Every year, millions of new college students arrive on campus lacking the necessary academic skills to perform at the college level. Postsecondary institutions address this problem with extensive remedial programs designed to strengthen students' basic skills. While much research on the effectiveness of remedial education has been conducted,…

Student retention rates in higher education have been a focus of study for decades, yet the problem of low student retention still exists, particularly among community college students. While student retention has not been empirically investigated among community college students in language courses, the specific problem of low course-level…

This study explores developmental education placement rates and how well high school grade point average and exam performance predicted performance in college-level courses among first-time students who enrolled in the University of Alaska system from fall 2008 to spring 2012. Like other colleges and universities, the University of Alaska, the…

In this essay, we explore how the same theories and metaphors' used historically to describe the frontier, are useful ways of thinking about both team teaching and English studies as an interdisciplinary field. Defining the frontier as both imprecise and liminal encourages the students, as well as the instructors, to work within an open space of…

Teach "The Little Prince" to senior English students? Senior Advanced Placement English students? What could these people who had analyzed "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," wrestled with "The Sound and the Fury," dissected "Heart of Darkness," and deconstructed "East of Eden" possibly find of value in a "children's book"? The tendency to…

This research tries to find answers to the following questions: How much English and how much Spanish is spoken in class? For what functions is each language used? Data were obtained from the tape recording of Spanish conversation classes. Other data sources included non-participant observations and an interview with each of the instructors. The…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has created tools and supports intended to help teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The tools seek to find the right balance between encouraging teachers' creativity and giving them enough guidance to ensure quality. They are the product of two years of…

Rather than propose or endorse a single theory of comedy, this essay explores a wide variety of implications in sometimes-conflicting ideas on the subject. It groups questions under such topics as types of comedy, plot, social morality, and identity. These questions are drawn from a wide range of viewpoints both ancient and modern. It concludes…

In contemporary contexts, young people are accustomed to life story; indeed, their lives are saturated with constructions of their stories and those of others, whether created by themselves or their "friends" on social networks. Multimedia outlets convey often detailed stories of more-famous others, whether celebrities or those experiencing…

Universities and students collaborate in a shared language of excellence, quality and choice, and become part of the same discourse of marketisation, commodification and globalisation, where each plays their part as provider and consumer in a highly competitive international area. Whilst there are an increasing number of studies which focus on the…

In the author's effort to find out more about how "English Journal" articles have led to meaningful changes, he asked several teachers to write about "an "English Journal" article that made a difference." Several council members write about influential articles they read in the pages of NCTE's century-old journal. The brief stories they tell…

Secondary career and technical education (CTE) students are faced with the unique challenge of learning not only specific content-related knowledge and skills, but also postsecondary preparation, 21st century technology, employability and self-marketing skills. At Cass Career Center in Harrisonville, Missouri, a senior capstone project was…

Creating specific lessons for different language skills is challenging and time consuming for English teachers, but it is definitely worth the effort. In the author's experience, teaching language skills through mechanical exercises and traditional fill-in-the-blank, true/false, and multiple-choice assessments does not interest students as much as…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

The following narrative reflects on the dilemmas and problems faced by inexperienced researchers working within the field of education. Focusing on a research project completed in fulfilment of an MA in Teaching and Learning, the article recounts the decisions made by one emergent researcher and evaluates how far the chosen methods may have helped…