Use Alan Brown's Sports Literacy Blog to find creative ways to encourage jocks to read! On Alan's blog, you'll find lots of links to popular sports-related texts, organized by genre – e.g., baseball, football, cycling, and even rock climbing. Since the site's curator, Alan Brown, spent years as a high school teacher and as a basketball coach, he knows how to excite students about reading through sports stories.

High/low, yes/no, black/white. There's something reassuring about opposites. A lot of vocabulary teaching is done using pairs of opposites, and with good reason: learners really feel they have a handle on a concept if they grasp its antithesis. There are, however, some other concept families that are best learned using three terms — triples — that provide a middle ground which in turn enhances all three concepts.  Continue reading...

Getting to grips with stories in the EFL environment is more than simply dealing with problematic vocabulary. It's all to do with context, and how words work together to form a greater whole. Finding the right trigger means students being able to exceed the "normal" lexical load.  Continue reading...

When Snoopy takes out his typewriter and begins to compose a novel atop his doghouse, he always begins with "It was a dark and stormy night..." This phrase — originally appearing in a schmaltzy 19th century British novel — has come to symbolize all that can go wrong with melodramatic writing, especially the clumsy attempts of a writer trying to evoke a dramatic setting within the first sentence of a work of literature.  Continue reading...

This week, we are emphasizing alliteration and assonance in some of our favorite lines from Macbeth. Click here for the worksheet and here to read the related lesson plan, "'Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair': Sound Devices in Shakespeare's Macbeth."

In this interview, Lori Wilfong, author of Vocabulary Strategies That Work — Do This, Not That!, describes some of her pet peeves about traditional vocabulary instruction and gives us some fresh ideas about how teachers can enliven their practice with student-generated definitions, word walls, and word jars.  Continue reading...