It is often asserted that UK school-leavers know less grammatical terminology than in earlier years. However, objective data on this supposed phenomenon are somewhat scarce. The study reported in this paper aimed to see whether and to what extent knowledge about language (KaL) has declined over three decades, and how this might relate to…

Although there is a vast research base on the literacy practices of adolescents and the issues surrounding the integration of technology despite current widespread access to tools and the Internet (Cuban, 2003), very little has been completed on the attempts of teacher educators to integrate technology within a specific content area to prepare…

This research investigated the use of blogs to promote collaboration between teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) teacher candidates and Adolescent English teacher candidates and to sensitize them to the writing demands placed on secondary English language learners (ELLs). Blogs offered an authentic experience for teacher…

Students enter secondary classrooms armed with attributions for their own successes or failures, informed by experiences in and out of school, but it is unclear to what degree these attributions affect achievement. Additionally, while the influence teacher expectations can have on student achievement is well documented, students' perceptions of…

This article represents an "overdue encounter" with the ideas of Ian Hunter to reconsider the historical emergence and descent of English teaching in the United States. Influenced by Hunter's account of the "pastoral" and "bureaucratic" genealogy of English teaching in England, my historical study documented…

The film scholar Robin Wood, who died recently, taught me English during the mid-1960s at Welwyn Garden City High School (now Sir Frederick Osborn Comprehensive). He was one of those teachers who "made a difference". He helped me learn that it was all right for a boy from a working-class home to study stuff such as literature. But it was…

Prompting students to self-explain during problem solving has proven to be an effective instructional strategy across many domains. However, despite being called "domain general", very little work has been done in areas outside of math and science. In this dissertation, I investigate whether the self-explanation effect holds when applied…

This study examined aspects of emerging adulthood that contribute to success in English developmental courses. The research approach included qualitative interviews with a collective case study of 12 emerging adults between the ages of 18-25 who successfully completed EN085 and EN085L at the University of Guam. The emerging adults shared…

College requires students to read strategically in order to be academically successful (Caverly, Nicholson, & Radcliffe, 2004). Strategic readers utilize a variety of strategies, including metacognitive reading strategies (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). However, not all students use the same strategies when…

The debate over the place of new literacies extends throughout the history of English teaching and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). English teachers have had some help dealing with the onslaught of new media. From the start, NCTE has provided support for English teachers interested in branching out beyond a print-dominated…

This article, which is coauthored by former and current SIG (special interest group) leaders, describes the SIG's history, its member profile, and the scholarly and teacherly endeavors that have grown from their work together. The article also describes the significance of this successful partnership beyond the immediate work of the SIG, including…

This article is a case study of how English teachers in England have coped with the paradigm shift from print to digital literacy. It reviews a large scale national initiative that was intended to upskill all teachers, considers its weak impact and explores the author's involvement in the evaluation of the project's direct value to English…

Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of…

This article explores how exposure to aesthetic education approaches can help novice teachers reconsider their literature instruction in an age of mandated curricula and increased pressures to "teach to the test." The guiding questions were as follows: What similarities exist between transacting with a text on the page and aesthetically…

To address the issue of plagiarism, students in two undergraduate Research Methods and Analysis courses conducted, analyzed, and wrote up original research on the topic of plagiarism. Students in an otherwise identical course completed the same assignments but examined a different research topic. At the start and end of the semester, all students…