This essay examines Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage during the early twentieth century through the lens of Mexican popular culture. Comedy, poetry, cartoons, and musical recordings of the time portrayed these marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as subhuman and unworthy of full…

Students' relationships with language are likely to change when they are permitted to play with it, but teachers must construct multiple classroom situations for experimentation, and thus change, to take place. Margo A. Figgins and Jenny Johnson give several ideas for how to foster wordplay among students, describing use of eponyms, word…

Performing text in the form of choral reading, rap, reader's theatre, and/or simulations offers students a powerful vehicle for understanding and recalling key concepts and significant details culled from textual materials. Creating a script, poem, or lyrics to perform requires repeated readings of a text, a practice that increases participants'…

Poetry should be an integral part of children's learning in elementary school. This article explains the classroom structures and routines through which third-grade students in an inner-city school became familiar with poetic language and learned to appreciate the artistry of poetry. Most of the students were struggling readers. Reading poetry…

This article reports the influence of school-integrated teacher education (SITE) courses on student teachers' initial experiences of learning how to teach. We analyse data from five student teachers who reflect back on their experiences of learning to teach through the integrated teaching and learning experiences of SITE courses. The article…

This document guides teachers through the production of a docu-drama designed to raise environmental awareness for primary school children aged 5-9 years old. The play is a narrated account of seven environmental problems and solutions that is acted in mime, rhyme, and song and could be adapted as a dramatic environmental awareness exercise. The…

This paper discusses, from a personal point of view, the process of writing a poem, from inception through revision to the final product. The intention is instructional for any person who wishes to explore the nature of creative, directed expression in language. Because it is a personal account, however, it is idiosyncratic in nature and possibly…

Ellen Kreger Stark, in her article, "Reforming the Critical Space," in "Critical Quarterly" discusses the gap which exists for poets writing in academic discourse, saying that she could not tell when she was writing criticism and when she was being a poet. Usually, teachers/professors say such writing is too personal, too…

This handout is a guide to library resources in the J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte for the criticism of poetry. The guide enables the reader to find sources of criticism on poetry, including critical articles and essays about single poems, or writings on the work of a single author. The guide's sections…

This bibliography lists poetry, fiction, and drama written by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish women of the twentieth century, some originally written in English and the others in English translation. The first section of the bibliography lists the 67 sources (collections and journals) that were consulted. The second part of the bibliography lists 888…

Within the texts of most contemporary ethnic American literatures, but especially those of Native American women, interwoven double-voiced strands of language and physical location constantly intertwine through recordings of individual memory and experience. The poems that result from these explorations create a self inextricably linked to Native…

Designed for teachers in the primary grades, this book provides a number of units outlining possible instructional strategies for teaching folk literature. The book's aim is to help children personally connect with literature so they will continue to love reading throughout their lives. The first chapter offers background on the world of folk…

Pupils should participate in numerous forms and kinds of writing activities involving poetry and should hear, read, and write different forms and kinds of prose. Types of poetry that pupils can write include couplets, triplets, quatrains, limericks, free verse, haiku, and diamante. The ingredients that all types of poetry might have include…

Intended to impart the basic ways a poem is constructed, this concise handbook is a prose guide to writing poetry. The handbook talks about meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense, iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and how and why this should matter to any person writing or reading poetry. Interspersing history and analysis with…

Body movement can be successfully integrated with language arts skills through the following six-step model: (1) begin with the auditory channel (chant the poem to the child and emphasize the sounds); (2) add rhythm (clap the beat, stressing the accents); (3) add movement (watch the execution); (4) add meaning (discuss each phrase, and use imagery…