Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Cultural Literacy: Alexandria

If you teach world history or global studies (or whatever your school, district or state calls this subject), you might find this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Alexandria useful.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Marshall (n) and Marshal (vt/vi)

Here are five worksheets on the homophones marshall and marshal used, respectively, as a noun and a verb. The verb, particularly, strikes me as something high school students should know, particularly if teachers are assigning research papers and asking students to marshal evidence to support arguments.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Beowulf

As we count down the days to the beginning of the school year, it may be a good time, particularly if you’re teaching English in the upper grades, to post this short reading on Beowulf and this reading comprehension worksheet that attends it.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

The Weekly Text, August 9, 2018: Four Parsing Sentences Worksheet for Nouns

This week’s Text is four parsing sentences worksheet for nouns. These are pretty simple literacy exercises designed to get students reading and understanding the structure of basic declarative sentences by analyzing the parts of speech in them.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Word Root Exercise: Morph/o

Here is a worksheet on the Greek root morph/o, which means form. It can also, naturally, means shape. As you will see, this is a very productive root in English, and is at the base of quite a few big abstract nouns.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Covenant (n)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun covenant, for which I can think of a variety of uses. I wrote it to help students understand it as an agreement, specifically the restrictive or racial covenants that racism wears in real estate transactions.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Independent Practice: Latitude and Longitude

Here for all you social studies teachers, if you can use it, is an independent practice worksheet on latitude and longitude that I assign early on in the freshman global studies cycle. If students are to read maps, they need these words and the concepts they represent.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Grammar

Any systematic account of the structure of the language; the patterns that it describes; the branch of linguistics concerned with such patterns.

Often restricted to the study of units that can be assigned a meaning. Distinguished in that light from phonology, e.g. singing is a grammatical unit as are sing and –ing, while s or the syllable si are phonological. Also opposed, thought not always, to a dictionary or the lexicon. E.g. the meanings of sing belong to its entry in the lexicon; the functions of -ing to grammar, where they are described for verbs in general. When limited in both of those ways, the study of grammar reduces to that of morphology and syntax.

Chomsky’s term in the 1960s for the knowledge of a language developed by a child who learns to speak it. A grammar in the widest sense was thus at once a set of rules (32) said to be internalized by members of a speech community, and account, by a linguist, of such a grammar. This internalized grammar is effectively what was later called I-language.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Postcolonialism

So today seems like an appropriate time to post this reading on postcolonialism along with the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This reading deals with postcolonial literary movements and personalities, so if you’re reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, or other postcolonial literature, this might be a useful adjunct.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: The Yalta Agreement

If you can use it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Yalta Agreement. This is…hell, I think I’ll assume social studies teachers understand the importance of the Yalta Agreement and leave it at that.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.