Conflicting ways to understand the nature of paragraphs, including their purpose and structure, have been central to composition theory for many decades. Yet English teachers across countries are experiencing ongoing pressures to mandate a specific paragraph template. This article traces the contentious, binary history of paragraph theory and…

Knowledge and practice refuse to be disconnected from contexts. They always already occupy historical spaces both cultural and personal. Those spaces intersect with lines of inquiry. This essay takes place in the United States in 2020, the fall of the presidential elections, a year marked by Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of white…

This study was designed to investigate teachers' and students' perception of students' rating as a tool for evaluating language instruction in College of Education. It examined the percentage of teachers and students who perceived students' rating as a tool for evaluating language instruction; it also tested to ascertain the significant…

The author was greatly honoured to give the Garth Boomer address in 2020. In the strange year 2020, the author "spoke" at the superbly organised online event. In this article the author restates and reframes the case for literature teaching in English classrooms across the globe by arguing for it from the perspectives of modern…

Undergraduate English majors should have opportunities to conduct meaningful, authentic research. This essay outlines a research methods course that introduces students to empirical research with qualitative and quantitative tools. Over the course of the term, students complete a whole-class project that models the process and then also complete…

The topic of grammar teaching has remained a stubbornly contentious subject of discussion for more than 50 years, tending towards binary, even polemical, positions. Yet scrutiny of the research shows how little attention has been afforded to considering what the relationship between learning about grammar and learning about being a language user…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces. Design/methodology/approach: This study's methodology centers participants'…

It is sometimes claimed that teaching grammar is elitist. This article contends that in actual fact, far from being elitist, grammar is a vital ingredient in the English language teaching mix. Since the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics there has been a school of thought in the English speaking world that the formal teaching of grammar is…

During the last decade, distance learning has developed and become widespread. Many colleges and universities in the United States have accepted distance learning as part of the instructional delivery. In 2017, 33% of students enrolled were in distance learning courses. Out of these, 3.1 million (15.7%) students enrolled exclusively in distance…

After watching his fifth-grade son perform in "The Taming of the Shrew," Ben Lathrop realized that having learned the play through performance, his son found the experience enjoyable. Moreover, his acting decisions (movements, gestures, vocal inflections) demonstrated that he had at least some understanding of his lines, suggesting that…

Data from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that only one-third of fourth and eighth grade students are able to read proficiently on grade level. Despite a well-established research base indicating that all students benefit from explicit, systematic code-based instruction, many teachers lack the knowledge about the…

This dissertation consists of three papers about quantitative research methods in education. Each paper is a response to potential limitations of the current approach to building evidence for effective education -- an approach that is dominated by Randomized Controlled Trials of school programs, with mathematics and English achievement as primary…

Successful implementation of the current English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum invites a new approach to teacher professional learning (PL). A focus on establishing and renewing relationships must play a role in developing the collaboration necessary for curriculum implementation. This article presents a research-based argument that effective and…

The purpose of this research discusses (1) to find out the preparation of pre-service teacher students in using digital storytelling in online learning, (2) to study the implementation of teaching English by using digital storytelling, and (3) to find out the pre-service teacher students' perception in using digital storytelling. This research is…

This paper examines how English teachers experience and articulate a rural sense of belonging (RSOB) while teaching and living in rural communities. Given that rurality is a social construct, teachers' inclusion in this study occurred through meeting nuanced rural criteria. RSOB is a relationship people have with rurality that helps English…