This week, I am introducing another fancy-looking website that helps learners with their vocabulary base. Let's explore Visuwords!
Visuwords is a website containing a database that offers a network of vocabulary. The layout is easy to follow and the design is mysterious-looking, which intrigues users' interests. By using Visuwords, learners are able to explore the connections of a word including its relevant words, categories, members, topics and usages.
Just as easy as it looks, users type out a certain word, and Visuwords do the rest of the work.
Visuwords features colors and different patterns of lines to indicate various relationships between words. Complicated as it may look at first glance, clear instruction on the side helps users ease into the exploration smoothly.
Furthermore, Visuwords does more than the searching work. It gives quick definition of the related words or phrases so that users need not look them up in another dictionary again.
I consider Visuwords to be a fun website for students to explore the network of vocabulary; however, considering the practicality of language teaching and learning, Visuwords may not be my priority choice of tool for teaching vocabulary or other domains of a language. My major concern is that the association of words acknowledged by Visuwords may not be relevant to the lesson goal or may not be the most common use that a learner will come across in the real world, plus it only provides limited networks in its database.
In short, I regard Visuwords as an interesting tool that makes a good exercise for learners to explore English lexicon, and for teachers to demonstrate the wide network of vocabulary. Nevertheless, in terms of language teaching and learning, its efficiency and efficacy are not so significant to me.
댓글