Hip-hop offers opportunities to rethink citation and argument. Hip-hop's melding with digital media means that students and scholars alike must keep abreast of citation style changes and continually investigate what counts as evidence in the classroom. This involves considering the ways in which popular culture, namely hip-hop, can help students…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

The efficacy of signifying, a form of social discourse in the African American community, as a scaffold for teaching skills in literary interpretation was demonstrated with 52 urban high school students in an experimental group and 25 controls. Skill in signifying and social knowledge showed positive correlations with achievement. (SLD)

The study of literature in the secondary schools should not be based merely on affective and aesthetic grounds, but on cognitive and linguistic grounds as well. The facilitation of linguistic and cognitive growth can occur only in an environment that allows adolescents to experience literature on their own terms. The carefully structured,…

A study analyzed the potential rhetorical impact of AIDS-related television programming directed at preadolescents. The four programs selected for the study were all submitted in the children's television category of the Peabody Awards competition for the 1987-1988 season. They are (1) an episode of the PBS children's documentary series…

An alternative approach to the teaching of literature views the reading of a poem, short story, novel, or other literary work as an opportunity for a person to create his or her own immediate response. The approach suggests that there is no constant, objective meaning for a piece of literature, only individual responses reflecting the…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

Teachers can take advantage of current presidential elections by having students keep journals in which they analyze public discourse as they record their responses to the campaign rhetoric. An interesting phenomenon that emerges from this activity is a sense of the political identity of the students, a perspective that colors virtually all of…

The aesthetic judgments of experts (casting directors and high school drama teachers), theater buffs, and novices were compared as they rated high school students' videotaped performances of Shakespearean monologues. It was hypothesized that theater buffs would represent an intermediate stage on the path to developing expertise in judging acting…

The aesthetic judgments of experts (casting directors and high school drama teachers), theater buffs, and novices were compared as they rated the videotaped performances of high school students performing Shakespearean monologues. Focus was on going beyond the determination of between-judge agreement to determine whether there were objective…