Addendum to "Spellbound by Spellbound"

It is gratifying to see that many of my readers still come to visit an earlier post called "Spellbound by Spellbound" about the 1999 National Spelling Bee competition.  Keeping a blog up to date is a challenge because some links go dead after a few years.  Angela Arenivar, for example, changed her blog name, so I recently updated my link to her.  Here is another link that tells the reader where the students profiled in the 2002 movie are now (as of 2011).

This year's winner is another student of Indian background who lives in San Diego. Her name is Snigda Nandipati and, like Nupur Lala (one of the "stars" of "Spellbound"), was a second-time returnee to the Nationals this year.  You can read more about Snigda Nandipati in this Huffington Post article, which points out that Nandipati is the "fifth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 10th in the last 14 years."  You can also revisit the topic of why children from this heritage have been overwhelmingly successful in the American spelling bee.

Some Tips on Writing (Blogging) Well

I haven't written about blogging for a while, but my daughter has sent me a link to a great site for copywriters.  I am passing along this link about several common writing mistakes because I am sure that you want to avoid these errors.  They are errors that ESL and English instructors everywhere try to avoid making themselves and try to get their students to avoid making.  Sometimes my ESL students seem unconvinced that the rules I teach are ones that native speakers need to follow, too.  Maybe these tips and this site will reinforce my lessons or yours.

"P" is for Polyseme

I've been talking about polysemes in my intermediate classes. Some might say that it is too big of a word for this level, but when I was a low-level student in Spanish, French, and Japanese, I recall being undaunted by big words.  The concept was what was important.

I want students to know that English has a huge number of words that, on the surface, look very simple, but have multiple meanings.  They are polysemes (n) or polysemous (adj).  There are other words that I could introduce to them, such as homophones, homonyms, homographs, but mostly what I want them to know is that there are words that look identical and have more than one meaning.

Try this little game to discover some simple and common polysemes (e.g., homographs).  Also, if you haven't seen "'R' is for Range", it is a previous post that examines the word "RANGE" for its multiple uses and meanings.

Quizlet Vocabulary Practice

Vocabulary students and teachers can practice vocabulary for free using this great application called Quizlet.  Open the page and you will be taken to a list of vocabulary words that we have practiced this quarter.  These are flash cards which will allow you to hear the pronunciation of the target words as well as definitions.  There are also some matching and spelling games that are timed for play.  Have fun!

There are other links that you might enjoy.  If you want to practice some vocabulary for jobs and for adjectives describing people and their skills, here's another link (it's not mine, but you can use it!).  That's the neat thing about this site.