The author takes the experience of book challenges as an opportunity for positive curricular changes by walking readers through the development of a formalized procedure for selecting new, diverse texts to add to the English Language Arts (ELA) program curriculum. The text-selection committee arrived at a six-step method: (1) Identify Desired…

The Syracuse University English Language Institute (ELI), housed within University College, has been offering noncredit executive English courses on a contract basis for the past 12 years. Despite its small size and limited resources, the ELI, whose main mission is to prepare international students for academic study, also manages a successful…

Students use analyzing themes in song lyrics, rhetorical devices in essays and advertisements, and psychology in contemporary film, to improve their skills in critical thinking and writing. Popular culture is deduced to have an important place in English curricula.

As multicultural literature has made its way into the English curriculum, it has challenged teachers' thinking about curriculum and instruction and urged them to expand their teaching repertoire to include a cultural-response approach to literature instruction. This article reports on a group of secondary English teachers' exploration and…

Drawing on data gathered during a seven-month study of the literacy practices of a group of White, working-class girls who have successfully navigated their high school's English curriculum, this ethnography investigates (1) how gender and class influenced the girls' uses of literacy in the classroom and (2) how the girls used texts from English…