1. Teaching Vocabulary from Literature Using News Sources to Teach Domain-Specific Words Teaching Shades of Meaning

Using News Sources to Teach Domain-Specific Words

Domain-specific words are all the rage these days, and a good way for students to learn them is to read news articles.
If you need an article about a specific word, chances are that the article has been written; take to the wide world of the internet and track it down. Articles often give a lot of essential context about the word in question—more than students will get from reading a sentence or paragraph. The more students read about a subject, the better.
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Teaching Shades of Meaning

If you're looking to teach students how to distinguish between similar words by shades of meaning, writing your own examples might be the way to go. After all, finding passages for all the words you want to use can be very time-consuming.
Teaching shades of meaning can help you teach a bit of literary technique as well. Giving students two sentences with only one word's difference between them can be an excellent exercise in analyzing how word choices affect the mood and/or tone of a piece. At the same time, this should teach students the finer differences between these words and help them marshal their words more precisely.
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Always Give Enough Context

Whether you're writing your own examples or selecting specific passages to teach vocabulary, one thing is always necessary: you must make sure the selection you choose gives students enough context to determine the meaning of the word you're teaching. Let's look at a couple of sentences as an example of how not to teach students what the word metaphor means:
What does Max do after Gwen runs off? What metaphor does Max use in the first paragraph to describe how he feels?
Students reading this won't be able to determine what a metaphor is—at best, they'll understand that a metaphor describes something. Of course, you won't find these sentences in a literary text, but the caveat still applies.
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