Once again, the National Curriculum orders for English are being rewritten. The writers of the new curriculum have looked to the education systems of "high-performing jurisdictions" for inspiration. The result is a curriculum draft that offers a limited view of the subject and one which apparently fails to prioritise the needs of the…

Writing center tutors know that improving writing skills requires sustained effort over a long period of time. They also know that motivation--the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal--is essential for writing improvement. Because motivation can direct attention toward particular tasks and increase both effort and…

"Milieu teaching" is a practice that involves manipulating or arranging stimuli in a preschool child's natural environment to create a setting that encourages them to engage in a targeted behavior. For example, a teacher might place a desirable toy in a setting to encourage a student to request that toy (where requesting a toy is the…

Background: The matter of teacher knowledge in the curriculum subject of English is not simple. Certainly it is not easy to delineate what its "content knowledge" should be and how this relates to other aspects of teacher knowledge. In the context of education policy in England, at a time of change when the nature of the subject and its…

Teachers' decisions about pedagogy are informed by a range of educational discourses. These discourses constitute particular kinds of teaching practices and teacher-student relationships in ways that are not immediately obvious. When a particular pedagogy becomes accepted as best practice and it produces desired learning outcomes for the majority…

Evidence from a recent study of English teaching in three London schools in the post-war era suggests that changes to curriculum and pedagogy, commonly attributed by historians to the 1960s, were well underway in the 1950s. Major changes associated with "New English" occurred when teachers began taking the lives and experiences of their…

Over the past 15 years, there has been a range of standards-driven educational interventions in England: focused particularly on students' writing, they have been targeted at particular students, short-term and based on the assumption that identifiable, quantifiable inputs would produce pre-identified, measurable outputs. This article explores one…

The use of music and song in the English language-learning classroom is not new. While many teachers intuitively feel that music is beneficial in teaching English language, there is sometimes a lack of the theoretical underpinnings that support such a choice. There are examples in the literature to argue the strong relationship between music and…

Rather than propose or endorse a single theory of comedy, this essay explores a wide variety of implications in sometimes-conflicting ideas on the subject. It groups questions under such topics as types of comedy, plot, social morality, and identity. These questions are drawn from a wide range of viewpoints both ancient and modern. It concludes…

While "transfer" has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how…

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

This paper describes the development and implementation of the "xsel" program in Western NSW. The program supports identified high school students from regional, rural and remote communities to access the study of English, maths and science at an academically selective level. A program review was undertaken during 2012 using a structured…

Writing is a kind of creative thinking activity. The teaching of three-part argumentative writing is crucial in college English instruction. Many English majors that fail to write well lack sufficient input of English argumentative reading materials, use Chinese thinking and structure to express their ideas, and lack frequent and sufficient…

Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most widely taught texts in language arts classrooms through the English-speaking world and is greatly valued by many readers today for its depiction of youth grappling with racism in the American South of the Depression Era. However, the novel's subtle and sustained critique of…

English is best advanced by being relocated within the central aims of education, which in turn need to be drawn from Enlightenment values. Central among the latter is knowledge. The article argues that the least obviously "factual" side of English--novels and poetry--contributes to knowledge in direct and indirect ways. These include…