Academic literature on the topic 'English language – united states – composition and exercises'

AbstractAgency has been an ongoing topic of concern in Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies since the field’s emergence while more recently notions of top-down vs. bottom-up power have been questioned in favor of more nuanced appreciations of the multiple factors that influence a local LL actor’s selection and emplacement of public language. Agency in public schools in the United States exists at the nexus of policy (determined at national, state, and local district levels) and the many decisions made by administrators at individual schools while teachers and support staff, students, and other stakeholders act according to and sometimes against explicit and implied policies. Previous studies of the LL of schools (schoolscapes) have demonstrated the role that public displays of language play in constructing identities, agency, diversity, and ideologies that affect multilingualism and literacy practices. This chapter reports findings of a mixed-methods study of all three elementary schools and the two secondary schools in a mid-sized public school district in Oregon. The combination of photographs, video-recorded walking tours led by schoolscape actors, and interviews with teachers and administrators documents the district’s schoolscapes and provides insight regarding their composition. This data leads to a classification of the functions of schoolscape signage and comparisons across the three elementary schools and across educational levels in terms of languages present, attitudes, policies, and agency. A Nexus Analysis focuses on the ideological positioning of Spanish relative to English and the construction of collective identities primarily as they affect English Language Learners and Spanish heritage speakers in the district.

This chapter details the author's learning English as a foreign language in her home country, Turkey, followed by a critical incident that took place in a freshman composition class in the United States. The author reflects on the ways in which that pivotal experience changed her perception of self, as well as how she coped with similar occurrences throughout her teaching career. Combining World Englishes with mutuality, the author makes recommendations for dealing with negative student comments proactively.

High school students in the United States have the option of taking advanced placement (AP) courses designed to prepare them to take AP exams that will potentially give them the opportunity to receive college credits for first-year undergraduate courses. This chapter examines the cultural biases present in the AP English Language and Composition course and exam, which focus on skills and knowledges typically learned in a first-year composition course. With culturally relevant theory in mind, this work specifically draws attention to the effects of such cultural biases on Hispanic students in Texas, a state where the number of Hispanic students surpasses the number of students from any other cultural background.

Concerns about plagiarism are salient for the academic writing of second language (L2) writers of English, who face several challenges while learning academic discourse and proper citation conventions. Effective instruction is crucial in helping them learn to avoid plagiarism and borrow from sources appropriately. In this chapter, the authors present a case study of an English as a Second Language (ESL) composition class at a Midwestern university in the United States. This study is framed by a social view of learning that draws from Lave and Wenger's (1991) notion of a community of practice. Data included weekly classroom observations, interviews at the beginning, middle, and end of the 10-week academic term, surveys, and student participants' online blogs. Findings illustrate how Turnitin, an Internet-based matched-text detection program, was used to support academic writing instruction and help socialize learners into an American academic discourse community.

This chapter offers a general survey of how harps and lyres were used as poetic instruments as well as how they were referenced in modernist poetry. Harps and lyres were foundational to poetic composition in the laments and praise songs King David played with a harp resembling a begena, just as poets of the Ur dynasty had done before him. The oral tradition of accompanying poems with music from a harp or lyre ranged widely geographically from the China of Confucius to the skolias or banquet songs of ancient Greece. Harps and lyres continued to be in common use by Europe’s medieval troubadours. The very objects, harps and lyres have come to signify poetic tradition itself. As such, both words have been significantly used in the long tradition of English language poetry, and they have also been involved in war and war poetry. This chapter provides poetic examples showing the presence of harps and lyres in modernist poems, including the masculine and feminine modernisms of Britain and the United States (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Sitwell, H.D., Moore, Millay, Auden and MacNeice) as well as African American modernisms.

Brown v. Board of Education established equality as a central commitment of American schools but launched more than a half century of debate over whether students from different racial, religious, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and other lines of difference must be taught in the same classrooms. Brown explicitly rejected state-ordered racial segregation, yet neither law nor practice has produced a norm of racially integrated classrooms. Courts restrict modest voluntary efforts to achieve racially mixed schools. Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort. Talk of this disappointing development dominated the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Instead of looking at the composition of schools and classrooms, policy-makers measure racial equality in American schooling by efforts to reduce racial differentials in student performance on achievement tests, and those efforts have yielded minimal success. Historians question whether the lawyers litigating Brown undermined social changes already in the works or so narrowed reforms to the focus on schools that they turned away from the pursuit of economic justice. Commentators have even questioned whether the Court’s decision itself ever produced real civil rights reform. Although Brown focused on racial equality, it also inspired social movements to pursue equal schooling beyond racial differences, and it yielded successful legal and policy changes addressing the treatment of students’ language, gender, disability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation. These developments are themselves still news, inadequately acknowledged and appreciated as another key legacy of Brown. Yet here, too, judges, legislators, school officials, experts, and parents disagree over whether and when equality calls for teaching together, in the same classrooms, students who are or who are perceived to be different from one another. Parents and educators have at times pushed for separate instruction and at times for instructing different students side by side. As the twenty-first century proceeds, equality in law and policy in the United States increasingly calls for mixing English-language learners with English-speaking students and disabled with non-disabled students, but students’ residential segregation and school assignments often produce schools and classrooms divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.