Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language
Fitch O'Connell is a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugual and other European countries. Here Fitch examines some of the most treacherous pitfalls of the English-language classroom: "false friends," or words that appear to share a common meaning across languages but are actually different.
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The great secret of success in anything is to get a hearing. Half the object is gained when the audience is assembled.Now that you're all here: it seems a suitable time to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of P. T. Barnum — a name that you probably don't associate with language in a particular way. Continue reading...
—Phineas T. Barnum
We recently heard from Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer about the "chunking" approach to English-language instruction, which focuses on teaching students how stretches of words ("lexical chunks") tend to fall together in high frequency. Brett Reynolds, a professor of academic English at Humber College in Toronto, has long been somewhat skeptical of chunking, and we asked him to offer a contrasting perspective on the value of the approach for language teaching.
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This Sunday's New York Times Magazine was a special issue on education, with a focus on education technology. I used the opportunity to write an On Language column that explored new theoretical approaches to language learning that are having important practical applications in the English-language classroom.
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While reading the Aug. 19 Rolling Stone and trying to wrap my brain around Matt Taibbi's latest piece on our country's ongoing financial shenanigans, I stumbled onto an article on Katy Perry, who I know very little about due to my old age.
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In the Language Lounge, we raise a toast to words that are celebrating their golden jubilee, having made their first appearance in print a half century ago, in the heady days of 1960.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Look it Up! A Dictionary by Any Other Name...
News recently broke about words like chillax and vuvuzela getting added to the Oxford Dictionary of English. Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review, noticed that many reports of the story couldn't get the name of the dictionary right. Here is her guide for the perplexed.
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