Placements in English departments' internship programs are problematic when writing opportunities lack range and/or depth, but at the same time students often have excellent internship experiences despite limited writing opportunities. An examination of the designs and assumptions of the writing skills internship program in the English Department…

Because of consistent faculty involvement from its earliest stages, the writing assessment program at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) represents a competent, fair, and useful procedure for the large-scale testing and evaluation of student writing. UMKC's assessment curriculum builds on the existing sequence of three composition…

The development of a college writing program can offer many challenges to a program director drawn from the ranks of the English faculty. The discipline of writing, an act of production, is both scorned and clutched by faculty who have been trained to analyze literature, an act of perception. Literature specialists, to be qualified to teach…

This 25th volume of "English Leadership Quarterly" contains articles on topics of interest to those in positions of leadership in departments (elementary, secondary, or college) where English is taught. Each issue focuses on a different theme. Articles in Volume 25 Number 1 focus on leadership and literacy and are: "Research Summary…

This 22nd volume of the "English Leadership Quarterly" contains articles on topics of interest to those in positions of leadership in departments (elementary, secondary, or college) where English is taught. Each issue highlights a different theme. Articles in Volume 22 Number 1 are: "Collaboration: Making a Difference"…

Offers a practical voice from an English department chair in the trenches at Arizona State University where posttenure review was mandated. Focuses on how the chair's job was transformed by this new personnel process in terms of workload and university support or lack of it. (RS)

Discusses two danger signs for writing across the curriculum (WAC) program survival, dealing with their cross-curricular structure, and their heavy dependence on just one person for their health and continuation. Outlines two cases from the history of writing instruction at the University of Michigan providing a precautionary tale for both kinds…

This article presents an interview with Professor Alan Davies who was born in Wales, studied at Oxford University and Birmingham University, and taught in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, completing 40 years this year. Professor Davies has travelled widely to give invited talks and seminars, participate in applied linguistics conferences,…

Although the number of English as a Second Language (ESL) students in United States colleges and universities has increased over the past decades, there has been no corresponding increase in the level of attention given to the special needs of these students in composition classrooms. ESL students are likely to be found in writing classrooms at…

Facing the problem of a wide discrepancy in grading standards for student essays, the English department at a Texas community college developed a standardized method of grading students' expository and persuasive essays. The department established a committee of 10 full-time instructors whose objective was to standardize grading for all required…

When the composition program at Kansas State University (Manhattan) was radically reoriented from one that emphasized the writing product to one that stressed the writing process, a number of problems surfaced. Teachers, for example, had difficulty in adjusting from being purveyors of rules and forms to being facilitators whose job was to help…

Presented at a writing center conference by English department faculty members from around the United States--all involved with writing centers--the papers in this collection relate personal experiences and discuss many of the problems faced by writing centers. The ten papers deal with the following topics: (1) the progress and future of writing…

Discusses the activities and accomplishments of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English (CCTE), especially with regard to its Teacher Education Commission's "Statement on the Preparation of Teachers of English and the Language Arts." (MS)

Among personal memories for one minority instructor in literature is witnessing the civil rights movement, that defining period in which people of African descent broke out of the chrysalis of "Jim Crow" and transformed themselves from "colored" to "Black." In 1995, 1,000,000 Black men once again converged on the…

When a large group of nontenured part-time English department faculty were summarily dismissed, a significant segment of the English curriculum was left largely unattended, and other problems arose throughout the institution. (MSE)