With the mention of "sustainability" and "recycling," most people think about reusing paper, plastic, metal, and glass, but what the authors discovered when they embarked on a word-study unit is that the sustainability movement has also brought about the recycling of words. The authors were team-teaching a language awareness class taken by…

"Trope" comes from a Greek word meaning "turn." In the rhetorical sense, a trope refers to a "turn" in the way that words are being used to communicate something more than--or different from--a literal or straightforward message. Tropes are part of "deep structure" meanings and include such rhetorical devices as allegories, allusions, euphemisms,…

Vocabulary instruction is addressed on two levels in this article: 1) the importance of direct teaching and 2) using the books of a popular children's series as examples to support these vocabulary lessons. Also addressed are specific methods of turning classrooms into places where vocabulary instruction is effective and enjoyable. Elements of…

Four doctoral students and their professor contemplate the value of play in their high school and college classrooms. They discuss their experiences teaching children's books, student illustrations, and excerpts from magazines and newspapers that convey the intricacies of the English language through homonyms, homophones, homographs, and polysemy.…

This paper discusses sexist symbols in editorial cartoons and how these symbols can affect thought processes and language structure. Through overgeneralization, women are portrayed in cartoons as small in stature and are placed in roles subordinate to men. Other cartoons present women as physically weak and needing male protection, or as being…

Probes the way sexism is fostered by four different but related processes of communication: overgeneralization, exaggeration, metamorphical extension, and the adaptation of behavior to fit the exaggerations and metaphors that grew out of the overgeneralizations. (EL)