Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 27, Issue 4, 2000

Suggests teachers helping older students in computer-aided classrooms should (1) expect these students to perform more slowly and to make more errors; (2) avoid comparisons that cause confusion due to students’ prior knowledge; (3) be aware of the danger of overload from information clutter; and (4) sequence assignments based on scaffolding concepts and on building skills through repetition.

Examines community college students’ choices of favorite works after a one-year composition and literature course. Finds “Antigone” was the favorite. Claims Greek classical works put students in contact with a distant culture that they find intriguing. Suggests juxtaposing a classical work with one from another time and culture to avoid assuming the classics into a rigid cultural hegemony.

Claims lower-division literature courses can engage students by incorporating student text into the anthologized canon. Describes specific classroom situations and effective strategies for connecting literature to students’ lives.

Proposes assigning polemics, suasive essays, and paradoxical encomia as a means to help students write in classical civic discourse forms, which enfranchise the personal in the service of the community. Presents guidelines for each assignment.

Claims personal narrative essays, although controversial, touch a unique chord in listeners and in readers. Suggest incorporating critical thinking and modeling by the instructor into personal narrative essay assignments.

Outlines three criteria that justify using passive voice. Claims teaching sentence focus--keeping the topic of the sentence in the subject position--will accomplish the end of teaching the appropriate uses of active and passive voice.

Describes three strands of knowledge which help students produce better research papers: (1) the four moves employed by authors of journal articles; (2) the strategies employed in writers of localized news stories; and (3) a checklist for localized field research.

Provide guidelines for (1) using storytelling to empower students; (2) drawing on students’ “family storyteller”; (3) bridging the gap between today’s students and teachers; (4) using the television show “Seinfeld” to enhance vocabulary development; and (5) using quizzes to teach proofreading skills. Presents a poetic response to students arriving late for class.

Reviews three books: Beyond Notecards: Rethinking the Freshman Research Paper, by Bruce Ballenger; The New Century Handbook, by Christinie A. Hult and Thomas Huckin; Outbursts in Academe: Multiculturalism and Other Sources of Conflict, ed. by Kathleen Dixon.