Discusses teaching junior high students Ann Sexton's poem about remembrances of childhood. Notes the strong personal connections students make with the action and feelings of the poem, and that the poem helps thirteen- and fourteen-year olds understand their own developmental transformations. Suggests related writing assignments based on multiple…

Discusses the role of the English teacher in teaching reading. Concludes that successful instruction is comprised of interaction between students and the teacher, sound methods, and appropriate materials. (FL)

Details a study in which high school students were introduced to a categorization strategy for vocabulary terms related to literary analysis. Concludes that the strategy was a worthwhile addition to the traditional Socratic approach to literary analysis. (FL)

Relates the experiences of students at Joel E. Ferris High School (Spokane, Washington) who tutored culturally deprived elementary school students. (SW)

Contains representative selections from issues of "Elementary English," a precursor to "Language Arts," from its fifth decade of publication. Includes articles, editorials, and ads reflecting contemporary concerns of English education still relevant today, such as literacy, the increasing interrelationship between politics and…

Presents a list of topics, reading assignments, and an outline for a survey course on reading and literacy. (RL)

Reports on a survey of nearly 300 high school seniors asked to reflect on their reading experiences, both inside and out of school. Demonstrates that students find assigned reading, especially Shakespeare and Dickens, unrewarding and painful. Discusses problems and solutions of contemporary teaching methods. Suggests that students be given a…

Examines the effects of increasing adolescents' awareness of their own response strategies to reading. Illustrates the importance of ensuring that all students discover for themselves not only what they have learned, but how they have learned it. (SR)

Examines the relationship between recent research on metacognition and schema theory. Provides practical teaching suggestions, showing how these concepts can be used as a framework for language instruction and for analyzing tasks students are asked to perform. (RAE)

Discusses the problems inherent in the teaching of young adult literature courses. Describes a collaborative project designed to allow preservice English teachers access to younger students to get a better idea of student reading interests. (HB)

Explores the research regarding the workplace writing practices of two-year college graduates. Outlines the basic skills that two-year teachers should work to foster in their students' writing. Summarizes the most important findings of recent studies of workplace writing tasks most commonly faced by recent college graduates. (HB)

Describes sentence collecting, an activity in which students do outside reading that may include content area textbooks, and bring to class interesting sentences found in their reading. Maintains that sentence collecting helps to model reading as a dynamic cognitive and social process in which readers participate actively. (SR)

Summarizes recent debates concerning the use of popular culture and media within the English curriculum. Presents an approach to using media in fostering understanding the way meaning and taste are socially constructed. Describes research aimed at developing an account of reading as social process. (HB)