To teach students how to write in a contemporary style, a secondary-school English teacher must be able to describe adequately the kind of writing he expects. Since many modern writers frequently ignore the guidelines proffered in traditional writing handbooks, the "new rhetoric"--a descriptive approach to composition that substitutes…

A university Latin instructor demonstrates the use of motivation techniques in teaching Caesar's account of the Gallic wars, the "Bellum Gallicum." Brought into play in order to show the work's sense and balance, its structural analysis, and its literary and historical context, are literary masterpieces of other periods, the essentials of literary…

Because this periodical about children's literature was published during 1976, the United States Bicentennial Year, it features contemporary essays on American children's literature from the colonial age to the present. Other essays discuss the current state of children's literature and the practices used in its criticism, German and Italian…

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…

Lessons directed toward the development of literary and interpretive skills in gifted children in grades one through three are described in this guide. The guide contains an introductory session and ten lessons designed to help children learn about three elements of plot (story line, buildup, and theme), the roles played by story characters, story…

Various questions concerned with the role of the educational system in affecting the pattern of inequality of life incomes within the Federal Republic of Germany are addressed. Sections include an introduction, a discussion on the distribution of benefits and costs of education, and a discussion on the efficiency and equity of the educational…

Although intended for use in English methods courses, this book is also intended as a resource and reference work for inservice English teachers. It contains chapters on the following topics: curriculum patterns, year plans, and unit plans; planning and presenting the English lesson; the purposes of teaching literature; the structure of…

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…

Intended to provide help for those interested in studying West African literature, this book is divided into three parts. Part One provides background information: the various African oral traditions are discussed, related to the way of life of the people, and examined for the extent to which they form the basis of present West African literary…

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…

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…

This book is a collection of papers presented at the symposium, "Conference on Ordinal Scales of Cognitive Development, sponsored by the California Test Bureau. Papers include: "The Theory of Stages in Cognitive Development" (J. Piaget); "Two Approaches to Intelligence: Piagetian and Psychometric" (D. Elkind); "An…

Three distinctions are usually made between norm- and criterion-referenced measures. They are: (1) their measurement forms, that is, student performance in relation to the performance of other students or with respect to some specific criterion; (2) general or specific kinds of objectives in which the measures are founded; and (3) their modes of…

The Quinmester course "Shakespeare" is designed to bring out behavior patterns in characters revealed through dialogue in the plays of Shakespeare. Selections include sonnets, the romantic comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the history play "Richard II," and the tragedy "Hamlet." The sonnets are analyzed…