English 5001
ESL EXPECTATIONS
Regardless of who should teach ESL students, the writing class has always been downgraded in class of importance compared to literacy. Many of the writing programs at the university are taught by new teachers or interns. There is also very little funding for writing programs, so when you add another layer to an already... »
Tweetilie DEE!!!
Students today have become the multi-task generation with texting, email and the web 2.0 in general. Technology could be seen as the new wave of learning in the classroom. Rhetoricians and Educators have tried some of the tools used by students to improve classroom participation. Some educators want to harness the potential behind... »
Discussion Questions for Class 04/22
Below are the questions I plan to ask for tonight’s discussion for people who may not be in class. I’m not posting with the intention of starting a discussion thread, but so that people can look at it if they’d like and also so that I do not need to provide a hard-copy to... »
Paper Proposal: The Image of Women’s Magazines
Women’s magazines are a prominent presence in society. Walk into a Target and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to walk through the check-out without catching a glance of Marie Claire, Glamour, or Cosmopolitan if not all three. Magazines such as these are written with the intention of appealing to women in today’s society.... »
Project Proposal
“The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known in America as marihuana, and to history as hashish. It is a... »
The Rhetoric of Sales: Infomercials in the Composition Classroom
For my final paper, I plan on engaging in a two-fold research project. The end result will produce a product that can hopefully be used in the composition classroom in order to educate students on various rhetorical strategies and how they are used in a medium outside of composition. I plan to... »
Matsuda
Of course ESL students have different cultural backgrounds, education, and language proficiency as Matsuda mentions in his essay. Ignoring these elements of students only increases the difficulty of teaching them English. I was surprised to read that in 1939 I.A. Richards proposed a plan to teach English through picture and word correspondence. The irony... »
Composition vs. Linguistics
“Well DUH!” This was my continued feeling as I read through Paul K. Matsuda’s article “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor.” Of course specialized ESL courses are necessary for second-language speakers. As Matsuda gives the history of the development of ESL courses in various institutions, he mentions the growth... »
Hooks’ Dilemma and our/our students’ writings
In Hooks’ Rebel’s Dilemma one can almost feel her pain. A pain caused by her culture, her family, her profession, her academia, and her own writing. The struggle to alleviate this pain becomes then a central focus, a mission to search for who she really is. In the process of understanding the author’s dilemma, it is... »
Proposal
Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist and author, definitely left a unique mark on Harlem Renaissance literature. In her most significant work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston sends a feminist message about autonomy and remembering one’s experiences; nevertheless, many of her contemporaries who sought change for African Americans criticized her work as minstrel, primitive, and... »