As is known, writing is an indispensable part of language education. As far as English Language Teaching Departments are concerned, writing courses, especially Advanced Writing Skills, are taken as a course of higher importance. However, forming a syllabus for Advanced Writing Course for English Language Teaching Departments is not an easy matter.…

Considers the emergence of the so-called culture wars in contemporary American society. Contends that, in the context of such cultural conflict, the English classroom is a particularly important battleground. Considers how English teachers might structure their classes to address the culture wars. (HB)

A detailed account of how a high school playwriting course was developed, with a list of 20 exercises. (RL)

The majority of college English departments in America identify and categorize their writing courses by genre. Because of this, writing instruction as a field represents teaching interests and results in written products that are diverse enough to suggest that departments should hire writing specialists who have equally diverse credentials in the…

Recommends teaching journalism as an English course or in combination with an English course to ensure the continuation of journalism education in the face of more stringent graduate requirements. Describes such a course, which includes literature, a research paper, and regular composition assignments. (HTH)

Summarizes sources on popular culture which can be used in designing a composition course centered around a mass culture theme. (MM)

Considers the profit of caring for writing students and helping them believe in the value of the materials they produce. Provides experiential evidence of the influence of one teacher's attempt to care ethically for his students. (HB)

Describes a system for arranging assignments in a composition course that aims to prepare students for academic writing, by focusing entirely on exposition and its conceptual demands. (HTH)

Describes how the structure and size of the freshman writing class was changed to deal with the large demand for these classes and the problems in staffing them. Discusses the university's commitment to writing across the curriculum, the writing center, the student tutor program, the use of a collaborative-workshop method, and the writing…

Presents a summarized, first-person account of implementing an English curriculum based on Pualo Freire's approach to literacy education and on Lev Vygotsky's work on the internal learning process. (RL)

In an effort to identify characteristics of effective college composition programs, an examination was made of 19 campuses of the California State University. Each English department chair was sent a "fact sheet" requesting program information on such matters as the use of placement test scores, sequence of and prerequisites for lower…

Teaching composition in a prison is different from teaching composition in a traditional freshman composition classroom. Since most prison inmates have a high school equivalency degree earned while in prison, a developmental writing course offered prior to the standard freshman composition sequence is probably necessary. Such a class may include a…

The results of an informal, random survey that examined the freshman English offerings in 23 two-year and four-year colleges are contained in this paper. Among the findings reported are the following: (1) the majority of schools surveyed used a placement test of some kind, and over half required students to enroll in a particular course based on…

This syllabus provides the organizational framework, philosophy, and goals that were developed for a senior high school English department. The major portion of the syllabus consists of 20 required and elective course outlines and a list of recommended audiovisual materials. Seventeen of the course outlines include a brief course description, a…

Written to comply with Connecticut's legislative mandate that educational programs be planned, ongoing, and systematic, this guide to curriculum development in the language arts for kindergarten through twelfth grade advocates a curriculum in which there is a balance between basic skills programs--speaking, reading, writing, listening and…