Dancing with Words: Helping Students Love Language through Authentic Vocabulary Instruction

This book invites teachers and students to taste and hear and move to the music of words, words in isolation and in interesting juxtapositions, and urges them to bring their own life experience to language, showing in turn how language can help them know that experience more fully.

Michaels demonstrates how to build a community in the classroom in which students and teacher not only take time to test out shades of connotation and learn about how words and syntax create voice, but they also risk engaging in personal and philosophical discussions that grow from seemingly simple words such as solitude, self, and phony.

The book offers a chapter on how to appreciate the different vocabularies used in a big city newspaper—in sports writing, book and TV reviews, news reporting, editorials, and science writing.