Garner's Modern English Usage, which just released its fourth edition, is potentially a damn useful thing to me. And after looking through Bryan A. Garner's latest, I can report that the potential is realized: this is an extremely useful and sensible guide. I don't know if I would sleep with it under my pillow, but I won't keep it far from my desk. Continue reading...
Florida's Margate Middle School needed help with vocabulary instruction. When they started implementing Vocabulary.com, the students' success built excitement for learning and also made headlines in the local media. Continue reading...
In order to readily comprehend a text, students need to know about 90% of the words in it. That's what makes vocabulary learning and retention such a key piece of the reading comprehension puzzle. With this in mind, consider putting the following protocol in place to maximize reading comprehension and long-term recall of word knowledge. Continue reading...
At Woodward Park Middle School in Columbus, Ohio, teachers were looking for a way to help out struggling students with literacy and turn around their scores on standardized tests. By adding Vocabulary.com as a literacy center in the language arts classroom, they saw immediate results. Continue reading...
In the Vocabulary Bowl, we had our own kind of March Madness, with the best and the brightest jockeying for position at the top of the leaderboard. Our SportsCenter-style roundup catches you up on all the action. Continue reading...
Teachers: here's how to use Vocabulary.com to prep your students for whatever text you are teaching. Watch this video and see how easy it is to quickly make adaptive learning activities using our list making tools. Continue reading...
When Dodd Middle School in Cheshire, Connecticut wanted to raise scores on a test that judges students' reading comprehension, they turned to Vocabulary.com for help. Their subsequent success was, in the words of one language arts teacher, "unbelievable." Continue reading...
While college basketball fans may be marveling at the exciting upsets of March Madness, the world of competitive crossword solving has experienced a major upset as well, as six-time reigning champion Dan Feyer was dethroned in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, losing out to first-time champ Howard Barkin. Continue reading...
One of the ways in which massive corpora (databases of natural language examples) have revolutionized lexicography is by providing access to a level of statistical analysis of language that was never before possible. The data in a corpus can tell us, with the effort of a few keystrokes—and backed by the effort of hundreds of person-hours of software development—all we need to know about the most frequent uses and collocations of words. Continue reading...
The Houston Independent School District has made boosting literacy a district-wide goal, and to that end, it has rolled out Vocabulary.com to all middle school and high school students in the district. In the process, Houston ISD schools have dominated the nationwide Vocabulary Bowl. Continue reading...