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! Continue reading...

You may have heard the educational buzz phrase "essential question" a lot lately, but do you really know what it means? Or how to develop meaningful essential questions of your own? In this excerpt from Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn, technology and teaching guru Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D. explains what makes some questions "essential" and provides some examples for every grade level. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...

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. Continue reading...