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…

The first segment of a long-term educational assessment plan, for which this three-part report was compiled, called for a study that would survey the status of English language arts programs in the province of British Columbia and serve as a pilot for future assessment programs. This portion of the study deals with the initial phase of the…

The first segment of a long-term educational assessment plan, for which this three-part report was compiled, called for a study that would survey the status of English language arts programs in the province of British Columbia and serve as a pilot for future assessment programs. This portion of the study presents the results of the second phase of…

The first section of this paper discusses various approaches used in providing feedback on student writing performance. It identifies four categories of feedback--positive versus negative, task-related versus task-unrelated, moderate versus extensive, and teacher-provided versus student-provided--and reports research findings related to each…

Following a discussion of the advantages of having everyone in an English Department--teaching assistants, junior faculty, and senior staff--teach composition courses, specific qualities desired in a composition instructor are suggested in this speech. These instructors should include: (1) those willing to insist that students emerge from…

Designed to help instructors become aware of factors that may interfere with teaching composition to Mexican-American students, this paper surveys research findings about attitudes toward Spanish-speaking persons in the United States and about language patterns and attitudes of Mexican Americans. It then briefly recommends techniques for working…

This document contains abstracts of experimental and descriptive educational research in West Virginia. The stated purposes of the document are to disseminate relevent educational research to West Virginia teacher educators, to encourage ongoing research in all areas and at all levels in education, and to develop professional utilization of…

FL-101 is an interdisciplinary, team-taught orientation to foreign languages. It has been designed to accomplish two goals: (1) provide a language-related academic experience for students who would otherwise not have any contact with languages, and (2) attract students to the further study of language. There are nine major components in the…

This is an annotated bibliography intended to provide, for teachers of English, enough information about research and experimentation in sentence-combining to enable them to begin to use it as a pedagogical technique with some understanding of the theories and issues involved. The annotations are selective in that they summarize the information…

Communications to college students about the value of their composition are better expressed in words than in letter grades. Research by Sweet and Seidman suggests that free-style, positive comment on student papers produces a markedly improved attitude toward writing. The author's own research reveals that in the presence of positive, free…

The "9 to 90" Saturday Reading Program sponsored by the Fullerton (California) College Department of Community Services offers individualized reading improvement in hourly sections on Saturday mornings to anyone from ages nine to ninety. Groups of nine to fifteen students meet each hour with teaching teams of three instructors. The groups are…

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…

To determine the influences of college work in English, of teaching assignment, of size of community, and of teaching experience upon opinions about the authority for standards of English usage, secondary English teachers in Oklahoma ranked items of usage as formal written or spoken, informal written or spoken, or uncultivated or illiterate…

This bulletin contains the basic principles of an approach to English teaching at the beginning secondary school level. Following a statement of the basic philosophy of the program and a definition of the aims of English at the secondary level, sections are presented containing (1) the prerequisite skills taught at the primary school level, (2)…

This book offers inner-city language arts teachers suggestions to make the teaching-learning act more significant and rewarding. The compilation of innovative activities and ideas is divided into six chapters dealing with (1) the improvement of students' self-image, (2) children's literature, (3) written expression, (4) poetry, (5) oral language…