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Easy Sight Words – A Closer Look

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Whether you call them sight words, popcorn words, or high-frequency words, they are, by definition, “commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole or by ‘sight,’ so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.”

In addition, high frequency words can be abstract, difficult if not impossible to represent using pictures, and especially difficult to understand where meaning may have an inferred understanding through context (something a second language learner doesn’t have the advantage of in early language development.)  It can be very elusive to create a clear mental model of words like have and get, both of which can cross several different word choices in a language learner’s native language.

This is why students of English need to be exposed to the patterns of speech and inferred meaning of sight words early on in oral and writing exercises.  Inevitably, as you move children from decoding individual words to decoding language in connected text, sight words should be a regular part of your ESL program.

As your emergent readers display rudimentary reading ability and become capable of decoding and deriving meaning from connected text, including sight-word practice is imperative. The habits that you build into the children’s learning activities will help them to acquire new words more quickly, build on their knowledge base to infer meaning, and progress more confidently in their studies.

Phonics Series – A Closer Look

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Phonics Series

A solid phonics program is the cornerstone of many pre-K through elementary classes. Focused phonics lessons and phonemic awareness improve pronunciation, listening comprehension, and give students the confidence to read and understand English. The Kinney Brothers Publishing five-book Phonics & Spelling Series is designed to teach kids the fundamental sounds and spelling of English in a multi-year, step-by-step ESL program.

The Phonics & Spelling Series series is also published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.) in Japan and available with a special discount through David Paul’s ETJ Book Service.

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom.  Visit for downloadable flashcards, charts, games, and activities.

A to Z Kinney Brothers Publishing
Phonics & Spelling, Book 2 Kinney Brothers Publishing
Phonics & Spelling, Book 3 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Kinney Brothers Publishing offers a wide range of textbooks including a Communication Series for upper elementary through high school language learners, an Easy Sight Words Series, and Trends for adult English language learners. If you’re looking for more support materials, be sure to check out Q&A, Cursive Writing!, and a treasure trove of games, charts, and flashcards in Donald’s English Classroom!

Communication Series – A Closer Look

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The Kinney Brothers Publishing Communication Series is designed to extend students’ skills and interest in communicating in English. The four-book series includes Stories For Young Readers and Dialogues For Young Speakers. The textbooks work in tandem to provide students with exercises in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Each textbook is detailed below with links for downloadable previews and purchase.

In Japan, The Stories For Young Readers series is published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.) and available through Nellies English Books and David Paul’s ETJ Book Service.

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom.  Visit for downloadable audio files, Lesson Packs, and Teacher’s Answer Keys. You’ll also see links for Lesson Packs on Google Slides for online courses and Kindle Books for your digital library.

Kinney Brothers Publishing offers a wide range of ESL textbooks including a Phonics Series that begins with your youngest students, an Easy Sight Words Series, and Trends for secondary and adult English language learners. If you’re looking for more support materials, be sure to check out Q&A, Cursive Writing!, and a treasure trove of games, charts, and flashcards in Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #82 – Test Your Knowledge of Stacked Adjectives

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Stacked Adjectives

Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives. In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order if accumulative. When they fall out of that order, the brain glitches, and the meaning can be lost, confused, or even misconstrued.

Adjectives

We learn in school that adjectives fall into categories, such as color, size, shape, age, etc. When multiple adjectives are used in a sentence, they appear in one of two types of groups: coordinate or cumulative adjectives.

An example of coordinate adjectives is, “It’s a black, brown, and white cat.” The adjectives are all in the same category of color, can be understood in any order, and must be separated with commas.

“I have two cute little pink pigs,” is a sentence with cumulative adjectives. With each successive adjective, categorical information is accumulated about the noun they modify and don’t require commas between them. The crux of stacked adjectives is the order that they are expected to appear.

Stacked Adjectives

Though there’s nothing semantically different between “a white big house” and “a big white house,” the second aligns itself to an English speaker’s internal ordering of adjectives – the result of a linguistic potty training we don’t even remember. An invisible code snaps into place and an adjectival conga line forms with all the modifiers in a proper queue:

  1. Quantity or number
  2. Quality or opinion
  3. Size
  4. Age
  5. Shape
  6. Color
  7. Proper adjective (nationality, place of origin, or material)
  8. Purpose or qualifier

There are linguists and laymen alike who oppose this strict order, such as size after opinion, arguing that a person is no less correct or clear in saying “a mean little dog” or “a little mean dog.” Nonetheless, patterns are imprinted from an early age and set with children’s stories like My Naughty Little Sister or Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse. (There is the curious case of “the big bad wolf” that doesn’t follow the size after opinion rule. That is the subject of another Fun Facts About English.)

Adjective order is still flexible enough for changing the character or meaning of an object being described. For example, a “fake Japanese watch” is a knock-off of a Japanese-made watch, but a “Japanese fake watch,” is a thing (dummy, toy, or phony) from Japan masquerading as a watch.

It would be impossible for most of us to elucidate this adjectival order, though we employ it in our language every day. Take the following sentence for example:

“This is a yellow new French cotton handsome jacket.”

It’s difficult to discern what the sentence is trying to convey and comes off like an adjective salad. In their proper order, the descriptors should be aligned thusly:

“This is a handsome new yellow French cotton jacket.”

Of course, one can stack adjectives so high that it becomes a categorical nightmare to mentally sort — whether you’re listening or speaking. This is why it’s often recommended that we limit the number of adjectives in a sentence to keep the lingual conveyor moving smoothly, for example:

“This is a handsome new yellow jacket. It’s from France and made of cotton.”

The Test

Imagine that you’re a foreign speaker of English. You’ve spent weeks memorizing adjectival order to answer test questions like the five below. Marvel at the sorting function that activates in your native English brain! The answers are below. Good luck and let me know your score in the comments!

  1. Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
    A. We took a ride on a green old Korean bus.
    B. We took a ride on a Korean old green bus.
    C. We took a ride on an old green Korean bus.

  2. Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
    A. My brother rode a beautiful big black Arabian horse in the parade.
    B. My brother rode a beautiful Arabian big black horse in the parade.
    C. My brother rode a big black beautiful Arabian horse in the parade.


    For the next three questions, insert the adjectives that are in the correct order.

  3. I bought a pair of _________________boots.
    A. new nice yellow rain
    B. nice new yellow rain
    C. yellow nice new rain

  4. Put the money into that __________________box.
    A. little old round red
    B. round little old red
    C. little old red round

  5. She was surprised to get a ________________ puppy for her birthday!
    A. little beagle cute ten-week-old
    B. cute ten-week-old little beagle
    C. cute little ten-week-old beagle

    Answers: 1-C, 2-A, 3-B, 4-A, 5-C

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, why Big Bad Wolf follows a different adjectival order, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students!  Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Donald's English Classroom

Donald’s English Classroom offers you bundled resources for savings on the materials you need in class. From preschool through adults, you’ll find a wealth of language learning materials for your ESL classes.

Fun Facts About English #81 – Old English Words

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Flitterwochen
English Timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

Old English is the language of the early Germanic inhabitants of England known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Their settlements began in the 5th century and lasted until the end of the 11th century. Only about a sixth of Anglo-Saxon words have survived and make up about 1% of the current English language. On the other hand, 80% of the thousand most common words in modern English come from Old English! They include the words water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no, and not. Interestingly, many common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin, including tits, fart, shit, turd, arse, and probably, piss.

Here are ten Old English words you can start using to bring some medieval color to your daily vocabulary. You’ll also be doing your part to save endangered words!

  • anon – shortly; “The concert will begin anon! Make haste!”
  • bedward – to head to bed; “It’s late and I’m moving bedward!”
  • crapulous – feeling ill after too much eating or drinking; “I’m feeling totally crapulous today, dude.”
  • elflock – tangled hair; “After frolicking in the woods, her hair was full of elflocks.”
  • gardyloo – what you shout before emptying your bedpan out the window; “The drunk yelled, “Gardyloo!” and pissed out the window.”
  • groke – to stare intensely at someone who is eating hoping you will receive some, especially a cat or dog; “The dog sat groking at me while I ate my sandwich.”
  • grubble – to feel or grope around for something you can’t see; “She grubbled in the bottom of her purse for her house key.”
  • overmorrow – the day after tomorrow; “We’ll have to travel all day tomorrow and overmorrow to arrive by Sunday.”
  • trumpery – things that look good but are basically worthless; “The crowd was taken in by his Madison Avenue trumpery.”
  • twattling – gossip, nonsense; “The woman is nothing but a twattling old gossip!”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in French words that you should know when dining at French restaurants, the influence of Native American languages in American English, or common words you didn’t know were Spanish!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English. http://www.kinneybrothers.com/blog/blog/2020/02/21/fun-facts-45-native-american-lanugage/

Donald's English Classroom

Visit Donald’s English Classroom for downloadable ESL games, flashcards, charts, full textbooks, and so much more!

Fun Facts About English #80 – Scientist

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Kinney Brothers Publishing scientist

The word science came into the English language via Old French from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge, learning, application, and a corpus of human knowledge.” From ancient times, the pursuit of knowledge included things like grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Previous to the term scientist, a practitioner investigating nature and the physical universe was known as a natural philosopher.

Rev. Dr. William Whewell, who coined the word scientist in 1834, was a British polymath; scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science.

William Whewell Kinney Brothers Publishing

From ancient times, an insular focus on social and religious systems often made little distinction between knowledge of astronomy and math, for example, or other types of knowledge, like mythologies and legal systems. The fundamental break with religion and the onset of the first industrial revolution changed this in the 18th century, giving rise to empirical science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By the end of the 19th century, with the changes brought about by science, war, and a second industrial revolution, we found ourselves in vastly different, faster-paced lifestyles unlike anything previously known.

Thomas Arnold Kinney Brothers Publishing

Labor, transportation, and communication saw an upheaval in social orders and means that had been in place for centuries. Landscapes and seascapes changed with the introduction of the locomotive, the telegraph, iron-clad ships, and electric lights. Factories tooled and expanded their production lines, becoming faster, and more efficient. The business of business became a science in itself with economies of manufacturing and the cost-effectiveness of human labor as its focus. By the early 20th century, in a period of just ten years, the horse, that stalwart of transport and labor for millennia, was completely replaced by combustion engines.

While the big machines get the most attention, the 19th century also gave us myriad small inventions that were quickly adopted as household and work conveniences. Factories brought us cheaper textiles and ready-made clothing, safety pins, canned food, staplers, raincoats, ice boxes, matches, barbed wire, typewriters, sewing machines, toy balloons, toilet paper, wrenches, cylinder locks, and the zipper.

World Industrial Exhibition Ticket Kinney Brothers Publishing

With the specificity of scientific inquiry came new language and terminologies. Appendicitis, conjunctivitis, bronchitis, and colitis were all 19th-century coinages. Specialized areas of study gave us new fields such as biology, climatology, and ethnology.

Along with 19th-century engineering feats that included the Brooklyn Bridge and the Thames Tunnel, the first trans-Atlantic cable was laid in 1858, and pleasantries were telegraphically exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. The cable was celebrated with souvenir watch fobs, earrings, pendants, letter openers, candlesticks, and walking-stick toppers. By 1880, the simple word hello, previously nothing more than a coarse expression for calling hounds to a chase, became a salutation for “calling” someone on the newly invented telephone.

Brooklyn Bridge Kinney Brothers Publishing

With its break from religious ties, scientists and inventors advanced civilization at such a pace, it truly must have seemed like “three hundred years in the span of thirty.” The next century literally took us to the moon and now a robotic vehicle is sending us data from Mars. Telescopic satellites photograph distant galaxies and star factories, relaying images that are nothing short of breathtaking. Today, 750,000 miles of submarine cables and satellites allow us to communicate, collaborate, and trade on the internet globally. Robots and AI are redefining manufacturing, the efficacy of human labor, and our “relationship” to work. Moore’s Law tells us our world is going to change at a pace and scale even twentieth-century industrialists could hardly have imagined. Buckle up!

To glimpse what’s in store for humanity in the next few decades, take a look at Tony Seba’s RethinkX, a technology think tank that is making data-based predictions for transportation, food industries, and the race toward renewable energies.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like reading about words that are understood all over the world, how the use of acronyms exploded in the past two centuries, or how rebracketing changes the pronunciation of common words!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

Donald's English Classroom

Kinney Brothers Publishing’s Communication Series is a graded textbook series for students studying ESL/EFL. Stories for Young Readers and Dialogues for Young Speakers offer readings, exercises, puzzles, and easy dialogues that will get students up and talking. This series is available as printed textbooks, downloadable pdf files, and as digital content on Google Slides – perfect for your online classes!