English Education Articles for Teachers - Page 4

Let us begin with the title that Salinger borrowed from the Robert Burns poem, “Comin’ thro the Rie.” Burns describes Jenny, a young maiden, coming through the rie (a stream, not a field of rye) to meet and kiss someone on the other side. “Jenny’s all wat poor body/ Jenny’s seldom dry/ if a body ...

Much like you are reading this article to learn something new, a read-to-learn requires students to read information to gain knowledge, replacing the traditional lecture or note-taking session where the teacher is doing all of the work. Read-to-learns are usually short (a page or two), include ba...

It was late September 2010, almost a year since my wife and I first came to Izmir, when her job forced us to move back to Ankara. I gave notice to my last place of employment that I would no longer be teaching for them. I had hoped that the valuable experience I gained teaching children would tra...

One of the small joys in life is making connections with people through literature—old literature, new literature, old television shows, movies, etc. In the middle of a conversation or dilemma, we often hear someone exclaim, “…this is just like that episode of Friends," or “Seinfeld had an episod...

Do you pass out a new vocabulary list each week? If so, make the most of your word work while reinforcing nightly vocabulary homework by incorporating two in-class exercises before the weekly quiz. I call these exercises the Mad Two and the Mad Three. What is Automaticity? Automaticity is the abi...

There’s a strong push for content literacy in all classrooms across all domains. As the Common Core State Standards attempt to prepare students to succeed in college, teachers are pushing them to analyze texts, investigate word choice and meaning, make inferences, and use text evidence in the pro...

Teenagers often feel powerless to change their destiny. Decisions are made for them by parents, teachers, and other adults. What they seldom realize is that the decisions they make in middle and high school have an incalculable influence on their future. This is why powerful nonfiction texts...

Thousands of people buy lottery tickets every day. Some buy scratchers, others have lucky numbers that they use for every ticket. Generally, when people hear the word lottery, they feel a positive emotion—excitement, hope, possibility. However, those are not the emotions readers feel after comple...

It's large enough to contain 1,300 Earths. It has a storm larger than Earth that has been raging for over 300 years. Its moons are close in size to other planets. And yet, we know very little about Jupiter, the king of the planets. However, that may soon change with NASA's Juno mission that ...

I nearly danced the first time I looked inside a Common Core textbook. While the Common Core has attracted a lot of attention for its incorporation of nonfiction, many teachers have not realized the increased focus on classic texts— particularly mythology. As a lifelong lover of mythology, I stro...

Teachers know about the importance of literacy. They see the benefits of strong literacy skills in their classrooms and look for ways to help their readers and writers succeed and improve their skills. There are specialized programs and regimens, specific strategies and involved processes de...

What do your pupils do when you pass back papers? Throw them in the trash? Stash them in a folder, never to be seen again? Leave them on the desk for you to find and try to return later? I’d like to propose an idea to implement technology in your class, while providing a place where your students...

A topic of much hype and even more hysteria over the Common Core ELA standards has been the increase of nonfiction texts to the supposed detriment of fiction texts. This is one of the things that Common Core has tried to explain in the Myths vs. Facts section of their website by stating esse...

It seems like the general public, despite having gone through school, has a distorted perception of what English teachers actually do; as if their English classes were the live action equivalent of Charlie Brown's teacher. Particularly in high school, people have a fuzzy idea of the point of Engl...

There are a variety of ways to teach or introduce poetry. Many teachers look in-depth at a few specific poems, some have a poem that goes with each unit or a poem of the week, and others dedicate entire units to poetry. Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of introducing multiple types of poetry t...