Using a Glossary examines the importance of clarifying unknown words by using a glossary to determine meanings.

Theme:A Guilty Conscience demonstrates understanding of theme by identifying an example of theme found in the short story, A Guilty Conscience.

Roland Barthes' From Work to Text is a seminal essay which lays out why, in the humanities, we have come to refer to pieces of literature, films and many other things using the catch-all term "text". Because, we refer a lot to...

In this latest episode of What the Theory? I take a look at phenomenology, time and dasein (Heidegger's concept of consciousness) through the example of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, the narrative of which is incredibly playful with...

Although originating in the dramatic theatre or narrative theatre, dramaturgy is an increasingly useful notion for describing the affective journey an audience goes on while watching a play or performance.



In episode four...

This gives an overview of steps to break apart words as well as some of the basic rules of syllable division. It's important for kids to have a background in syllable types to understand this video.

Prefixes are letters or groups of letters at the beginning of words. It's important to know prefixes to be able to understand the meaning of words. Four of the most common prefixes are dis-, in-, re-, and un-. This video teaches about...

Quantum physicist Artur Ekert (Oxford and NUS) describes a key issue in cryptography: the key distribution problem.

Historian David Armitage (Harvard) describes the importance of trying to unpack the various layers of meanings that have accrued to words and concepts over the course of history.

Particle physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, frankly assesses his likelihood of making a scientific breakthrough, and relates how he's determined to spend the vast majority of his time doing physics rather than...

Famed scientist and writer Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, muses on Mathematical Platonism, choosing the analogy of Daniel Hillis' Songs of Eden to speculate that mathematics might have played a similar role for science that...

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, University of Queensland, describes his recent research in how people correlate their emotional response and sense of meaning of particular experiences with time.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, University of Queensland, describes how consciousness is not “a direct pipeline to reality” but involves the brain and the associated conscious mind mysteriously combining to somehow produce meaning...

UC San Diego psychologist of music Diana Deutsch describes her motivation to rigorously explore a link between tone languages and perfect pitch in music, and the scepticism she encountered on all sides.

York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok describes her research on how bilingualism increases metalinguistic awareness - knowledge about language and its structure.

Cognitive scientist Victor Ferreira (UC San Diego) sketches out an intriguing future experiment he'd like to conduct to probe the difference between meaning-level and grammar-level effects.

Psychologist Carol Dweck (Stanford) describes how she serendipitously discovered "growth-minded children" which launched her on an intriguing and influential research path.

Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht describes her view that “the feeling of meaning is sufficient to the definition of meaning” and how we often need to consciously allow our culture and community to help provide meaning for us.

“Satire” describes the characteristics and purpose of satirical writing, using examples from British Literature.

This video will help students understand the critical role of comparative figurative language (metaphor, simile, and personification) in establishing theme in poetry.

A video entitled “Parenthetical Punctuation” which presents ways to use marks of punctuation (commas, parentheses, and dashes) to indicate nonrestrictive elements.

“Idioms, Adages, and Proverbs” is a video that explains the meanings of common idioms, adages, and proverbs.

“Using Context Clues” explains how context clues can be used to understand unknown words.

Everyday, millions of people around the world use hashtags to sift through the Internet’s endless content – but where did this ubiquitous symbol actually come from?