Fear of poor teaching and low national test scores have spawned a back to basics movement and a shift from the use of tests as predictors and models to that of assessment and achievement. This movement may have positive impact on the teaching of English, which previously has not lent itself well to standardized testing. Although many English…

Generative rhetoric is an essential part of any composition program or instruction in written language that begins with the preschool child and continues through the freshman year of college and beyond. Applying the principles of generative rhetoric to selected essays and student performance established the need to maintain the place of generative…

Teaching in the two-year college, which was once considered to be a stepping-stone to teaching at a four-year college or university, has become a unique profession in itself. In the years ahead, community colleges should be actively involved in cooperating in developing English curricula. Prospective teachers of English at two-year schools need to…

That program development for the preparation of English teachers requires the collaboration of curricularists, educational philosophers and psychologists, and content specialists is the focus of this paper. One orientation to program development is considered in a discussion of social foundations, curriculum theory and development, English…

Although grammar has its place in secondary education, teachers have been consistently premature in their zeal to impose order and precision on students' understanding of language through grammar. This paper argues that romance demands and deserves a special place in the language curriculum. Romance encompasses the humanistic aspects of language…

This paper offers six strategies for teaching literature to unsophisticated students. Unsophisticated students are defined as adult and other part-time learners, as well as full-time students, who are less academically qualified than students in previous years. Strategy one suggests that teachers directly confront difficult literature and help…

The English language is now used by a quarter of the world's population and is both spoken and written in many parts of the world. Yet the reading curriculum in our schools usually represents only the history of English writing in Britain and America. This paper stresses the need to expand the content of the school reading curriculum to include…

Certain forms of literature present special comprehension difficulties for readers at all levels. Each of the genres--poetry, drama, the short story, the essay, biography, and the novel--presents special problems and difficulties to some of its readers who would find their reading more enjoyable and profitable if they understood the ways to…

This paper will explore aspects of past practice and belief and how relevant these are to the future. New Zealand Curriculum guidelines for English will be examined in relation to best practice. Oral and visual texts will be discussed, as will the blurring of the boundaries between written and visual text with examples from picture books and…

This paper argues that literacy needs to be conceived within a broad social order, what Street and others have called a "new communicative order." This new order takes account of the literacy practices associated with screen-based technologies. It recognizes that print-based reading and writing is now only part of what people have to learn to be…

Questions about the implications of the new technologies for literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy practices provoke diverse and contradictory responses in the media, in policy documents, in state and national assessment surveys, and among teachers themselves. On one hand, the need for literacy to be reconceptualized and redefined in the face…

Increasingly in Australia, attention is being given in English or language education to core or functional literacy conceived as print mastery, alongside literature, and critical literacy. The Queensland Years 1 to 10 English syllabus evinces an attempt to organize such qualitatively distinct "literacies" under a burgeoning conceptual…

Proposes a curricular framework that provides an alternative view of "balance" in guided reading and literature discussion groups. Suggests several possible scenarios for the future of literature in classroom instruction. Presents a curricular model for a literature-rich classroom. (NH)

Although it is satisfying and fulfilling to be part of the professional conversation on English teaching, and to have had one's writing published in journals, two difficulties should be noted. First, the notion still persists that it is publication alone that validates the writing experience. Second, it is wrong to encourage teachers only to write…

A teacher's search for a coherent explanation for the resistance of students to high school literature programs, vitally important since student attitudes influence learning, resulted in a discovery of both external and internal causal factors. Externally, an increasing emphasis on competency testing hinders the fostering of lifelong literacy.…