Critical Factors in Teaching English

Abstract

IN RESPONSE to the growing number of criti cisms aimed at teachers of English, an evaluative study designed to assess the competencies of student teachers in English was recently undertaken at the University of Arkansas. As one aspect of this investigation, an effort was made to determine the qualities or competencies in which these teachers exhibited strength or weakness (2). The practical value of knowing that teachers are relatively strong or weak in a trait requires some value judgments as to which traits are critical and which are non-critical in teaching English. The problem of separating the critical from the non-crit ical in teaching is an age-old one, but the necessity for adequate and workable distinctions is undimin ished, according to Barr (1). This present study was an attempt to bring new light to this problem: (a) by delimiting the study to the single subject mat ter field of English, as opposed to the more typical practice of confounding the problem by placing to gether all subject-matter specialties for analysis as one; (b) by employing more sophisticated statistical techniques in the treatment of data which allow the researcher to differentiate between unique contribu tions to overall effectiveness and contributions which are not unique, and (c) by statistically recog nizing the extreme intricacy of the teac hing-com plex through the determination of a most critical combination of factors in teaching English.