By KATHERINE SCHULTEN
Here are 12 quick, easy and engaging ways to learn and practice new words by reading, viewing or listening to NYTimes.com.
1. "SAT Words" and The Times: Reading just the front page of The New York Times every day can introduce you to scores of SAT-level words in context. For instance, in this article about Prince William's engagement alone you can find déclassé,
obsolete,
indifferently,
fevered,
naïve,
saturation,
virtually,
speculation and sought. Did you know you can double click on any word in a Times article to read its definition? Or that the Learning Network has a Word of the Day feature that examines each new word in a recent Times context? To keep track of the words you're learning, use our vocabulary log.
2. Times Fill-Ins:
Every week we choose a high-interest Times article (on, say, a pumpkin-smashing contest,
eating insects,
Snooki,
A-Rod or skateboarding) and take some key words out of it. You can fill in the blanks with your own words, or choose from a scrambled list of the words that were removed.
3. Student Writing About Language: Not only does our Student Opinion question invite students to practice writing and vocabulary usage daily, we also occasionally ask vocabulary-focused questions. Read the entertaining student comments on the following, for instance, then invite your students to add their thoughts as well:
For more student wordplay, you might also look at the results of the Found Poem Student Challenge we ran last April.
4. Times Language Contests: What "family phrases" do you and your family or friends use that would be meaningful only to you? What modern similes ("as generous as a stimulus package") can you invent? Visit the Times blog Schott's Vocab to submit ideas for the weekend competitions. Past competitions have included words you loathe,
Tom Swifties,
novel analogies, favorite slogans, and both the saddest words in the English language and the happiest.
5. Word Infographics: Create a Words They Used graphic or illustration like this one that charts and compares the words used most often at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Paste text from an article, novel, story or even an essay of your own into Wordle to create and customize instant word clouds. What words in the text you chose are used most often? What patterns do you see?
6. Greek and Latin Roots: What Greek and Latin roots do you know? Challenge a partner to a contest, and find as many words with Greek or Latin roots on the front page of The Times as you can. You might also try our student crosswords on "borrowed" words and the building blocks of vocabulary.
7. Test Yourself Daily Quizzes: Every day we pose a Test Yourself question that uses Times content to strengthen literacy and numeracy skills. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we ask English language arts-related questions that test vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and usage skills. Or, use our Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling and Usage Bingo with any day's edition of The Times.
8. Investigating Etymology: In Ben Zimmer's weekly On Language column, he takes readers into the etymology of currently popular words and phrases, whether student slang,
words from rap music, insults for beach tourists or science fiction languages. Read a few, then try your own: find a word or phrase you're curious about, read up on its history, then write an essay using On Language as a model.
9. Battling Cliché: What do you think are the most overused sports clichés? How do sports reporters keep descriptions of games, teams and athletes fresh? For instance, hunt through the Sports section to compile a list of the different verbs or phrases writers have used to mean "to win" or "to lose." Or, challenge yourself to create an all-cliché description of an athletic performance, like this one from the Laugh Lines blog.
If you're curious about what phrases even seasoned editors and reporters overuse, visit the After Deadline feature. And to avoid clichés in a college essay, consult our lesson plan on the topic.
10. Learning by Listening: Some people learn more easily by listening than by reading. Try improving your vocabulary by tuning in to Times podcasts on topics like front-page news, music, science and stories that could happen "only in New York." Then make your own podcast about something you're an expert in, whether comic books, cooking or baseball, using some of the specialized vocabulary associated with that field.
11. Words and Images: Visit the Times photojournalism blog Lens or our 6 Q's About the News to find a photo that interests you. Write your own caption by trying to describe succinctly and elegantly what you see and what it might mean. Or give it a funny caption, as readers did in this Laugh Lines blog contest. You might try the ideas in this lesson plan for other photo-based writing prompts.
Or, flip the idea and instead of using words to describe images, illustrate a word or concept to help you remember what it means. You might use the illustrations that accompany the weekly Science Times Science Q & A column as inspiration. For instance, how would you illustrate the phrase "status quo" to help you remember its meaning? The word "neologism"?
12. Subject-Area Vocabulary: Many teachers teach difficult vocabulary before having students read an article, especially one that is heavy with technical terms. In several lessons, we've used the List/Group/Label game to make this process more fun. For example, here is a lesson on the debt crisis in Europe, one on the Large Hadron Collider and one on Edgar Allan Poe, all of which start with the technique.
To choose the words for the game, you might enter the text of the Times article you choose into the Visual Thesaurus's VocabGrabberto see which words of different kinds are used most often, or to find the best vocabulary words. (Or try a sample VocabGrabber lesson using a Times article about the ethics of online homework help.)
