In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Yagoda writes about the errors he's noticed in his students' compositions. Very often, he says, students change their writing to be "longer and more prosaic": "They give a new sound to prose. I call it clunk." Read Yagoda's guided tour to "clunk" here.

“Stop and think!” was a phrase deployed numerous times an hour by a former co-teacher, when we worked together in a preschool classroom. Whether it was a girl about to try to eat some sand from the sand table, or a boy seconds away from hurling himself off of the top of a slide, “Stop and think!” would ring out.  Continue reading...

It's that time of year — to make New Year's resolutions and to toast to a stronger vocabulary (that's your resolution, right?) Well, to help your students fulfill their resolution of expanding their vocabularies in 2011, we are sending them a worksheet that will help them figure out what some words containing the Latin root nov all have in common.  Continue reading...

We recently spoke to Nancy Mack, author of Teaching Grammar with Playful Poems, to find out how she was inspired to use poetry as an innovative entry point for teaching grammatical patterns to young students.  Continue reading...

Michele Dunaway, a teacher of English and journalism, writes: "In our haste to have students prep for standardized tests, English education has left behind a very important area: writing the letter."  Continue reading...

Idioms can act as roadblocks and detours on the road to learning English — for ELL students and native speakers alike. In this "Idiom Workout," we chose some idioms that can be found in the Visual Thesaurus database and that have "idiom cousins" with the same starter words (i.e., get the..., in a..., on the...).  Continue reading...