Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth planted an inspirational seed in 5th grade teacher Francesca Leibowitz's mind: "What if our class were to grow a Word Orchard by planting roots and affixes? And what if the fruits of our labor (pun fully intended) were those morphemes' derivatives?"  Continue reading...

In Vocabulary at the Core, Amy Benjamin and John T. Crow assert that word study should play a more significant role in English class and across the curriculum — as emphasized by the Common Core State Standards. In this excerpt, Benjamin and Crow explain the difference between receptive control and productive control of words and why our students' receptive vocabulary remains considerably larger than their productive vocabulary.  Continue reading...

As teachers begin to grapple with the demands of the Common Core State Standards, they may be overlooking a discrete language standard living in the shadows of those major shifts.  Continue reading...

The presidential debates begin this week, and this week’s worksheet gets students to evaluate the language and words that shape the focus for each presidential and vice presidential candidate.  Continue reading...

An ongoing struggle in the English Language Arts classroom is improving students' spelling habits. We educators know that good spelling is a crucial skill; is there anything more likely to derail a résumé or essay than a spelling error? Yet it's also a skill that requires assiduous practice on the part of our students.  Continue reading...

In an earlier article, I suggested that the selection of a "standard" English for teaching purposes was a bit arbitrary and that the "standards" selected frequently failed to be representative of the way that most native speakers actually speak English. I opined that it seemed somewhat disingenuous to expect learners of the language to struggle with mastering phonemes that many native speakers didn't bother with much themselves. This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Continue reading...