ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120088
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY B.W. TABOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
There is no specific call for first-grade readers, phonics or Faulkner. No demand for sentence diagramming or Dante.
Instead, a long-awaited report on national standards for English language instruction gives only general guidelines. It says, for example, that by the time they finish high school, American students should have read a ``wide range of literature'' and be able to communicate with a ``variety of audiences,'' using books and newspapers as well as computer data-bases.
They should be able to use a library and write and criticize texts. And even students who speak another language at home should be ``competent'' in English.
The new curriculum guidelines, released Tuesday in Washington after a long, somewhat stormy development, are the last voluntary guidelines for a major discipline to be made public.
English teachers, as well as employers and parents, have long complained that many high school graduates cannot read or write effectively, use poor grammar and have little knowledge of literature.
Consequently, the drive to develop national curriculum standards, which gathered steam during the Bush administration and has continued under President Clinton, is widely supported as a way of addressing such shortcomings.
``The key thing is that we use language in order to communicate and think,'' said Beverly Ann Chin, president of the National Council of Teachers of English, which developed the report along with the International Reading Association.
``We want all students to be able to use language effectively. This document furthers our vision of what literacy means. For example, in many classrooms today, children are on computers talking and e-mailing people around the world.''
The report does make some specific recommendations, including supporting bilingual education for non-English speakers, the study of both classics and contemporary literature and the need for students to be competent in ``standard English,'' which the report delicately refers to as ``this language of wider communication.''
Still, the report is surprisingly brief and general, offering none of the reading lists, benchmarks or preferred teaching methods that have been used in other subject areas.
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