In our summer 2006 issue, we ran a comprehensive overview of how postmodernism has degraded composition on our campuses. Steve Kogan enlarges that indictment and charges that the movement has deliberately corrupted every area of English instruction--from the acquisition of skills and knowledge to the more fundamental mission of developing in…

There is a continuing need to investigate how contemporary students in schools are writing the word, and their world, beyond modernist parameters of the page. This article explores the online writing of a senior English world literature class, located in a Western Canadian city, as examined through a recent qualitative case study. Borrowing a 17th…

In a small-scale study of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-rich primary school, interactive whiteboards (IWBs) were found to be the predominant ICT tools used by teachers. The study sought to identify how the teachers used features of ICT to enhance learning, based on a list of ICT's functions published for teacher education…

In "The Mis-Education of the Negro," Carter Woodson issues a mandate for a different and original program of education for African-Americans, specific to their own conditions. If educators, the author opines, are to take this mandate into consideration when designing and implementing appropriate curricula and pedagogy, then they must start paying…

This article contains an analysis of a component of a large-scale reform effort in an urban school district that entailed placing high school students identified as underperforming in literacy in separate classes aimed at accelerating their learning. The relationship between students academic performance and social backgrounds, school…

The purpose of this study was to examine the language ideologies--the assumptions about the nature of language, language variation, and language learning--reflected in a widespread daily editing activity often known as Daily Oral Language or Daily Language Practice. Through a yearlong ethnographic study of grammar instruction in three urban,…

This study examined the roles of speech perception and phonological processing in reading and spelling acquisition for native and nonnative speakers of English in the 1st grade. The performance of 50 children (23 native English speakers and 27 native Korean speakers) was examined on tasks assessing reading and spelling, phonological processing,…

Suggesting that the United States' dominant form of literacy is contingent and historical, not permanent and absolute, this book asserts that when a society changes its definition of literacy, it also changes its models of mind and its models for teaching English. The book challenges the assumption that the public schools are a failure, arguing…

Intended for teachers at all levels, but especially the junior high and high school levels, this book offers a rationale and practical ideas for teaching grammar not in isolation but in the context of writing. Chapters in the book are: (1) Grammar and the Teaching of Grammar: An Introduction; (2) Teaching Grammar: Reasons for, Evidence Against;…

Deliberately pedagogical in its orientation, this book presents the essentials of English structure in a framework derived from modern linguistic theory and in a way that should be comprehensible to beginning students. The book is intended to offer students an understanding of what is involved in the scholarly study of language as they acquire an…

English for native speakers is compared and contrasted with English for non-native speakers by examining the influence of Moffett's (1968) structural curriculum for native speakers and the notional functional syllabus approach for second language learners. Both approaches are more rhetorical and less grammatical then the approaches that preceded…

A college professor of English involved with the HELDS project, Higher Education for Learning Disabled Students, describes his own reluctance in accommodating learning disabled students in his classroom. He mentions his discovery that some students have difficulty in dealing with conventional print in textbooks, and that typographic changes and…

The author contrasts the process of teaching English to Australian schoolchildren to that of teaching it to foreign-born adult immigrants. The major problems lie in producing acceptable pronunciation and a good grasp of sentence structure. (AJ)

English classes should return to teaching the great literature. (JH)

This article focuses on the development of the English curriculum, changes that have occurred over the years, and possible future trends in English education. (RC)