WordAloud software "free" to English schools

WordAloud^® - teaching English and literacy worldwide

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Benjamin Franklin

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WordAloud to teach yourself English

Practise your listening and reading skills

Practise listening. WordAloud is able to speak words at the same time as it shows the words on the computer screen. This helps you to separate words out of a continuous stream of speech sound. You can make WordAloud speak slowly and continuously, or you can step through the words at your own speed, giving yourself time to be sure of the meaning. You can read through a sentence again without the speech. Find whether you can hear the words in your mind as you see them. And you can close your eyes and listen to the sentence again, to check you understand each word as it is spoken. You can speed up the speech, building up your confidence and ability to understand people speaking English fluently.

Practise reading. Turn off the speech by going into text mode. WordAloud can display text either a word at a time or a sentence at a time. Seeing each word by itself helps you to concentrate on the meaning. You can set WordAloud to run through the text at any speed, or you can step through the words by yourself at your own speed.

Build up vocabulary. Go into collect mode. When you click on a word, WordAloud adds the word to a wordlist. Thus you can add difficult words to the list, and revise them later.

Alphabet, spelling and pronunciation. If you are learning from the beginning, it is worth considering the synthetic phonics approach, especially if you are not familiar with the Latin alphabet in which English is written. You will start with a few sounds of the language, how they can be used make words, and how they are represented as letters in the alphabet. You will see some simple spelling rules. And with WordAloud you can learn the correct pronunciation of the words. Then you learn other sounds of the language, and how they are represented. You will learning spelling and pronunciation in a gradual systematic way, understanding the normal rules of spelling and pronunciation, and learning the exceptions as you go.