Literary criticism in the form of the so-called book report, may, therefore, wrote Stephen Bloore in 1934, "be a most valuable aid to independent thought if it is not used merely to check up on the books supposedly read by a student". For a century, "English Journal" has been a map and a narrative of the discourse about teaching ELA as well as the…

In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…

Meaningful discussion helps students develop new knowledge about the world around them. "Progressive discourse" is talk that encourages people to develop a new understanding together. In this article, the author discusses how she used student collaboration to foster progressive discourse and describes assignments that engage her students in group…

This study highlights one semester of ongoing research reflecting how preservice English students performed dispositions for social justice. This work draws on a postmethod approach, observing participants' artifacts and participation in a variety of classroom activities. By tapping into participants' funds of social justice knowledge, it explored…

The small sultanate of Brunei, located on the island of Borneo in the South China Sea, introduced bilingual education shortly after independence. As a consequence, Brunei's Ministry of Education outsourced much of its English language teaching requirements to qualified expatriate teachers. Despite over 25 years of systemic English language…

Genre theory has been around for a long time now. The exchange between Michael Rosen and Frances Christie recently featured in "Changing English" is the latest in a series of exchanges between advocates of genre and their critics over the past three decades or so. Our aim in this response-essay is not to weigh up the merits of the cases…

We are at a particularly difficult historical juncture marked by uncertainty, contingency and change. Zygmunt Bauman characterises the present time as "liquid modernity" (2000, 2008, 2011b) because of the fluidity and instability that we live with. Our identities and our relations to the world are changing radically. There is an urgent need for…

Re-reading James Moffett's work in the light of more recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, this paper presents a "deconstructive" account of Moffett's key texts. Understanding them as instances in themselves of rhetoric and textuality, and reading them at once "with" and "against" the grain, the…

One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

As teachers, the time they get to talk with peers, their friends, is an important time because there is never enough of it. Why not allow students the opportunity to chat with friends--the same courtesy the author appreciated in meetings with peers? Through talk, students can improve their conversational skills, which in turn would help their…

James Moffett's "Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness" remains as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1988 for those who want to understand the nature and sources of contemporary conflicts in American language and literacy education. Censors continue to try to restrict student…

Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns provide a useful and informative review of research appearing in the "English Journal" ("EJ") and "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") over the past 100 years. It is a bit unfortunate, if understandable, to exclude books and articles in other journals, because such a restriction excludes many pieces of…

The author does not really like "Hamlet." He loves the play, the language, and the characters, but always finds it difficult to teach. Part of this is because he prefers to assign students scenes to perform as they read a Shakespeare text, but Hamlet does not divide nicely into manageable scenes, and he usually does not have enough teenage Ken…

This collection of essays, "Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment," edited by Donna Heiland and Laura J. Rosenthal, represents an important new venture in the Foundation's communication program. The book is the product of many authors, including the editors, both of whom have written essays for it. But it…