Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Teaching
We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Fitch considers how a fun exercise in concocting collective nouns could be used as a tool for vocabulary expansion.
Continue reading...
A cold and brisk hello from snowy New York City! Winter is a great time to, as a friend of mine said, "Cozy down," at home and in the classroom. To that end, I've been knitting, reading and cooking a lot at home, and digging in with my kids to improve our practices at school.
Continue reading...
Earlier this week, we interviewed Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson about their new book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools. One intriguing section of the book discusses how students from culturally diverse backgrounds can be assisted in developing academic vocabulary. Here we present an excerpt describing how one creative student approached learning SAT vocabulary via rap.
Continue reading...
We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Here Fitch considers one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the English-language classroom: the dastardly phrasal verb.
Continue reading...
The title of this month's column is a direct quote from one of my students. Please imagine it being delivered in an accusatory tone. What caused such a lament? You see, I had the audacity to suggest that learning new words was, well, fun.
Continue reading...
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.
Continue reading...
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.
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.