THE FIRST OF THESE TWO 12TH-GRADE UNITS IS DESIGNED TO SHOW STUDENTS THAT THE UNIMAGINATIVE OVERUSE OF LITERARY CONVENTIONS LEADS TO TRITENESS, VERBOSITY, AND DULLNESS. LESSONS ARE ORGANIZED BY GENRE AND FOCUS ON LITERARY SELECTIONS WHICH SHOW VARYING DEGREES OF ORIGINALITY IN THE EMPLOYMENT OF LITERARY CONVENTIONS. AMONG WORKS DISCUSSED ARE…

OVER 50 EDUCATORS FROM AMERICA, ENGLAND, AND CANADA, REFLECTING DIVERSIFIED EXPERIENCES, INTERESTS, AND POINTS OF VIEW, MET FOR FOUR WEEKS IN THE SUMMER OF 1966 AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE FOR THE ANGLO-AMERICAN SEMINAR ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, THE FIRST LARGE-SCALE EXCHANGE BETWEEN AMERICAN AND BRITISH EDUCATORS ON THIS BASIC SUBJECT. THIS REPORT,…

Children's books published between 1910 and 1960 reflect a changing world and new attitudes toward children. In 1910, although some of the moral tales of the earlier Puritan era survived, the didactic period in children's books was nearly over. From 1910 to 1925, a transitional period, writers began to look toward the children's own world. Then,…

Comics--as a special literary genre--must be judged by special criteria. In fact, the four-panel daily comic strip must be judged by different standards from the full-length comic book or the single- or double-frame comic. Among the four-panel strips are found comics that make a claim to literary quality--"Li'l Abner,""Pogo," and "Peanuts." These…

This article describes the problems that the College Entrance Examination Board's Committee of Review for the Examinations in English encountered in creating a fair, objective, hour-long literature achievement test which would meet four objectives--to measure the breadth of a student's reading, his understanding of that reading, his response to…

The Gender Antonym Replacement Technique is a computer assisted aid to determine whether a written statement about the condition of one sex does in fact speak to problems encountered principally by that sex, rather than to problems common to both sexes. The technique involves deleting gender-related terms in a passage, substituting an antonym for…

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than…

Media literacy (particularly for television) should be taught in college freshman composition courses. Since young people watch a lot of television, they should understand the dynamics of that medium and be able to use interpretive and evaluative skills in selecting and viewing only the best of the medium. Since the methods of studying literature…

Five models are postulated for interpreting the three historical stages in the development of compulsory schooling in the United States. These three stages include (1) a symbolic stage where compulsory public school education began to gain strength but lacked enforcement procedures, (2) a bureaucratic phase beginning around 1900 where new…

The long-forgotten debate of 1929-31 between T. L. Kelley and W. H. Kilpatrick is reviewed with the aim of reviving the crucial, but dormant, issue of the competence of quantitative empirical research to answer educational questions. They debated the need to supplement scientific method with a philosophical approach sensitive to needs, impulses,…

The three objectives of this study were to evaluate the following: a test of literary judgment for use with community college students, the free responses of students to passages in the test, and the use of original literary selections and distortions of them as a classroom tool. The test of literary judgment used original poetry and prose…

A review of the literature on Black English was made to determine what information is available and to assess the credibility of the information. The review covered the years from 1865 through the first half of 1975. More than 75 documents were identified as potentially informative in the area of investigation. The linguistic features of Black…

It is proposed that teachers of Chinese expose their students to traditional critical views of Chinese poetics and criticism through careful selection of poems. This approach to language study is based on the assumption that the student may gain insight and appreciation of Chinese poetry as well as a feeling for the culture. Arguments favoring…

Several of the important themes of post-World War II English, French, and German drama are analyzed in this book. The first chapter briefly examines the major contemporary playwrights in each national literature. Subsequent chapters discuss contemporary drama as an expression of Artaud's "theatre of cruelty," its relationship to the changing…

Across the centuries the heroes in dramatic works develop and play out action along the same lines, although the dramas may have been created by different authors and may reflect various eras and cultures. A case in point is a comparison of the two Spanish plays "El Caballero de Illescas" by Lope de Vega (1602) and "Los Intereses…