Outside the box

The basic competence a translation education program aims at providing the students with is that of translation competence. Most translation studies scholars working in the field of translation education have declared four competences to be among the basic indispensable sub competences of “translation competence”; namely, cultural competence, critical reading competence, linguistic competence and critical thinking competence. One of the most effective ways of getting students to acquire these competences is including literature courses in the curricula. When the curricula of Applied English Translation Programs that provide associate degree translation education in Turkey are examined, it is seen that English Literature courses are offered in very few universities and vocational schools. In addition, translator candidates graduating from these associate degree programs can have the right to take the vertical transfer exam and receive undergraduate education in the departments of English Language and Literature, American Culture and Literature where they further specialise in such fields as literature and language. This is another reason why acquisition of literary competence may be one of the intended objectives of these programs. Within the framework of these discussions, drawing from the analysis and comparison of the concept of “translation competence” with the competences provided by literature courses, and the intended program outcomes of Applied English Translation Programs, this research aims at arguing that English literature courses are necessary and useful components of the curricula of these programs.

Publish or Perish? Re-Imagining the University Press

While critical thinking is one of the ultimate requirements for students and is integrated into assessment practices in higher education, there has not been a definitive view of what it means and how it can be achieved. This limitation challenges students when they neither recognize the need to demonstrate critical thinking nor successfully perform it. To reconceptualize critical thinking in higher education, this study emphasizes how critical thinking is defined, performed, and evaluated in an English Literature course in Vietnamese higher education. Following the analyses of the course documents, the students’ writing with the lecturer’s comments, and the interview with the lecturer, the study revealed the distinctive view of critical thinking in relation to the characteristics of the writing genre and the Literature discipline. For critical thinking being discipline-oriented and genre-based, successfully performing critical thinking was also found challenging to the students given their limited understanding of the lecturer’s conceptualization of critical thinking in this particular course. This study therefore suggests pedagogical implications to support the explication of this concept to students to improve their academic performances.

English literature as a traditional core course of English Language and Literature Major in Chinese colleges and universities has been more and more marginalized in recent years. This paper attempts to explore the possibility of changing the marginalized status of English literature course through discussing the application of blackboard platform and blog as two information technologies in the teaching and learning process. Through empirical research, it concludes that as a new application of information technology in education, teaching of English literature course in the context of blackboard platform and blog can inspire a series of reforms in teaching concepts, teaching mode, teaching contents and pedagogy, and revitalize the traditional course of the humanities by motivating the teacher's teaching initiative and student's learning interest and promoting their consciousness and ability of self-reflective teaching and autonomous learning.

line with the recent and ongoing technological changes in Saudi Arabia, which place greater emphasis on cinema and film adaptations, this study aimed to investigate the effect of incorporating films and visual media into literature courses on students’ understanding of and motivation towards literary texts. The participants were 41 fourth-level female students in the Department of English at Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia. The treatment group (n=21) read Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) and watched the adapted film, whereas the control group (n=20) was asked to only read the play and discuss it in class. The findings revealed that the treatment group performed better in terms of answering questions about play after watching the film adaptation. It is suggested that incorporating film adaptations into literature courses has a positive impact on English as a foreign language students’ understanding of assigned literary texts. This research adds a new case study to the expanding literature. Limitations and future research directions are discussed. KEYWORDS English language, literary texts, motivational tools, students’ comprehension, teaching methods, visual media

Using Elbow’s model of Expressivism and J. L. Austen’s notion of writing as performance, this paper outlines how performative pedagogies of creative writing practice at our university have transformed the creative writing programme. Giving examples from classes I teach, I examine the performative aspects of teaching creativity in first year courses, in collaborative writing workshops, in literature courses for creative writers, and in courses where literary theory is taught, and demonstrate how Creative Writing is taught as a perlocutionary utterance, meaningful only in its effects and contexts, a performative act that becomes itself only in the act of doing.

CLA JOURNAL 479 Pedagogy of Empowerment: Approaches to Teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Na’Imah Ford Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013) are texts that complement each other nicely in the Introduction to Literature classroom. Recently, Coates received the coveted MacArthur grant after publishing his third book, Between the World and Me. He has been likened to James Baldwin in his ability to construct poignant, provocative, socially conscious, beautifully written prose that eloquently slices through the deluded rhetoric surrounding race, class, and gender in contemporary American life and culture. Similarly, 2008 MacArthur fellowship recipient Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel Americanah (2013) is an insightful exploration of race, class, and gender within a transatlantic, African Diaspora context. I chose to use these authors in my Introduction to Literature course because Coates and Adichie can reach students through their usage of media platforms and shared cultural interests in ways that other authors within the academy simply cannot. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a comic book author and correspondent for The Atlantic magazine; additionally, he is fully immersed and vetted within the Hip-Hop community. Adichie, a novelist and activist, is ever-present on various social media platforms. With connections that range from Kendrick Lamar (hip-hop) to Beyoncé (R&B/Pop), these two writers affirm the premise of this collection of essays that investigates a movement from academic voices toward a more diverse faction to describe, define and articulate the concerns of black people throughout the African diaspora. Between the World and Me begs the question, “What is it like to live in a black body?” which rings eerily similar to questions James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison asked before him. Adichie’s work, on the other hand, asks students to contemplate blackness as it exists for other citizens of the African diaspora outside of the United States. Coupled, these writers explore what it is like to live in a black body, male and female, within a Diasporan context. Using these texts helps students examine how gender and race are connected within American society. Contrasting these two narratives was intentional. I wanted students to contemplate the intersections of race and gender coupled with how these two paradigms inform their own identity construction. Although many of them had trouble articulating their thoughts on these ideas through writing, they were transparent about how they felt, and they could articulate their viewpoints in meaningful discussions. 480 CLA JOURNAL Na’Imah Ford COURSE DYNAMICS The purpose of this article is to explore the successes, challenges, and points of revision for teaching these works. Most of my teaching responsibilities require me to teach freshman writing and Introduction to Literature (LIT 2110) courses for the English Department at Florida A&M University (FAMU). When I began teaching at the university, I was pleased with the level of freedom we had in choosing our own texts within the parameters of the goals and objectives outlined by the Department of English and the state of Florida. Because I did not get to teach many upper–level courses in my field, I decided to incorporate my research interests into the aforementioned classroom curriculum, and I have been very successful at using writers, text, and media from Postcolonial Studies to discuss traditional concepts. It is important to note here that I do not abandon other canonical works, but much of what the students read and study are from authors and artists who have a shared cultural experience. To produce pedagogy that empowers students is a lofty proclamation for any educator to profess. Nevertheless, it is one that I strive to create. Drawing from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), I try to create a classroom community where dialogue and the open exchange of ideas are commonplace. He affirms,“the banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality” (74). Freire describes the “banking concept” in education as: an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat...

The teaching of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Sun Yat-sen University in South China has its own particular characteristics. First, to my knowledge, this is one of the very first English Creative Writing courses taught by Mainland Chinese faculty to students for whom English is a second language. Another important factor is that the Creative Writing program at Sun Yat-sen has developed not only as a writing experience, but also as a context for counselling and therapy for students. The students taking these courses write from the experience of their own lives, and the workshops that are integral to the program have provided a context where students can share the experiences they write from. Students have come to regard the program as a safe space where they can share their experiences about growing up, as well as their personal relationships with family and friends. Teaching this course over the last year has led me to believe that Creative Writing not only serves to improve students’ writing ability, but may also provide an educational context that helps students share experiences, and enables them to grow as people.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) director, David Fenza, asserts, ‘Creative Writing classes have become among the most popular classes in the humanities’ and member undergraduate programs jumped from 155 in 1984 to 318 just twenty years later.1 The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs now lists 421 undergraduate programs.2 In addition, a recent report on ‘The Undergraduate English Major’ by the Association of Departments of English (ADE) mentions the addition of Creative Writing as one way that English departments have addressed the drop in percentage of English majors since the 1970s. This report claims, ‘there is at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that when Creative Writing is an option or track within English, it often contributes significantly to the success of the English major’.3 In ADE’s study, ‘Nearly half (49.3%) the chairs identified Creative Writing as second only to literature as the focus chosen by English majors.’4 We are now established as a discipline in universities and colleges and, to some extent, valued. The fear is that, in buying into the academy, we might sell out our art or craft.KeywordsUndergraduate ProgramCreative WriterEnglish DepartmentCreative PeopleTeaching CreativeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

University level second language (L2) creative writing courses are widespread around the world. However, little empirical research has been done to document teachers and students’ experiences with courses whose main focus is to develop students’ creativity. In response, this case study was conducted to explore how an English native-speaking (NS) creative writing teacher and non-English majors at a Taiwanese public university evaluated an elective L2 creative writing course through the investigation of the teachers’ language ideology, assessment strategies, and learning activities. Data included the course syllabus, the teacher’s and the students’ reflection reports, and the students’ L2 creative writing portfolios. Through qualitative content analysis, it was found that this creative writing course did focus on teaching creative writing skills. Despite the NS identity of the teacher, in resonance with the spirit of the world Englishes pedagogical paradigm, the notion of conforming to NS linguistic norms and accuracy was not introduced to students. Lecturing, sharing, and workshopping were found to be effective learning and assessment activities, while students experienced the most difficulty with keeping a creative writing journal. We argue that creativity should and can be pursued as the main objective in English creative writing courses even by NS teachers. Lastly, implications for research and pedagogy were considered.

This chapter presents a case study of two English literature courses (one graduate course taught in the Spring 2010 semester and one undergraduate course in the Fall 2011 semester) at Troy University's Dothan, AL, campus analyzing student engagement in relation to the learning environment. Both of these courses presented challenges in facilitating classroom discussion inhibited by the physical design of the learning space. To compensate for these physical limitations, both courses incorporated blended learning. One course was moved outdoors, thereby blending the traditional classroom with a non-traditional learning space, while the other incorporated a blended learning approach that used an online discussion board. Although such “relocations” of the learning space overcame initial barriers to student engagement and success, even the blended approach suggests that further research and investment in classroom design would improve student engagement in both traditional and blended classes by promoting dialogism in the classroom.

ABSTRACTUnlike all other major Anglophone points of comparison (e.g. USA, UK and Australia), Canada is disinterested in the national and global demand for doctoral programmes in Creative Writing. This paucity of PhD creative writing programmes is especially noticeable when Canada has the highest per capita undergraduate enrolment in the world, federal funding available for writing PhDs, and a low OECD ranking for the number of per capita PhDs. This illogical market denial stems in part from Canada’s preference for housing Creative Writing educations within English departments, who are hostile to creativity and living Canadian writers. Canada pays national economic, social, pedagogical and aesthetic consequences for its globally anomalous disinterest in Creative Writing doctoral programmes.

This study functioned as a digital literacy technique that aided in raising students' motivation and classroom dynamics in reviewing writing structure, terminologies, and related knowledge. This study investigated the effects of integrating questioning strategies with the game-based student response system (GSRS), Kahoot!, into English literature courses. Specifically, this study explored students' perception of Kahoot! on raising engagement and classroom dynamics while reviewing writing structure, terminologies, and knowledge in the EFL online classrooms. This research is based on the premise of intrinsic motivation and game flow. A total of 276 undergraduate learners were observed in the study, including 233 (154 female and 79 male) surveyed from two English language classrooms. Data that emerged within the EFL context shed light on how and when Kahoot! positively influences students' learning experiences, including boosting students' enthusiasm, encouraging inquisitiveness and contribution in identifying knowledge gaps, and understanding the subject matter. The study utilized a t-test and one-way ANOVA, which revealed that students have positive attitudes toward a game-based approach in English learning, suggesting that educational competitions in the classroom reduce interferences and cultivate the quality of teaching and learning beyond what is offered in traditional classrooms.

Abstract: I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on “Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional “rise of the novel” narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century’s changing relationship to commerce and exploration. Wollstonecraft’s travelogue is the final text in a syllabus that begins with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and continues with Phillis Wheatley’s poetry about ocean voyages and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Wollstonecraft’s account of traveling in Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is more concerned with the survival of the human species than the survival of the individual. But reading Wollstonecraft’s travelogue in a course on survival narratives primes students to understand how the material conditions of reading and writing—often taking place under extreme circumstances—shaped the literature being produced in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft’s meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own “travelogues” written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom. With classes online at the time due to COVID-19, many of my students drew on this lesson to discuss how a moment of crisis shaped their skills and experiences as writers.

Reviewed by: Coming of Age as a Poet Chris Beyers Vendler, Helen . 2003. Coming of Age as a Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $22.95 hc. 202 pp. T. S. Eliot once remarked that the apparent purpose of Arthur Symons's Studies of Elizabethan Drama was to "expose" the reader to a "faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own." Such, one gathers, is also the purpose of Helen Vendler's Coming of Age of a Poet, a book whose thesis is really just a circular argument meant to display Vendler's sensations. I would say that impressionistic criticism works very well if you happen to be Walter Pater, less well if you happen to be Arthur Symons, and not at all well if you happen to be Helen Vendler. Three fourths of Coming of Age as a Poet collects the James Murray Brown lectures Vendler gave at the University of Aberdeen in May, 2000. In delivering then publishing these lectures, she has accepted the mantle of public intellectual. To be sure, saying something that is simultaneously comprehensible to the "public" and really worth listening to is difficult—especially since the rise of literary theory, which more often than not introduces jargon and modes of interpretation that tend to make the world of literary criticism all the more insular. Still, there is a splendid tradition of writers who fulfilled the role admirably, headed, to my mind, by W. H. Auden, who wrote in a time no less dedicated to new jargon and radical methods of inquiry than our own. Vendler's response to the challenge of speaking directly to Educated Joe Public is to deliver what are essentially Introduction to Literature lectures on canonical writers' most canonical works. There is really nothing here for those of us with advanced degrees; I suspect bright Junior and Senior English majors will not find their knowledge extended very much by what is said here. Educated Joe will likely say to himself, "I don't see what Rush and George are complaining about—English literature courses haven't changed much since I took them forty years ago." Vendler purposes to consider the first "perfect" poem that John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath ever wrote. Oddly, "perfect" doesn't mean flawless—at one point, she asks if there is anything "wrong" with one of her perfect poems and then answers that there is (133). It turns out, a perfect [End Page 194] poem is that poem "which first succeeds in embodying a coherent, personal style" (1); it is characterized by "confidence, mastery, and above all ease." It is the poem for which "the poet comes of age as a poet to be reckoned with" (2). Such generalities can hardly be called criteria. They sound a lot like the abstractions of bad wine criticism. Her actual principle of selection is revealed when she adds that a perfect poem is "one that will become canonical within the poet's oeuvre: its imaginative powers are so characteristic and deep, and its characteristics so match them in ambition, that an anthologist or teacher is likely to choose it when illustrating the early work of an author" (2). It is bracing, in a way, to see such a bald endorsement of the canon, especially since so many of my colleagues seem to believe that a work's canonization automatically renders it ideologically suspect. Nonetheless, in this day and age it is astonishing that Vendler never even bothers to ask if her conception of the poet's "personality" is perhaps a product of the canon. Her subjective criteria allow her to discard and elevate works according to her whim, so any work which does not accord with what she considers the poet's true personality she can simply discount. And how can we tell what that true personality is? Why, by the person revealed in the four perfect poems. Such circular, a priori reasoning can hardly be called a compelling argument, but I do not believe Vendler truly believes her views can be contravened anyway. For the record, the perfect poems are Milton's...