There is a serious of similar websites to make tag cloud. Let's first see Wordsift as a typical example.
What is Wordsift?
WordSift gives a verbal quick-capture of a text material to preview the vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. Just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you will quickly identify important words that appear in the text due to their high frequency in the text. Click to have a try: http://www.wordsift.com/
Wordsift produces a Tag Cloud of the 50 most frequent words in the text, excluding function words (such as is, of, at, the). The words in the cloud are alphabetically ordered, and their relative frequency is indicated by text size.
The cloud can be sorted according to their frequency in the printed English language from common-to-rare and rare-to-common, and alphabetically from A-to-Z and Z-to-A. The cloud can also be made to disappear and re-appear by clicking on squish and unsquish.
The text:
Universities in England could be stripped of the power to charge tuition fees of more than £6,000 a year if they fail to admit sufficient numbers of students from poorer backgrounds. And those setting higher fees could face large fines for missing targets.New government guidance also confirms universities can admit poorer students with lower grades than other candidates if they show potential.Universities say sanctions would be unfair.
Critics say the government is cutting access to higher education by raising fees.
Annual targets
Fees are due to rise to a maximum of £9,000 per year from 2012, but the government says it wants to ensure this does not put off poorer students from applying to university.Any institution wanting to charge more than £6,000 per year will have to negotiate an annual access agreement with the Office for Fair Access (Offa).
This will set a target for how many students from state schools or poorer backgrounds it must recruit in future years, and will be reviewed each year initially, rather than every five years at present.At the moment just over 7% of pupils in England go to private schools (more attend in sixth form) but they make up about half of those at Oxford and Cambridge.
The government says it wants to help pupils on free school meals (FSM) to reach their potential by going to university.
According to a report by the Sutton Trust charity, in the 25 most selective universities, only 2% (approximately 1,300 pupils each year) of the student intake was made up of FSM pupils, compared with 72% of other state school pupils. The charity produced a table showing how different universities in England compare.
Wordsift
http://tagcrowd.com/
http://www.wordle.net/
How can Tag cloud be used in English language learning?
- Lesson preparation: A teacher can use tag cloud to review assigned text to identify challenging words or concepts prior to a lesson.
- Previewing text: identify the key vocabulary, practice the ability of skimming.
- Help write gist and summary.
- "Assessment: Whole-class vocabulary assessment can be done on-the-fly by showing the images from selected words, having them identify unfamiliar words, and having students talk about which picture is the best representation of a given word."(http://www.wordsift.com/site/about)
Limitations:
- some numbers and dates which are not important may also be included as high-frequent words.
