Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Students
University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron explains how a simple grammar lesson can lead to a clash of civilizations.
Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things. Continue reading...
Yesterday we talked to sixth-grader Nicholas Rushlow, who finished 17th in the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee. At his home in Pickerington, Ohio, Nicholas maintains an impressive "word wall," festooned with many of the fascinating words he has learned while practicing for spelling bees. We asked Nicholas to share some of his favorites. And he has also created a Community Spelling Bee for us with even more "killer" words!
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We were thrilled to learn that sixth-grader Nicholas Rushlow of Pickerington, Ohio, who placed 17th in last spring's Scripps National Spelling Bee, is an avid user of the Visual Thesaurus. In fact, he used the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee as a training tool in preparing for the Nationals. And now as he gets ready to compete again during this school year, he's taking advantage of our new Community Spelling Bee feature to customize his practice lists. We caught up with Nicholas and his mother Michele Rushlow to find out what it takes to be one of the nation's top spellers.
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Blog Excerpts
Yes We Can Learn English
In Japan, the new craze among ESL students is learning English from the speeches of Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal reports.
Teachers sometimes feel like their students live in a different linguistic world. The varieties of English spoken by students these days may be jam-packed with slang and other colloquialisms largely impenetrable to their teachers, especially when there's a difference in cultural background. Though the teacher's job is to train students in the proper use of standard English, can that be balanced by an appreciation of the diversity of student slang? To answer that question, we're checking in with two teachers with experience in the New York City public school system. First up is Shannon Reed, who writes regularly for our Teachers At Work section.
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When we ran a post called "Short Words Are Best" a few weeks ago, subscribers jammed our Inbox with comments. One in particular caught our attention:
"Sure, short words are more readable, but what about the joy that comes from solving the innermost puzzle of a long word? For a linguaphile like me, the purest ecstasy arises from finding the Latin or Greek roots in a word, putting them together, and discovering the story of a word. For example, the word "peninsula" comes from "paene" and "insula," which mean "almost" and "island," respectively. So the word peninsula literally means "almost island." Sure, it's a long word, and some students may not like to read it, but the pleasure of the shape of the word and the story of its creation makes reading it worth the while."
We appreciated this spirited defense of long words, plus we noticed the word "students" in the comment. So we emailed this person, a teacher obviously, to find out more about how she teaches language. Well, maybe not so obvious. Here was the reply:
"You just made my day! I'm no English teacher -- I'm a high school freshman!"
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