Assignment: Textual Research

For English 295, 296, and 297

Professor Bob Broad, Department of English, Illinois State University

Rationale for and orientation to this assignment

Reading and writing textual research offers teachers several benefits.

• Reading, conducting, writing, and publishing textual research (i.e., research that takes professional books and journal articles as its primary data for analysis) makes teachers better informed and more reflective about their teaching practices.  Being better informed and more reflective, in turn, enables teachers to make more professional decisions about how best to teach and also enables them to persuade their colleagues, administrators, students, and parents of the benefits of the teacher's practices.  
  
• Reading and writing research makes teachers part of a professional community, ameliorating the chronic sense of isolation that plagues most teaching careers and providing crucial support for bold, innovative, excellent teaching.  

Guidelines and requirements for your Textual Research

1. Purpose. Your textual research should provide your readers with useful, compelling, and fresh information and ideas about teaching secondary or middle-school English.  The best textual research changes readers' teaching practices for the better.  
   
2. Audience and Forum.  Your textual research may be included in the sourcebook we will publish at the end of the semester. People who will likely buy and use that book include prospective, new, and experienced teachers of secondary English.  If we publish our book on the worldwide web, anyone in the world might read it.  
   
3. Topic:  You have wide leeway in choosing, developing, and refining the topic of your textual research.  Taking into account your knowledge and experiences as a teaching candidate, develop a question that you and your colleagues need answered or a problem they need solved.  Then conduct and write your research to help answer the question or to help solve the problem.  The content of your textual research must fit the course for which you are conducting it.  For English 296, focus on  teaching literature. For English 297, research the  teaching of writing.  In English 295, you may inquire into either composition or literature, or both.  
   
4. Length:  If you take your textual research "all the way" (i.e., to the "published" level of revision; see "Three Levels of Revision for Major Projects"), it should end up as a 2000- to 3000- word article (about 8 to 10 pages of text, plus a Works Cited section and any appendixes, etc.).  
   
5. Give your article a catchy and informative (and maybe provocative) title.  In the opening paragraph(s), introduce your readers to your topic and your research question or problem.  Make your article's opening brisk and engaging.  Show your that you know what has already been presented in the professional literature on your topic and question/problem.  Then, most important, provide your readers with fresh insights, questions, ideas, and/or teaching suggestions related to your research topic/question/problem.  Conclude your inquiry with observations or reflections that build on and extend the thinking you did in the main part of your article.  
   
6. Include a Works Cited section to document your sources and to help your readers find your sources.  Use MLA style (Gibaldi, Joseph.  MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  5th ed.  New York: MLA, 1999.)