Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 31, Issue 3, 1997

Observes how nine members of the Pine View High School English Department interpreted and implemented Kentucky’s state requirement for portfolio assessment of secondary school students. Suggests that the faculty saw the assessment as a test of their competence and felt great pressure to produce good portfolios but little incentive to explore ways portfolios might be used in the classroom.

Studies profoundly deaf children’s responses to picture book reading in a preschool environment as compared to responses of hearing children. Finds that in spite of a severe delay in learning language, deaf children’s responses to the picture books were similar to those of hearing children. Concludes that deaf children learned a great deal about language by reading picture books.

Investigates how teaching and the teacher’s role in elementary and secondary school writing classes have been conceptualized by leading workshop advocates. Uses M. Bakhtin’s writing on F. Dostoevsky to develop a metaphor of the writing teacher as novelist. Argues that workshop visions of teaching and the teacher’s role mystify meaning-making and ignore the workings of power.

Examines tense, aspect, and voice choices in the reporting verbs in a corpus of research articles from the "Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine." Investigates how such choices correlate with other syntactic elements in the citations, as well as with the discourse functions of the citations in their contexts.