Reviews efforts to develop national content standards for teaching English. Today's standards movements are distinguished from earlier efforts in that the learner is recognized as active, the meaning is socially and historically contingent, and the purpose is the development of language for political power and the creation and appreciation of…

Teacher educators have come to appreciate that the teaching of difficult subjects combines knowledge of content and knowledge of generic teaching methods. A study was conducted, therefore, to explore the potential of cases to carry pedagogical content knowledge. A case was developed describing how an expert teacher goes about teaching…

The Metropolitan Educational Trends and Research Outcomes Center has identified seven projects in the southwestern United States and one in Massachusetts that exemplify the educational practices important in today's ethnolinguistically diverse classrooms. Preliminary findings indicate that each of these programs contains several critical elements…

The Metropolitan Educational Trends and Research Outcomes Center conducts Improving Programs of Schools Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Student Populations, a survey to identify programs that have successfully addressed the needs of ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse students. This report presents a cross-sites…

Focusing on ways to teach language intelligently and enjoyably, this journal issue contains 23 articles dealing with a variety of topics. Article titles and authors are (1) "An Experiment: Immersing Students in Language" (S. C. Kirby); (2) "The Art of Storytaking" (J. Charnock); (3) "Getting Poems from the A-poetic" (J. W. Broaddus); (4) "Using…

Three English courses, based on the idea that subject matter, basic skills, and values are three separate areas that can be taught simultaneously, are described in this paper. The course described in the first section, "Women and Literature," combines interesting thematic material and values clarification with practice in traditional composition…

This paper, intended for freshman English instructors who teach reading and writing to both native and non-native students, discusses basic differences and similarities affecting instruction for the two groups. For example, non-native linguistic differences encourage teachers to deal with syntactic interference in reading and with highly embedded…

The 15 articles in this book focus upon the major literacy issues raised by the Bullock Committee in Great Britain and offer reflections upon these issues by United States and British educators who work daily with literacy problems. The articles cover the following topics: the Bullock Committee's work, providing for language growth in young…

A child's own purpose in life is to educate himself and to explore experience; consequently, secondary-school children will benefit from English teaching that encourages their imaginative creativity rather than forces strict adherence to arbitrary rules. When considering their childhood memories and the adult experiences before them, children…

English, which enrolls all students, is the only humanities course capable of transmitting culture to everyone. Students respond to cultural stimuli other than books, however; and since many justifications for traditionally narrow English courses are demonstrably not valid, English subject matter should be broadened to include methods of…

The aim of this course for grades 10-12 is to develop in students their command of language through their use of it. It tries to guide the student through the actual process of composition, avoiding the treatment of the pre-writing stage and the writer's situation. The instruction material is divided into six categories (Conciseness and Clarity,…

Descriptions of suggested teaching procedures are given for each item in the "Reading Skills" sequence of the "Junior High School English Course of Study" (Los Angeles City Schools publication X-66). This information includes suggested diagnostic procedures such as standardized tests, observation of pupils, oral reading surveys, and silent reading…

This teaching guide for written composition in grades K-3 contains (1) a statement of objectives for a curriculum in composition, (2) sequence charts which relate subject content for each grade to basic understandings about composition, (3) illustrations of ways in which the ordinary experiences of children can become the bases for compositions,…

This guide for teaching composition in grades 4-6 (1) objectives for a curriculum in written composition, (2) sequence charts which relate subject content for each grade to basic understandings about composition, (3) illustrative learning experiences, and (4) units for teaching specific skills. The units for each grade are "Structuring a…

Modifications of current assumptions both about the nature of the spoken language and about its functions in relation to personality development are suggested in this book. The discussion covers an explanation of "oracy" (the oral skills of speaking and listening); the contributions of linguistics to the teaching of English in Britain; the…