For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

Discusses examples in "Moby Dick" of Melvillean words symptomatic of the significance of Ishmael's rhetorical energy, in order to suggest that Ishmael's language reflects Melville's search for lexical and rhetorical forms that express the democratic impulse. (SRT)

Students engaged in literary response on weblogs they wrote and maintained for an 11th-grade English class. Three focal students, all members of a "regular" American Literature class in a school that is highly invested in The College Board's Advanced Placement program, forge hybrid social languages from the discourse of formal literary analysis…

Examines the views of Marshall McLuhan for their relevance to English teachers wishing to develop a media oriented curriculum. (RB)

Analyzes the evils of political and commercial doublespeak and contends that they can be alleviated by the truth of good literature. (DD)

Offers a rebuttal to an earlier article in which the author had argued that language use must not be distorted to serve political purposes. (HOD)

Argues that the formalistic study of poetry is the best preparation for the study of law because no other discipline (1) communicates so well that words are not often interchangeable, (2) concentrates as much on the effects of ambiguity in words and phrases, and (3) focuses as much on the concept of contextuality. (MM)

Rability of acquiring good English" as using it to forge the very chains he wrote the play to break." (Author/RD)

Describes how Bakhtin's insights can heighten the reader's ability to experience verbal and written expression in a rich and complex way, thus serving as an anecdote to a simplified, exclusive concern with purely formal aspects of writing instruction. (EL)

Reacts to the essays in "Alice in Genderland," a publication of the National Association of Teachers of English, that are concerned with the ways in which society's sexually differentiated view of "normality" is mediated to children in schools. (HOD)

This lesson plan complements study of plot and characterization in "Romeo and Juliet" by focusing on Shakespeare's use of lyric forms and conventions to spotlight moments in the drama and thereby heightens the impact of the action on the stage. Students look first at the sonnet in which Romeo and Juliet meet, analyzing the imagery to…

Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is presented in this paper and shown to be an effective vehicle for helping students discover the power of language and of literature. The paper first discusses the potentially destructive way English teachers sometimes tell students about "hidden meanings" in long and complex works…