The "Battle of the Books" program includes the competition of English classes against each other and each class has a designated team, which gets first chance at the questions, but can ask for help from the rest of the class. Most of the competitions included two or three teams battling the competition and the winning scores got higher at each…

The use of popular culture to bring about an advanced learning in the students as they try to find appropriate literary allusions and further their own learning in the process is discussed.

As curriculum standardization escalates, teachers' agency in relation to teaching to student diversity takes on increasing importance. This article draws from an international study that investigated the multicultural and antiracist teaching practices of 15 English teachers in two racially diverse schools, one in the United States, the other in…

While discussion about the nature and function of the PhD has flourished for years in the broad context of English studies (Bérubé; Lunsford et al.; Nelson) and for more than a decade now in rhetoric and composition (Brown, Meyer, and Enos; North; Young and Steinberg), the Master's degree has attracted scant attention. No doubt this traces to a…

In this article, the authors reflect on the last 13 years of The Writers' Room, a program they developed for the Montclair Public Schools (New Jersey), which began officially in the spring of 1993 when a group of parents volunteered to become writing coaches for the newly detracked 9th grade English program. The idea was to help each writer find…

The following text is a "narrative inquiry" (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) in which I present an account of my experiences as an English teacher working in an Australian public secondary school. I explore the ways in which my beliefs as an English teacher conflicted with my role as a Literacy Co-ordinator/teacher and how--even though I…

The author has been invited to reply to this response to her article of December 2006 in this journal. This response can only be a summary of some of her findings and a reiteration, in very truncated form, of her arguments. She would refer any interested reader back to her original extended review of the PIRLS project as it was there that she lays…

For the sake of keeping language alive, contemporary American poets must be included in the English curriculum. (JH)

Some uses of the mass media for educating the adolescent are discussed, and the fact that teachers have generally neglected using mass media devices is emphasized. Multisensory stimuli are seen to enhance the excitement and drama of the written page and to be essential to a concept of literacy broad enough to encompass all aspects of critical and…

This is the final volume in a series by the NCTE/ERIC Clearinghouse which provide an index to ERIC Documents on the Teaching of English. Finding and ordering aids and a list of abbreviations precede the citations. The documents cited appear under the following categories: Teaching Profession; English Instruction: Methods, Theories, Practices;…

We need a different view of teaching writing--a principle that allows us to formulate sequential learning environments with specific objectives--what the author chooses to call the Principle of Redundancy. This principle provides the student with meaningful choices about how he will learn. It states, "In any language course, parallel back-up…

In a response to the Minnesota Conference on the Future of Doctoral Study in English, argues that literary theory has redirected attention to the medieval liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. (JK)

Argues that provision must be made for new works to enter the literary canon, suggesting that meaningful reformation of the canon must evolve from discussion among those involved in the profession of humane letters. Claims lethargy inhibits the process of canon reformation, and discusses revisionist approaches to curriculum. (ARH)

Identifies the activities recognized as drama in the curriculum and suggests that each offers a distinctive educational experience and has a particular educational justification. (Author/RB)

Suggests that English teachers' basic objectives should be to lead students to experience literature as a way of knowing parallel in importance to the ways found in mathematics and science and further discusses the purposes and content of literature courses. (TO)