article through the words used. 

another suggestion by my lecturer, is that teachers could also carry out a story guessing activity. Students will be asked to write out their own story and then copy the work they have done and paste it on word sift. After  the words have been sifted, students could print it out with their original story and bring it to class. Students could swap their word sift with their classmates and the teacher could choose one original piece from the students and read it out. Then, all of them would have to guess which story would the word sift belongs to.

Click it to give a go : http://www.wordsift.com/

Have fun 'sifting'!