Although much attention has been paid to issues of contingent faculty in the university (American Association of University Professors [AAUP] position statements) and, more specifically, in composition studies (Schell; Bousquet, Scott, and Parascondola; Miller), the matter of contingent faculty in technical and professional communication (TPC)…

During the author's thirty-seven-year career as a professor of English literature, she has learned as much from professional service outside her home institution as she has from her work as a teacher and scholar. Engagement with the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Association of Departments of English (ADE) has both enabled her service…

This study investigated the effect of Blackboard-based instruction on pre-service teachers' achievement in the teaching methods course at The Faculty of Education for Girls, in Bisha, KSA. Forty seventh-level English Department students were randomly assigned into either the experimental group (N = 20) or the control group (N = 20). While studying…

Teaching service courses such as the first year composition courses and an introduction to literature is often a primary mission for English departments on campuses in the United States. Sometimes specific departments request specialized additional English classes such as Writing for Business, basic grammar courses, composition courses focused for…

In this article Sutherland surveys over the period of the last 40 years (the length of an average full academic career) the changes which have occurred to the departmental structures and procedures in the teaching of and research into English Literature in British universities. He perceives a marginalization of the English department in the…

As student teachers and new teachers enter the rich, historied culture of their English departments, they are listening and looking intently for cues about how they fit in. Sadly, recent scholarship indicates that many teachers never actually find a satisfactory fit. According to Richard Ingersoll, almost 50% of new teachers quit before they reach…

Changing a curriculum is already stressful enough without finding new ways to create anxiety, discontent, and rancor. To provide a truly integrated liberal education, the author contends that educators must not only change their curricula--the courses they offer--but they must change what they do in the classroom, the kinds of papers and…

This study explores the discourse generated by English as a foreign language (EFL) learners using synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) as an approach to help English language learners to create social interaction in the classroom. It investigates the impact of synchronous CMC mode on the quantity of total words, lexical range and…

This study investigated the relationships between teacher collaboration practices known as working as a professional learning community (PLC) and student performance. Through a review of the current literature, an operational framework of PLCs was developed that distinguished results-oriented from inquiry-oriented PLCs. The study considered the…

English departments is not uniform. Many departments still exist with traditional notions of inquiry and curriculum and ignore community engagement or understand it in narrow ways. For a variety of reasons, writing courses and compositionists more easily than literature scholars and creative writers can embrace current concepts of community…

This article explores the question of where literary study happens through reflection on two case studies. The article examines projects within two UK English departments, which were designed to allow students of literature to engage with local communities as part of their studies. The implications of this work are considered for curriculum…

Presenting prospective teachers with theories that inform them of multiple readerships will help them to make informed decisions about what to read with their students and with their own children, and it will help them gain insight into the forces that are upon young children and adolescents because of societal pressure like the control and…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate online dictionaries from faculty prospective. The study tried to obtain in depth information about various forms of dictionaries the faculty used; degree of awareness and accessing online dictionaries; types of online dictionaries accessed; basic features of information provided; major benefits gained…

This essay argues that a trend in histories of literary and writing studies is to bifurcate the origins of the fields and so engage in those modernist narrative fallacies described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Such works limit our understanding of past practices and the longstanding connections between disciplinarity and labor. (Contains 2 notes.)

Over the last decade, and in the context of the fiscal crisis in the nation in general and in higher education in particular, a debate has raged over the value of humanities research. Various commentators have argued that unlike nonhumanities disciplines, fields such as English studies and other humanistic disciplines bring very little into their…