Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language arts
While teaching roots and affixes may help students make sense of unfamiliar words, supplying students with long lists of "word parts" can sometimes be overwhelming and unproductive. In this excerpt from Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools, academic vocabulary expert Robert J. Marzano explains how to focus instruction on those affixes and roots that will give you the most vocab-enriching bang for your buck!
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This is a must-read for teachers planning on revamping their vocab instruction! Few educational authors can blend research, theory and practical examples like the vocabulary instruction expert Isabel Beck and her co-authors Margaret G. McKeown and Linda Kucan. This excerpt, from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, offers creative ideas about how to motivate "word wizards" of all ages to extend their vocabulary use beyond the classroom walls.
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Teachers all over look to Gerald G. Duffy, EdD, for his expert advice on how to teach reading, and part and parcel of Duffy's reading strategies is his focus on vocabulary. In this excerpt from his best-selling text Explaining Reading, Duffy demonstrates how semantic maps can help students visualize how word meanings can be categorized.
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When renowned education writers Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are not presenting at prominent ed conferences across the country, they are putting their innovative ideas to work back in their San Diego high school and college classrooms. In this excerpt from their fantastic book on teaching academic vocabulary across the disciplines, Word Wise and Content Rich, Fisher and Frey encourage teachers to use paint chips to get students to recognize that words — just like similar shades of paint — can be arranged in a continuum.
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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.
When Bob Greenman taught high school journalism and English in Brooklyn, NY, public schools he found himself turning to the New York Times for more than just the news. "I had the kids work on vocabulary from the paper," the 30-year veteran educator explains. "It's peerless for vocabulary acquisition, even better than reading classic fiction." That experience inspired Bob to put together a book called Words That Make a Difference, a compendium of vocabulary words with contextual examples from the New York Times, and another one he co-authored with his wife Carol, this time with examples from the Atlantic Monthly magazine. We spoke to Bob about his practical approach to teaching vocabulary.
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Word Nerds: Amalgamate! Online Resources for Teaching Vocabulary
I confess, I'm a word nerd. When I was a kid, I didn't keep a diary (grasping even at eight that the exploits of an introverted bookworm with a peaceful home life were perhaps not the stuff that formed a fascinating read), but I did keep a list of words that I liked: Burble. Murmur. Placate. Superfluous. Chaos. It's the specificity that got -- and gets -- me. My mom isn't just "kind" -- she's compassionate, altruistic and decent.
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