Discovering English with VersaText

Studying and teaching vocabulary and grammar one text at a time

James Thomas

What is VersaText?

VersaText is a free online tool for teaching and studying English through texts. You paste your own text in, or use one of the 20 sample texts, and then it makes you a word cloud.

The sizes of the words in the word cloud show how frequent they are in the text and their colours indicate their parts of speech. You can customise the word cloud in many ways that allow you to focus on different features of the language. For example, you might show your text's verbs only, or you can choose between showing key words and most frequent words.

Next, you can click on any word in the word cloud and it produces a concordance of that word. In this way, you can see what the author says about that word and how they have used it. You see what phrases and structures it is used in and how they create some of the messages of the text.

In addition, there is the Profiler which provides stats about the text: most frequent words, lists of the adjectives, for example, that are among the most frequent 1,000 words of English. And all the proper nouns, which is useful for setting the scene for the text. And the Profiler provides readability scores as well as an estimate of its CEFR level.

The Profiler

Teachers often need to create their own teaching material on texts and topics that are not available in published resources. This is often the case for teachers of CLIL, ESP, EAP and EMI. Teachers often see texts on current affairs that are related to their teaching. VersaText is an excellent tool for creating lessons on the fly that deal with both the content of the text and its language.