Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Teaching
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Correia Middle Tops School Leaderboard for April
Points for the month: 20,517,875
Congratulations to students from Correia Middle School in San Diego, CA, who continued to dominate the school leaderboard in April!
Continue reading...
Having logged many years teaching English and theatre at New York City high schools, Shannon Reed now teaches freshman English Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. Here Shannon shows how teachers can work with students to improve their writing by focusing on five overused words.
Continue reading...
The city of Providence, RI is embarking on a bold initiative to narrow the "word gap": young children in families of lower socioeconomic status tend to hear fewer words in their home environment than higher-income counterparts, leading to inequalities in academic success when they enter school. Providence has won a $5 million grant to address this problem by means of a high-tech vocabulary intervention program, as our own Ben Zimmer writes in his latest Boston Globe column.
Continue reading...
Under the HoodThe science of vocabulary building
Vocabulary Instruction in School: Too Willy-Nilly?
Common Core Requires Comprehensive Approach
Career educator and senior curriculum specialist at the Northwest Evaluation Association John Wood writes about the Common Core and vocabulary instruction: "Schools must continue to address vocabulary development across the grades through high school...through an intentional program that has vocabulary development as one of the instructional goals."
Continue reading...
WordshopVocab activities for your classroom
Staring, Glancing and Glaring Through Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight"
Despite its popularity among teens, you're not going to find class sets of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series in the English department book rooms across the country. Even if most teachers don't incorporate trendy literature into their class syllabus, it doesn't mean that they can't take advantage of the excitement of the fad and harness it to teach some valuable lessons about writing, editing, and word choice.
Continue reading...
Flexible and inflexible are opposites, but flammable and inflammable are not. Why is this? From a morphological and contextual perspective, Susan Ebbers discusses how to help students come to grips with confusing words, including inflammable, impregnable, and infamous.
Continue reading...
Over the years of teaching English as a foreign language, I've noticed how some of my students adopt some of the throwaway words and phrases that I use unthinkingly. The two words that are adopted most are stuff and thing (though I just as easily say thingy while waving a hand to indicate that I don't know or can't remember the correct word).
Continue reading...
Sign up now (it’s free!)
Whether you’re a teacher or a learner,
Vocabulary.com can put you or your class
on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.