In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers considers how interest influences student learning. She focuses on a timely legal question sure to interest students and engage them in debate: whether Facebook "likes" count as free speech.  Continue reading...

Hi. What did i miss in class today. i want to keep up in english

I get a lot of e-mails. My favorites are the ones that come in from students who clearly like to prove to me how little they are using the skills I'm teaching. Thus, the group of teachers with whom I work decided to address the art of writing e-mail.  Continue reading...

At a summer journalism workshop, young writers were thrown into the deep end of the pool but came up with impressive results. Bob Greenman recounts how the high school students that he taught proved up to the task of becoming dogged reporters.  Continue reading...

Novelist and journalist Jennifer Miller has been thinking about a recent scandal involving New York high school students cheating on their exams. She argues that one thing is clear from the scandal itself, and the reactions it engendered: we live in a culture of shortcuts, with ill-formed thoughts expressed in equally ill-formed language.  Continue reading...

Here are a few summer programs that provide incentives for students who reach their reading goals.  Continue reading...

We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal. Fitch reveals what happened when students in his classes were asked to select their favorite words.  Continue reading...