Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Teaching
In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers considers how interest influences student learning. She focuses on a timely legal question sure to interest students and engage them in debate: whether Facebook "likes" count as free speech.
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One way to help students grapple with more complex texts is to be more transparent about measurements of readability in the classroom. Reveal to students the readability of a text before reading it, and engage in meaningful discussions about what makes a text difficult.
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WordshopVocab activities for your classroom
Beware the Obscure Adjective, Gelid in its Untouched Tomb
In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers provides teachers with some creative suggestions for showing students how to make the most of adjectives, "those fabulous descriptors that comprise about one-fourth of the words in the language."
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Bob Greenman is an award-winning educator who spent 30 years in Brooklyn, New York teaching English and journalism at James Madison and Edward R. Murrow High Schools. Here he recalls how he he used objects encountered in everyday life as the inspiration for enjoyable and effective vocabulary instruction.
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I recently witnessed one of those lightbulb illuminating moments when someone suddenly "got it." What this language learner "got" was the difference between adjectives and nouns prefixed with un-, and verbs prefixed with un-. The adjective/noun becomes negative, but the verb typically has its action reversed: unusual vs. unwrap, for example.
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Facing Up to the Hard Facts of the Situation: Clichés in the Classroom
Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, has been musing on a dilemma involving clichés. Though they are often disparaged by writers of English, clichés are nonetheless "part of the bread and butter of speech, and thus we would be doing a disserve to our students if we didn't encourage their fluency with a significant number."
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Teaching the Power of Word Coinage
Get students hooked on language by having them make their own words.
Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck.
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