Specific English Research Articles

The Index of Middle English Prose. Handlist IV: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Douce Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford by Laurel Braswell

REVIEWS CX2- (in Manuscnpts in the Fifty Years After the Invention ofPrinting, ed. J. B. Trapp [London, 1983], pp. 6-8) or of A. L. Hench's identification of the setting copy for Tyrwhitt in Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950):265-66. It is regrettable that this volume shows evidence ofa lack offinalrevision. Professor Boyd has assembled much useful material in this volume. With a little more effort its reliability, particularly in textual matters, could have been greatly increased, and fuller justice done to her industry and scholarship. A.S. G. EDWARDS University of Victoria LAUREL BRASWELL. The Index ofMiddle English Prose. Hand/ist IV: A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Douce Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Cambridge and Wolfe­ boro, N.H.: D.S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. xix, 110. $32.50, ,£19.50. It is encouraging to see the steady accomplishment of ambitious designs in the publication of substantial parts of a large scholarly project such as The Index ofMiddle English Prose.Since such collaborative projects are, by their very nature, vulnerable, it is of considerable credit to the general editor and coeditors and the editorial board that this fourth handlist, a list ofmanuscriptscontaining Middle English prose in the Douce Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, appeared within three years of the publica­ tion of the first handlist (with others now also out or imminent and the invaluableIndexofPrinted MiddleEnglishProse [IPMEP] also published). T he present handlist usefully identifies those items of specific interest to Middle English specialists in the large and diverse Douce Collection, listing fifty-four manuscripts containing Middle English prose, ranging from the ubiquitous collections of medical and other recipes to a translation of Vegetius De re militari; a copy of the Master ofGame; several copies of the Wycliffite translation of the Bible; a romance, Ponthus; a manuscript of devotional treatises of Carthusian provenance; and so forth. A concise introduction categorizes the types of Middle English prose texts found in the Douce manuscripts and offers a resume of the formation of the collec­ tion as a whole, as well as of Douce's career as a collector of diverse objects and as an unexpected benefactor ofthe Bodleian Library. Given all this, it is 191 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER a great pity that in detail Handlist IVdoes not seem to fulfill the expecta­ tions raised by the businesslike tone of its introduction, nor the high standard set by earlier handlists in the series, such as the exemplary list of MiddleEnglish prose in the HuntingtonLibrary that appeared as Handlist Ithat has become, with IPMEP, an invaluable reference point for any study of this material. A sample of three entries in the present handlist, chosen at random, reveals, when checked against the manuscripts, an unfortunate number of inaccuracies. And so, in the opening lines of the Three Kings ofCologne, which begins imperfectly in MS 301, "pis" in the first line of the transcrip­ tion should read "pat"; in line 3, in the account of Paul's road to Damascus experience, the text should read "conuerted to Crist" andnot "connected to crist"; in line 4, "propre heryes" should read "prophecyes," and the un­ biblical "zhalaam" should read "Balaam"; in the following line, "his bokes" should read "in he(r) bokes" (and in the transcription of the final lines "three," incidentally, should read "thre"). And again in the transcription of the opening lines of a copy of the Brut Chronicle in MS 323, "surreye" should read "Surrye"; "a noble kyng and myghty a man of grete renoun" in fact has an additional ampersand after "myghty"; "dyoclissian" should read "Dyoclician" (and is it really necessary to avoid capitals [cf. the general editor's note, p. v, paragraph 4], at times even in the face ofmanuscript practice, when an equally arbitrary decision to capitalize all proper names would help the reader considerably?). The transcription of the closing passage of the Brut, which is said to begin on folio 101v but in fact begins on the recto, contains two mistranscriptions: "toke pytye" for "toke pe pylfre" (a radically different effect in the context of the aftermath of a battle between the Scots and the English) and "scotte" for "Scottes." (In...

Evaluating English as a Second Language: A Naturalistic Model

The article describes a program evaluation study of a special English as a Second Language program conducted by the Calgary Board of Education entitled CORE-ESL. This program was developed to meet the needs of a group of 18 to 21 year olds with a severe gap in their schooling due to political upheaval and war. The program was funded for a one-year period by a local foundation which requested that an external evaluation be conducted. The study was designed as a naturalistic model involving five stages of data collection and participant involvement. These five stages are described and study recommendations and outcomes are outlined. A composite student profile, developed in the study, is appended to the article.

Competence and the English Specialist

Competence and the English Specialist

ESP for nursing assistants and home health workers

This paper describes a sequence of two courses in vocational ESL for students preparing for the occupations of nursing assistant and home health worker. The first course provides students with a grounding in general medical concepts and in the special English useful to all health paraprofessionals. It prepares them to meet the entrance requirements for the vocational training course which follows. The second VESL course is more occupation specific and provides language support for the vocational course in nursing assistance or home health in which students are concurrently enrolled. The author has developed and taught the two VESL courses in close coordination with the content of the vocational course. Instructional strategies, especially in the more vocation-specific course, are designed to encourage language acquisition behavior which will allow students to assume responsibility for their own professional learning.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES. R. MacKay and A. Mountford (editors). Longman. 1978. xii+227 pp. M. A. Frankel M. A. Frankel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ELT Journal, Volume XXXV, Issue 4, July 1981, Pages 475–477, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/XXXV.4.475 Published: 01 July 1981

Poet in opposition

For several years tensions in the former British colony of Guyana have been running high. Since the late 1960s Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and his party, the Peoples National Congress, have been accused of keeping power through a combination of fraudulent elections, the sponsoring and equipping of private armies of thugs (often linked to religious cults such as that of the notorious Rev Jim Jones and, currently, the ‘House of Israel’ led by the self-dubbed' Rabbi Washington'), the manipulation of the ugly racial divisions between those of African and Indian origin, and the harassment of the opposition. This last has included restrictions on the press, by interrupting newsprint supplies and intimidating printers, and outright murder. A number of recent events have brought the situation to a head. On 14 February 1980 the PNC-dominated National Assembly approved a new constitution which gives Burnham the position of Executive President and virtually unlimited powers. At the beginning of June the trial finally began, after two postponements, of three leading members of the left-wing opposition Working Peoples Alliance - academics Drs Walter Rodney, Rupert Roopnaraine and Omawale - accused of burning down the PNC headquarters in Georgetown in July 1979. Such were the doubts about the fairness of the trial, which the authorities had decided should be held summarily before a judge rather than by jury, that several international human rights agencies, including Amnesty International, the UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group and the United States National Council of Churches, sent observers. In the event, lack of evidence and radical inconsistencies in that which was presented, resulted in a further adjournment until August. The trial was accompanied by widespread arrests in various parts of the country, the erection of roadblocks, house searches and heavy-handed police operations to prevent demonstrations. Finally, on the evening of 13 June, days after the trial was adjourned, Walter Rodney was killed when a bomb exploded in his brother's car in Georgetown. Despite official denials all the indications were of assassination by a government-sponsored death squad. There was world-wide outrage, including statements by Commonwealth leaders Michael Manley and Robert Mugabe. Rodney's death deprives Guyana of one of the world's foremost specialists in African and Caribbean history, as well as of an able political leader, whose young and growing party has made considerable strides in overcoming racial antagonism. In the article which follows, Stewart Brown, an English specialist in Caribbean literature and himself a poet, looks at the writing of Guyana's leading poet, Martin Carter, and, through his work, at the general situation of the writer in the post-independence Caribbean.

A comparison of English language skill improvement between interdisciplinary and noninterdisciplinary English classes.

There were 14 students with good speech and hearing discrimination selected from the class entering NTID in 1979, and a matched control group was selected from data on 1978 students. The experimental group was taught half of each week by a speech pathologist and an audiologist and the other half by an English specialist. The control group was taught by the English specialist using the same highly-structured course materials. The experimental group made significantly greater gains in reading comprehension than the control group.

THE PERFORMANCE OF NON‐NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH ON TOEFL AND VERBAL APTITUDE TESTS

ABSTRACTThis study examined the performance of two groups of non‐native English speakers on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and an appropriate verbal aptitude test. One group of graduate applicants took both TOEFL and the verbal section of the Aptitude Test of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). Another group of undergraduate applicants took TOEFL, the verbal section of the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and the Test of Standard Written English (TSWE). Data are presented showing how native and non‐native speakers compare on each set of tests. Information is also provided to aid in interpreting test results for non‐native speakers who have taken both types of test. The appendix to the report summarizes item reviews, by specialists in English as a Second Language, which suggest future directions for TOEFL test development.

Teaching Literature: the Oxford Education Research Group Project

This paper* describes the Oxford Education Research Group Project into the teaching of English Literature. The Project arose out of a number of conversations that were held between Oxfordshire English teachers and specialists from different disciplines within the University. What emerged from these conversations was the strong sense that while virtually all of the teachers gave a very high priority to literature in their English lessons, a considerable number were seriously concerned about their effectiveness in dealing with literature in the classroom. They were thoughtful about the nature of the objectives they were pursuing: was their job, for instance, to initiate children into the stylistic complexities of the Great Tradition, or was it something wider, more amorphous, something to do with the pupil's emotional development as an adolescent moving towards adulthood? If the latter, then how does the reading of appropriately chosen literature affect emotional development? Then there were, predictably, practical issues: the dilemma as to whether to use class texts or private readers, whether to teach literature within a thematic context or not, the effect of examinations, the problems of having children of widely different ability and maturity within the same class, of large classes and shortage of money. Some of these issues were of a general practical kind that no research project could (at least directly) resolve, but there did seem enough genuine interest both in the schools and in the University to mount a collaborative enquiry into literature teaching under the aegis of the Oxford Educational Research Group. The project, which is only in its initial stages, falls into two parts: a period of investigation into literature teaching that will pinpoint a number of issues that might repay study in the second, action research, phase of the enquiry. Thus it is intended in the first phase

A Campus View of College Writing

matters of language, it does not necessarily follow that their specific ideas of suitable English usage wholly correspond with those of the English specialist whose training and life work have been in the field of language and literature. In order to learn as much as possible about the attitudes of faculty outside the English Department toward problems of language and expression, as well as tactfully test their ability to spot some of the more common English mistakes, I sent a questionnaire to 2700 college teachers across the nation. A group of 300 English faculty at various schools also received the survey in order to facilitate a comparison of their views with those of their colleagues.'

QUALITY CONTROL AND THE COMMUNITY PHYSICIAN IN ENGLAND: AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

The quality of health care is becoming an issue of increasing public importance in both England and the United States. As the government role in providing health care grows and citizen demands increase, the effective and efficient use of health care resources and their equitable distribution become crucial. Although government responsibilities, particulary for health care, differ in both countries, as do traditions of quality control, cross-national comparisons are nonetheless useful. An examination of the role of the new English community medicine specialist and his potential for quality control may indicate what tools and powers should be introduced into a health planning and quality control system in the United State. The study concludes that at the district level of the National Health Service, where the basic planning, monitoring, and evaluation of services are to take place, the District Community Physician has very limited tools to carry out his quality control function. Although he has formal position in the unified decision-making structure, it is unlikely that he will be able to effect any substantial reallocation of resource without the voluntary support and copperation of the consultants, general practitioners, and other health providers.

Can We Test Technical Writing Skill Objectively?

The use of subjective testing as the only method for testing writing ability is questioned in this paper. Even a collaboration between engineers and specialists in English gives highly debatable results. The author of this paper, a well known British educator, has been experimenting with a type of objective testing. He invites readers to take one of his tests and to discuss the results with him.

NCTE Counciletter: The Disadvantaged

T HIS is a year to think of the disadvantaged English teacher. So much sympathy has been generated for the disadvantaged student: for the dull and the apathetic, for the unmotivated and bored, for the one who turns off the school, for the one who claims to be frustrated by the non-relevance of his intellectual experience, for the drop-out, and for the passive sit-in. But these are not the disadvantaged to whom I would draw your attention at the close of the '60s. This is not to say that these students do not deserve the sympathy and the creative talent of imaginative teachers. They do, indeed they do. However, part of the problem of the disadvantaged student is the frustration of the disadvantaged teacher. There are a great many things which are right with English teaching and with teachers of English. But let us not be complacent. It is the weak link which causes the chain to break, no matter how strong most of the links may be. If we do not look to our weaknesses, our strengths may not be sufficient. I should like to consider three of the dilemmas of the profession: many teachers of English are overworked, some are frustrated by paradoxes in the carrying out of educational philosophy, and some are out-of-touch. Ten years ago, in 1959, James B. Conant in American High School Today presented Recommendation 6: English Composition ... In order that teachers of English have adequate time for handling these themes (one a week), no English teacher should be responsible for more than one hundred pupils (page 51). And then he goes on to say, Obviously, adequate instruction in English composition requires that teachers not be overloaded. Obvious, it may be, but far too few schools are even attempting to work toward a reasonable load for the English teacher. National Interest and the Teaching of English in 1961, two years after Conant, in The Need for Better Teaching Conditions, makes a strong case for the improvement of the conditions under which English is taught: Specialists in English consider four classes of 25 students each as the teaching load necessary for effective learning. present overload of teachers of English prevents students from receiving needed instruction and discourages recruitment (page 89). Then again in 1964,

A First Year Teacher’s Notes on a Girl in Special English (Verse)

A First Year Teacher’s Notes on a Girl in Special English (Verse)

A First Year Teacher's Notes on a Girl in Special English

A First Year Teacher's Notes on a Girl in Special English

Local and Community Power in Angola

N 1964-65 a study of contemporary Portuguese Africa was initiated by the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon and carried out by a team of American and English specialists. As part of the study the author was commissioned to examine the institutions and processes of local government and public administration in that part of the world.' The terms and conditions of the study made it possible for the author to test the validity of two propositions concerning the political process in an authoritarian society during two months of field work in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique. The propositions tested are the following: 1. As distinct from the attempt in totalitarian societies to destroy competing foci of power and construct a monistic social structure, the political process in authoritarian societies is identical with that of democratic societies with the exception of the power of bloc voting in the latter. 2. In authoritarian societies the state (government and bureaucracy) is clearly seen as a distinct power aggregate different in function but not different in kind from other power aggregates operating in society and engaged in the political process. This is in distinction to the confusion that arises between the state and society itself, and which occurs in both totalitarian and democratic societies in totalitarian societies because of the conscious effort to identify the two and make them in fact identical, and in democratic societies because the directing group in the state, the government, is chosen by society at large or by some part of it.2 The overseas territories of Portugal are divided into provinces, of which five are in Africa, the two most important by far being Angola and Mozambique. Policy decisions covering all of the overseas provinces are made by the Overseas Ministry in Lisbon, subject to the approval of the Prime Minister, who is ultimately

Soviet Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages

classroom showed more growth in sentences spoken correctly than those receiving English as a Second Language instruction outside their regular classroom. Group II also continued to maintain a higher level of performance on sentences spoken correctly when compared to Group I. A comparison of the data from Table I shows that the reading achievement of groups receiving English as a Second Language instruction was greater than those not receiving English as a Second Language instruction. Data also reveal that the group receiving English as a Second Language instruction outside the regular classroom appeared to achieve at a higher level in reading achievement than those receiving instruction in their regular classroom. The Student-Fisher t was used on the data in Table I to compare the differences in means between Group II and Group III on number of words, number of sentences, and reading achievement. Only the average number of words was found to be significantly different. It can be seen by inspecting Table I that the data favor the experimental groups over the control in all cases. The data, however, do not favor one experimental group over the other experimental group in all instances. They do show that students receiving instruction in the regular classroom develop larger vocabularies than those being drawn out for special English as a Second Language instruction.

Courses for English Specialists in Colleges of Education

Courses for English Specialists in Colleges of Education

Preparing the English Specialist for Teaching

Preparing the English Specialist for Teaching

Pilot Plant Techniques of Submerged Fermentation

Journal Article Pilot Plant Techniques of Submerged Fermentation Get access Pilot Plant Techniques of Submerged Fermentation . Special English Edition of Rendiconti Instituto Superiore di Sanita, Vol. 17 . 243 pgs. Interscience Publishers , 250 Fifth Ave, New York 1, N.Y. ( 1954 ) $8.10 . AIBS Bulletin, Volume 5, Issue 5, October 1955, Page 12, https://doi.org/10.1093/aibsbulletin/5.5.12-d Published: 01 October 1955