Extend literacy beyond the ELA classroom.

Whether you teach science, social studies or math, there’s a special language that’s unique to your discipline. To be fluent in that language, students need to know the domain-specific vocabulary that’s encountered in the context of your subject. But they also need a solid “broad” vocabulary — those core academic words — that allow them to read, write, listen and speak effectively.

That’s why vocabulary instruction is in the critical path to building content knowledge and demonstrating proficiency in every subject.

Every test is a vocabulary test.

Think about how students are expected to demonstrate proficiency in any given academic discipline. Proving their content knowledge and their skills means they’ll be doing a lot of reading and writing.

Whether they’re facing a summative assessment, standardized test, or performance task that you’ve designed with your department, your students will likely:

• Read and follow multi-step instructions and complex procedures
• Interpret data and perform statistical analysis
• Analyze content-related passages
• Present solutions to problems and responses to questions in extended written form
• Construct coherent written arguments that use academic language

All of these higher-order thinking skills depend on a robust vocabulary.

Vocabulary.com, your secret weapon.

Let us teach the words so that you can focus on the curriculum. We make it easy to integrate vocabulary instruction into any subject.

Here's how:

1. What are you teaching? Whether it’s physics, geometry or government, we’ve created subject-specific lists based on standard middle and high school curriculum that make it a snap to get started. Just search our list library, select a list, and go.
2. Let your kids “Play.” Simply tell your students to use VocabTrainer™ on Vocabulary.com for 15 minutes. This is the adaptive word-learning experience that exposes them to the words they’re ready to learn. We’ll be improving their academic vocabulary, and you’ll be giving them a chance to improve their literacy skills.
3. Have students create project-specific word lists. Before your students start a big research paper or dive into project-based learning, have them create a word list that they’ll use as a word bank. As they learn, the list serves as a growing collection of the domain-specific words and other relevant vocabulary that they’ll need when it’s time to write about and present their subject.