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ddeubel's SlideShare account has several presentations on using Wordle in the EFL classroom in innovative ways (sometimes they refer to well-known activities made more interesting by using Wordle). Not all the activities are solely for EFL use

7 practical ideas for using Wordle with ESL and EFL students.

Wordle created from the text of McCain's concession speech; from a Plurk message that I didn't bookmark.

use this as a compare/contrast of Obama's and McCain's acceptance/concession speech

I totally agree with your comment about WORDLE serving to highlight the commanlities. As an EFL teacher, I tend to focus a lot on the common words in English, as these are the words that define our fluency in the language. I use the BNL2709 vocabulary profiler for this at http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl -- when you compare McCain and Obama's use of the most common words in their speeches, it can be a good starting point for a compare/contrast analysis which is accessible to most EFL students (well, those above B1 on the CEFR scale). When I get a good result for a WORDLE, I save it to the public gallery. Perhaps interesting to view WORDLEs focusing on the common words in English below with your WORDLE of unfiltered words in the McCain speech in mind. Compare the two WORLDEs http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289555/Obama_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289552/McCain_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 Notice the differences in frequency of words in both speeches (campaign, bless, nation, unite, promise, achieve, white). Also of note are the words that appear in one and not the other like fail, victory, generation. :) Creating complementary WORDLEs like this can be another useful way to explore the compare/contrast issue that you mention.

An example of maniupulting the output from a collocates/pattern table in Just the Word as input for the ADVANCED feature of WORLDE.

Hi Sheryl - glad you found it useful. You are quite right about the spreadsheet idea...I tend to use EXCEL and some of the basic TEXT, LOOKUP and FILTER options to manipulate lexical data I get from various sources. I did leave several suggestions for PHIL at the JustTheWord user group in GOOGLE to make the 'mash up' between JTW and WORDLE more seamless. But, as you suggest, copying and pasting the data into a spreadsheet is the only way to do this at the moment. Spreadsheets aren't everyone's cup of tea, but perhaps we could provide a template for the faint at heart, which can make it easier.... I also use the same technique to extract 'sets' from Mark Davies corpus sites at http://corpus.byu.edu as well as vocabulary profiles at Tom Cobb's Lextutor site at http://lextutor.ca -- Of course, PC-based software like ANTCONC and ANTWORDPROFILE also output data that can easily be manipulated into the ADVANCED feature of WORDLE. Here are some WORDLEs in my public gallery that show the results...the ones contrasting OBAMA and McCAIN speeches are quite interesting. http://www.wordle.net/gallery?username=BNL2709 My background is EFL, so I find other sources of lexical sets like http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=mouse&btn=Shrink+Set+%28to+15+items+or+fewer%29 also useful as input to WORDLE. :)

I'll look over these resources. Yes, I made WORDLES of Obama and McCain. I think one reason these types of web applications are so interesting is to view the ways in which we teach and learn....what our commonalities are.