Despite its popularity among teens, you're not going to find class sets of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series in the English department book rooms across the country. Even if most teachers don't incorporate trendy literature into their class syllabus, it doesn't mean that they can't take advantage of the excitement of the fad and harness it to teach some valuable lessons about writing, editing, and word choice.  Continue reading...

Looking for texts accessible online? These e-text sites contain thousands of unbound texts. Anne of Green Gables, The Blue Fairy Book, Animal Farm, all of Mark Twain's writing? It's on there. Bonus: you can grab the vocabulary from any of these texts using VocabGrabber. 

• Project Gutenberg
• eBooks@Adelaide 

Flexible and inflexible are opposites, but flammable and inflammable are not. Why is this? From a morphological and contextual perspective, Susan Ebbers discusses how to help students come to grips with confusing words, including inflammable, impregnable, and infamous.  Continue reading...

Over the years of teaching English as a foreign language, I've noticed how some of my students adopt some of the throwaway words and phrases that I use unthinkingly. The two words that are adopted most are stuff and thing (though I just as easily say thingy while waving a hand to indicate that I don't know or can't remember the correct word).  Continue reading...

After a trying few weeks, English teacher Michele Dunaway has arrived at some insights about what kids learn in school: "Here are the things schools teach, the things schools and teachers do that can never be addressed or assessed by fill-in-the-bubbles."  Continue reading...

The new semester is starting, and a colleague proudly announced on Facebook that he is banning laptops, tablets, and cell phones in his classes because students are using them to go on Facebook. Other colleagues, who seem always to be trumpeting their support for the digital revolution on their own Facebooks, promptly "commented" their own plans to institute classroom bans on these attention-sapping devices.  Continue reading...