Field Of English Teaching Research Articles

Whose Portfolio Is It Anyway?: Dilemmas of Professional Portfolio Building

Examines use of portfolios as a major assessment tool for students in the field of English Education. Discusses how professional portfolios encourage students to use their meta-cognitive skills and find their own unique themes as well as encouraging teachers to become collaborators and co-creators with students. Describes advantages and disadvantages of portfolio use and presents experiences with several students.

Looking the Part: For my mother: Ouida Eleanor Harrison Clapp

Discusses how education is still a profession held hostage by images. Presents concerns dealing with racial expectations in the field of English education. Focuses and concentrates on the contents of the English language and literature professions that, although acknowledging its many diversities, avoids the distraction of “finding someone to look the part.”

Building a Foundation for Effective Teaching and Learning of English: A Personal Perspective on Thirty Years of Research

Offers a 30-year retrospective on the evolution of a researcher and of the field of English teaching. Discusses the tradition of scholarship that seeks to ground its approaches to teaching and learning in the best of their understandings of language use and language learning, drawing broadly on rhetoric, linguistics, sociology, literary criticism, cognitive science, and anthropology.

J. C. Tressler--A Brief Memoir

It was fifty years ago. I had passed the teacher-intraining test given by the New York City Board of Examiners and was appointed to Richmond Hill High School. That assignment changed my life because the chair of the English Department was J. C. Tressler. As a neophyte, I knew little about the giants in the field of English education, names like Wilbur Hatfield, Angela Broening, Robert C. Pooley, Charles Fries, and Carol Hovious. Among the leaders, J. C. Tressler stood tall. By 1936 he had a national reputation. More than a million books in the English in Action series had been sold. He was sought after as a speaker at conventions and a contributor to educational journals. He pioneered a new emphasis in English textbooks-on making young people proficient in the actual use of English, not on trying to create inept grammarians. He devised a dual organization of textbooks, with composition activities in one section and a reference handbook in the second.

ON THE CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL AIMS AND PRACTICAL AIMS OF ENGLISH TEACHING AND LEARNING

The discussion on the aims or values of the teaching and learning of English often contrasts two controversial labels : 'cultural' and 'practical'. This dichotomy is commonly said to have its origin in Y. Okakura's monumental work Eigo Kyoiku (English Education) published in 1911. This paper traces the concepts of aims or values of English teaching in Japan focusing upon the conceptual development of cultural aims and practical aims. In contrast with the aims of English studies around the Meiji Restoration, which laid emphasis on the practical values, the aims of English teaching in the school curriculum came to be discussed at the end of the last century, when the effects of English teaching came into question, and resulted in the emphasis on the cultural values. Other points made clear in this paper are that the concept of cultural and practical values had been introduced much earlier by R. Mitsukuri, and that, therefore, Y. Okakura is not the originator of the concept, although he established the dichotomy in the field of English teaching.

Will the Real Terminal Student Please Stand Up?

PROBABLY NO AREA in the field of English teaching, from kindergarten's show-andtell period through the doctoral dissertation, is more amorphous and ill-defined than the course known in some junior colleges as This paper offers no bibliography because there is precious little information available. Such mention of terminal English as occurs in recent NCTE publications, even those devoted to junior colleges, suggests merely that there is great opportunity here, and rather wistfully points out that the need for research is desperate. In addition to the NCTE publications and an occasional article in the Junior College Journal, recent CCCC conventions have devoted one workshop to terminal English. The chances are that no discussion will get far until two very important questions are answered: Who are the terminal students? What should