English Journal - Volume 86, Issue 6, 1997

Describes how students who are learning disabled can improve their writing skills through physical movement and manipulating visuals. Describes how movement draws on kinesthetic intelligence and manipulatives draw on spatial intelligence to help students understand language structures in nonverbal ways that may be more intuitive than verbal explanations. Shows that manipulatives can also help students organize their ideas.

Describes a two-week unit in a high school English class which teaches high school students how, why, and when to use professional study notes, such as “Cliffs Notes.” Prepares students with the skills to research and write their own notes.

Relates the story of how the author connected for the first time, in the 11th grade, with writing, awakening in her something she did not know she had.

Explores the many reasons to read and teach multicultural literature, including to know oneself and others, and because people still lead largely segregated lives. Considers the impact of including and excluding lives and cultures. Responds to opposition to including these works, and details the power of multicultural literature to move students.

Describes the creation and teaching of a high school elective course on American Indian literature, and discusses how a workshop on Native American literature challenged the teacher’s beliefs and practices. Concludes that it is important to address the limitations non-Native readers bring to this literature but that those limitations need not confine what students choose to read.

Notes the presence of references to classical mythology throughout modern culture, and offers an annotated list of 43 works of contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama that use mythological sources and that can help close the gap between today’s students and the gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters of long ago.

Discusses some Japanese cultural concepts and student behavior that grows out of them. Suggests a number of classroom techniques that recognize and accommodate these cultural concepts while helping Japanese learners adjust to American classrooms.

Susan Tchudi, Heidi Estrem, and Patti-Anne Hanlon describe a variety of methods for revision through the examples of students working to revise their papers.

Defines passive and active writing portfolios, suggesting artifacts to include in an active portfolio and ways to move outcomes from passive to active.

“Minimizing Writing Apprehension in the Learner-Centered Classroom” by LaVona L. Reeves lists the characteristics of apprehensive writers and offers a number of strategies for drawing them out.

Describes a four- to six-week project for high school sophomores in which students create pamphlets and in the process learn basic research skills and practice several elements of the research paper.

Describes a project in a southeast Michigan high school in which Latino English-as-a-Second-Language students worked collaboratively for 10 weeks with at-risk working-class Anglo counterparts from an 11th-grade American literature class. Describes reading and writing activities that centered around the notion that students should search for and value the treasures of their own experience.

Describes how an English teacher uses ghost stories in his classroom to further students’ interest in and understanding of epics. Presents a short unit in which all the class work focuses on scary kinds of things.

Describes a project in a third-year Latin class in a high school in the Appalachian foothills in which students (1) identified and analyzed classical rhetorical devices in speeches by Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr.; (2) used rhetorical frames; and (3) wrote their own speeches as part of a year-long writing exchange with senior-level English students in England.

Considers what influences the idealistic preconceptions (or fantasies) of student English teachers. Examines various models, found in journal articles, movies, Socrates and Plato, and in this very journal. Examines two books that helped the author reformulate his ideals and find new, more satisfying models.

Available in print version only.