Monday, December 26, 2016 | By: Юля

The Big Picture: Idioms as Metaphors by Kevin King

This year Santa generously left this treasure under my Christmas tree: The Big Picture: Idioms as Metaphors by Kevin King. (By the way, Kevin is my co-worker, who used to teach at Harvard. I know. I never seize to admire my co-workers at the Intensive English Program of Souther New Hampshire University. )


The book explains the origins of most popular American idioms, their meanings, and offers a variety of practice activities. Honestly, I've worked with several books of idioms, but this one by far is the best one I've ever seen.

The Big Picture consists of 15 chapters, each grouped by their metaphorical meaning.
I loved the book so much that decided to upload all the idioms and their meanings on Quizlet. I'm sure you will also find this helpful. Enjoy! These Quizlet sets will make studying American idioms easy and fun. However, having the textbook in front of you, will only add to your knowledge.

Chapter 1: Ideas are Balls. Ideas are Food 








Chapter 4: An Argument is a Vehicle. An Argument is a Construction. An Argument is a Battle





Chapter 6: Money is Blood. Money is Food









Chapter 11: Life is a Journey










Saturday, September 10, 2016 | By: Юля

TOEFL Idioms


Chances are you will never ever encounter a single idiom in your academic textbooks. Here you have nothing to worry about. That said, the problems of understanding your professor can start as early as when he or she says, "This semester your hands will be full, and I want to make sure that no one here cuts corners. " Your puzzlement might continue when the professor apologizes to your for accidentally"putting you on the spot", and you might get even more confused when, towards the end of the class, your instructor will say, "Let's wrap it up".

Moreover, I can guarantee that as long as you daily study or work with native English speakers, you will keep learning idioms after idioms and will never stop wondering about the wealth of the American idiomatic language.  Thus, for instance, you will here them say that someone is totally up their alley, that they want to set the record straight, and that particular question was outside their wheelhouse.

At times you might end up feeling like the character in the cartoon Symphony in Slang.

That is why studying English idioms should go hand in hand (haha) with practicing academic vocabulary, which you can find here, here, here, and here.


The TOEFL Idioms book is my favorite. I often have my students practice some of the most frequently used idioms from it and then review them with our old friend Quizlet.

Here you can find dozens of practice sets of all the taught idioms together with their definitions from this book. Enjoy!

Have fun learning new vocabulary and remember: the more you expose yourself to the target vocabulary,  the better you will retain (AKA "remember") these words). Thus, for instance, you can upload any vocabulary of your choice at a bingo card generator and compete with your classmates or friends. You will see how many new words you'll be able to remember in no time!

To give you an example, I've uploaded 20 idioms from the above mentioned book so that you can have 10 ready-made bingo cards, enough for an entire language class. I usually use them together with paper flash cards, on which both the idioms and their definitions are given. One student draws one flash card with a definition, and the others are to find out if the target word is given on their bingo cards. (By the way, you can  print out such flash cards from Quizlet in no time by hitting Print and then Index Card.)

You can find the bingo cards by simply clicking here.

All the best,
Yulia
Sunday, September 4, 2016 | By: Юля

Advanced Vocabulary Sets for the SAT, TOEFL, GMAT, and GRE


I am back in the blogging world. These past few years have been really crazy (but in a good way). I've been busy raising my toddler  and teaching students all over the world. I've also developed a wealth of materials for college preparation and passing such tests as the TOEFL, SAT, GMAT, GRE, and PRAXIS I.

Today I would like to share with you the wonderful vocabulary resources developed by Townsend Press and adapted by me with the help of Quizlet: Vocabulary Basics, Building Vocabulary Skills, Improving Vocabulary Skills, Advanced Word Power, and Advancing Vocabulary Skills.

These textbooks present and teach academic vocabulary in an easy-to-digest way and offer a variety of nicely-scaffolded exercises. You can also practice these vocabulary words online for free by creating an account in their Learning Center.

I generally recommend Vocabulary BasicsBuilding Vocabulary Skills, and Improving Vocabulary Skills for the TOEFL and SAT preparation, while Advanced Word Power and Advancing Vocabulary Skills are more appropriate for the GMAT and GRE tests since they present by far more advanced vocabulary.

I use most of these textbooks weekly, and they have proven terrific tools for both me as a teacher and my students. That is why I have uploaded all the words from the textbooks with their definitions on Quizlet so that my students and anyone who might find them useful can further practice the words in a fun way. Since I uploaded them, I have received numerous thank you messages from the Quizlet users. And today I am uploading the links to all these sets here.

Building Vocabulary Skills on Quizlet 

Advancing Vocabulary Skills on Quizlet

Advanced Word Power

(I haven't created any sets for Vocabulary Basics since none of my students has ever needed this level.  - I'll gladly do so if you need. As for Improving Vocabulary Skills, I am currently working on adding these vocabulary sets on Quizlet.)

I hope you have found these resources useful and would love to hear back from you. Any comments, suggestions, questions, and requests are very welcome!

Next time I'll talk about the fantastic TOEFL preparation course I took on my favorite EDX.ORG and will share with you the videos and other materials I found most useful in this course.