The major thesis of this paper is that the teaching of English should be interdisciplinary. The paper shows that the works of George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare are interdisciplinary and observes that the greatest current educational need is for breadth of education and interdisciplinary linkages rather than for transmission of facts. It…

Intended for use every day for a semester, this secondary seminar handbook provides a schedule, lesson plans, materials for classroom distribution, and a bibliography for a course designed to teach critical reading and basic writing skills through an in-depth study of Ernest Hemingway. Because the course requires that students write seven position…

THE USES OF MYTH, ITS RELATION TO TRANSLATION, AND THE RELATION OF BOTH TO THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH FORM THE SUBJECTS OF THIS DARTMOUTH SEMINAR STUDY-GROUP REPORT. PAUL OLSON'S INTRODUCTION ON THE BASIC ISSUES OF DEFINITION AND SYSTEMATIC INTERPRETATION IS FOLLOWED BY THE POSITION PAPER, "SOME MEANINGS AND USES OF MYTH" BY ALBERT LAVIN,…

Essays and reports useful to English teachers are collected under four headings: (1) "Issues and Problems" contains a 1959 report on the basic issues of teaching English, the Report of the Language Committee of the School and College Conference on English (April 1940), and the Report of the Literature Committee of the School and College Conference…

The 18 essays in this volume originated as talks given at the Yale Conferences on the Teaching of English. The first nine discuss where and how to begin writing, the subject matter and organization of student compositions, the relation of writing to reading and grammar, methods used to mark papers, and the evaluation and function of both…

The encouragement and formulation of a student's imaginative response to and "engagement" with literature and the concerns of the papers and summaries of discussions in this Dartmouth Seminar report. James Britton discusses refining the student's natural response to literature by developing his increased sense of form ("principally…

From colonial days onward, colloquial speech was looked down on as inappropriate for serious writing, but with the publication of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," American colloquial style was raised to the level of high art. English teachers should encourage students to build on their own colloquial speech in their writing, rather…

Topics covered in these essays on testing in high school English are (1) the need for major literature tests to determine not factual recall but whether students are growing into rational and humane persons through their experiences with English; (2) the usefulness of pre-tests and re-tests, and the need to emphasize tests as a means of…

This listing of audiovisual materials available for studying Shakespeare includes 16mm films, 35mm filmstrips, 33 1/3 rpm records, and tape recordings on deposit at the National Tape Repository. Entries are organized under seven headings: biography and background, theater, plays, anthologies, poetry, and analysis. A directory of sources provides…

This volume contains nineteen essays, dealing with various aspects of transformational grammar, by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Eric H. Lenneberg, and Leon Jakobovits. These essays have been reprinted from sources such as "College English" and "Language Learning" and are intended for the most part for a nontechnical audience. The anthology is…

Extremists, whether formalists of the New Criticism or of the humanist-moralist tradition, are taken to task in this attempt to combine elements of both in a more pluralistic approach to literary criticism. An analysis of a Frost poem, "Stopping by Woods", is attempted as an illustration of a kind of criticism that seeks to clarify the parts of…

This guide describes the nongraded phase-elective curriculum employed in the Cedar Falls (Iowa) High School. All students are required to take tenth grade English, which provides them with a relatively uniform background in the language arts. After that, the phasing classifies the courses according to difficulty and complexity of skills and…

A statement officially adopted by the Board of Directors of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is presented. The position is taken that the amount and effects of racism and bias in English and Language Arts educational materials cannot be ignored. Specifically, educational materials now suffer from the following crucial…

Outlines a student-conducted literature course that uses several classic novels ("My Antonia,""The Pearl," etc.) as the basis for group discussion, writing, and oral performance activities--all directed toward extracting "meaning" from the books selected. (NKA)

Offers a rationale that can be used to defend the assignment of Alice Walker's controversial novel for class reading. Indicates four issues that might evoke calls for censorship: (1) subject matter, (2) vocabulary, (3) grammar, and (4) the epistolary form of the work. (RBW)