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...

Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker has a simple lesson for her students: Don't learn grammar from rock stars. Here Margaret explains how rock and roll lyrics with non-standard English constructions can often lead students of grammar astray. 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...

We here at the Visual Thesaurus have a long-standing commitment to providing tools for teachers who want to get students excited about language. From our award-winning application to our high-quality lesson plans and other online content, we're constantly looking for ways to help educators enliven their classrooms. Now we're bringing all of those resources together on a redesigned educators page, together with some brand-new features. Continue reading...

Teachers from across the country write us about how the Visual Thesaurus helps their students increase reading comprehension. Now a federally funded study is taking a closer look at the connection between the Visual Thesaurus and reading. Developed by researchers at the prestigious Education Development Center, Inc. in Boston, the study is following eighth grade students with learning disabilities who've been introduced to the Visual Thesaurus. Their findings show that the Visual Thesaurus can significantly help students struggling with reading comprehension. Continue reading...

In Japan, the new craze among ESL students is learning English from the speeches of Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal reports.

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