For English Language Learners

Rewordify is an excellent online tool that I encourage my students to use regularly. Where I am, it is easier, less expensive and more convenient to find books for my students online at Project Gutenberg. There are over 55,000 free books and the selection is awesome. Typically I provide my students with a .pdf version of the text or tell them to organize their own copy by providing the link.

Once my students have the text in digital form, they just navigate to [Rewordify] (https://rewordify.com/) and, when they encounter a passage that is challenging, they can "rewordify" it. [Rewordify] essentially substitutes difficult vocabulary with easier and more commonly known synonyms in a format of the reader's choice.

Here I will provide a brief example for ease of reference, using passages from my short story The Edge of Dreams or The Neoplatonic Pirate. As you can see from the first paragraph, the text has some vocabulary that may be challenging for English language learners:

"The great Spanish galleon of lost dreams slid along the razorblade horizon between hope and hopelessness. Its great oars lapped deep into the birthing foam of love and fate, seeking to sweep the great ship onto the inexorable cresting of an eternal dawn. Tattered with whispers of relinquishment, the sails genuflected over lustrous decks of beaten bronze and the burnished beauty of the ship’s forgotten youth swayed beneath the captain’s unshod feet."

On the homepage of Rewordify there is an empty yellow field in which to enter text. When we copy, paste and click "Rewordify text", we get the following:

As you can see, the more difficult terms have automatically been replaced with words that are highlighted in yellow. There are however other formats that I find easier for my students, which can be found under the "settings page".

For my students, I typically recommend "Display hard word and easier word inline", which provides the easier synonym in parentheses immediately after the word. Students on their own however tend to like "Display original with vocabulary column". Try all the options and see which you like best.

You can also click on "Parts of speech" in order to see what each word is, be it a noun, adjective, verb etc. You can also click on the original word then the speaker symbol to hear a female robot pronounce the word.

Rewordify also has a very nice selection of classic literature that is automatically "rewordified" in its entirety, so you can read the text in an easier version online. Here's a preview of Milton's Paradise Lost in the "rewordified" form from their site, so you can get the idea:

There are a large number of "public documents" as well, with everything from news stories to scientific essays and legal documents. Start reading!

For English Language Teachers

Rewordify has a ton of amazing resources for teachers, as this screen cap demonstrates, enabling teachers to make multiple choice quizzes, vocabulary lists, matching exercises, cloze activities and much more, each with the option to generate an answer key to go with it.

In my experience it is good to proof read and reformat just to be on the safe side, Rewordify uses a machine recognition algorithm which is not always 100% correct, which for teaching is essential. Even with proofreading and reformatting however, it is still MUCH faster to create teaching materials!

For teaching students to use the site, if you have a projector or beamer hooked up to your computer, you can click the "demo" button and illustrate how the site works to the students in that way.

It is also possible to assign students homework that is to be done on the site under Learning Sessions, click on "Teach smarter" in the upper right hand corner to go the Educator Central Overview, where you can decide if you want to sign up (for free) to use Educator Central.

Once registered, you can then upload documents to read, check students' progress on the site via charts (how many minutes they read, how many words they have learned and what errors they make) and then scaffold your lessons accordingly. This is just one of the many different kinds of charts you can choose from:

The site has developed amazingly in recent years. I am very excited to see what will come next! So give it a try!