Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Word Frequency Counter Tool

I have had the pleasure of seeing noted CI/TPRS expert Karen Rowan present many times both in my district and at NTPRS. Every time I see her present, I walk away with a number of new strategies and tools. One online tool which I have seen her demonstrate is a Word Frequency Counter website.

NOTE - there are numerous word frequency counter websites online. This particular one is no different from any others, but it happens to be the one which I use.

What I love about this website is that it allows me to type (or cut/paste) a text and to find out the frequency of each word. When I am writing stories for my students, this is very important, because it helps me see if I am getting in enough repetitions of a target word/structure. If I feel like it is not enough, then I need to find ways to get in more repetitions.

The tool is quite easy to use 
1) Go to http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html


2) Type in your text in the "text box"


3) After inputting the text, click on "count words"


4) You will then see a list of words and how many times each word appears in the story. It will break it down into total words in the story and then into unique words in the story. You can also choose to have the list arranged alphabetically. NOTE - a different form of the word counts as a unique word, so for Latin, that may be something to consider. 


This tool has been of great use for me - I hope that you will find it helpful too!

6 comments:

  1. I just played with it and a tip: it does NOT like macrons. You'll have to remove them from your text if you want it to count properly.

    By chance I asked about word count tools just this afternoon on the Facebook iFLT/TPRS group. Textivate (paid) has this functionality amongst its many, and voyant-tools.org does word counts & a bunch of other things.

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    1. P.S. Despite the macron issue, this tool was definitely the easiest and most intuitive to use of the ones I've tried today. If you don't have macrons and you just need a quick list, it's your best bet.

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  2. This tool works with macrons and is pretty quick and easy if you don't have time to de-marcon your text. https://www.easycalculation.com/word-count.php

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  3. Excellent. Thanks for sharing. I used a word counter tool one time but this is a good reminder for me to use it to check the scripts and stories I write for my students.

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  4. THIS IS GENIUS. I had never heard of this before - I always wondered how teachers determine the highest frequency words in a novel. Thank you!

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  5. This word counter handles macrons fine and also allows you to eliminate certain words from the count

    https://planetcalc.com/3205/

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