Phrasal verbs combine a verb with a preposition or an adverb, and they tend to confuse English language learners. This week's worksheet helps students to make sense of them.  Continue reading...

Shannon Reed writes: "Texting, Twitter, Facebook statuses, IMing... all of these take up more of teenagers' lives than reading, hand-writing or (I suspect) conversing these days. Thus, I wanted to find a way to incorporate this familiar way of communicating into my curriculum."  Continue reading...

I recently watched John Pollack's YouTube video of his "pun safari" where he combed the streets of New York City trying to spot images of puns (such as the restaurant sign "Ciao for Now" and the waitress's "Bored of Education" T-shirt). Even though I find this kind of humor a bit painful, the video did support Pollack's call for awareness that "puns are everywhere." The video also made me think about how useful it could be to challenge students to take their own "word safaris" to document the prevalence of the words they are learning.  Continue reading...

Teachers, Halloween is upon us, and your students may be brewing up some spooky stories. Don't let them fall into the trap of clinging to overused intensifiers and boring adjectives!  Continue reading...

When you look up a word with loads of meanings on the Visual Thesaurus, you are greeted with lots of colorful meaning bubbles, lots of meaning branches, and lots of synonyms. This week's worksheet asks students to check out some of our more action-packed word maps to identify synonyms and definitions from different parts of speech.  Continue reading...

Here in Portugal, teachers of English have been scratching our heads a bit recently over what words should sound like. We found it to be quite a conundrum.  Continue reading...