Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

This article takes as its starting-point four moments that occurred in the course of a year of teaching A-level English Literature in an inner-London sixth-form college. It argues that these moments represented forms of learning and experience that were valuable, but that fell outside the prevailing version of what (English) lessons are for. It…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

Providing written commentary on essays to students in English has long been a challenge for instructors. With increasing numbers of students being placed in classrooms, it can be difficult to deliver an adequate amount of feedback without taxing too much of teachers' time. Consequently, the author wanted to know what feedback students valued most…

The central activity of literary criticism, the understanding of literature, is related to the process of establishing a context for the works of literature being studied. Choosing not to discuss the factual elements of literary criticism, the author clarifies and concentrates on the "lower" and "upper" limits of criticism. While the "lower" limit…

In this study of high school and college students' responses to structural principles and clues to order in poetry, four groups of students were tested: Groups I and II were high school sophomores and seniors enrolled in an English class for "average" learners; Group III were college sophomore English majors in a course in intrinsic literary…

Suggests concepts useful to English teachers among those discussed by Jerome S. Burner in The Process of Education." (RD)

The pedagogical and theoretical questions raised by the notion of using microcomputers in the teaching of literature are covered in this report, rather than the current state of computer use in the classroom. In part, the report formulates basic premises that underly what teachers do in literature classrooms and asks what skills, concepts, and…

A five-step method of conflict analysis can help students generate accurate and complex theme statements about literature without teacher intervention. The conflict analysis involves (1) identifying the characters who are in conflict as a series of pairs and determining if the protagonist has an inner conflict; (2) determining the major conflict,…

Argues that students should exercise criticism in the classroom, but this criticism should not take the form of mere training in technical skills, indoctrination into a particular conceptual system, or theoretical speculation ungrounded in reality. (SRT)

While each English department will establish its own set of assumptions appropriate for its objectives and programs, the new rhetoric can bring some coherence to the teaching of writing and literature by providing students with reliable strategies for reading literature as well as writing. In teaching literature teachers need to demonstrate the…

Focuses on the need for improved teaching at the secondary and college levels of the English curriculum, emphasizing the view of learning that also includes the development of thinking abilities capable of helping students use information to create their own insights. Reviews recent pedagogical guides that follow this approach. (NKA)

The ways that students can learn about the nature of the English language and develop a sense of excitement about their language are explored in this focused journal issue. The titles of the essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "Language, the Forgotten Content" (R. Small and P. P. Kelly); (2) "What Should English Teachers…