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Program Mission Statement

To further ÀÏ°ÄÃÅ×ÊÁÏ's pedagogical mission, the Department of English offers students opportunities (1) to learn how to read critically (to analyze, criticize, evaluate, and appreciate) canonical and non-canonical works of British, American, and other national literatures as well as a range of non-literary cultural artifacts (film and digital works, for example, and written versions of oral narratives); (2) to learn different methods of and approaches to understanding such texts; (3) to formulate critical questions appropriate to different kinds of texts and to explain the strengths and limits of such questions; (4) to learn both basic and advanced rhetorical and compositional concepts, to recognize and accurately assess the level of technical and stylistic skill in evidence in other people's writing, to produce skillful writing in a range of discipline-specific genres and for a range of specific audiences, and to accurately self-assess one's own level of compositional skill and rhetorical success.

To these ends the Department offers a General Education writing curriculum, an upper-division curriculum (which includes an English major, a drama track, and minors in American literature, British literature, creative writing, drama, film Literature, in Literature in/as Performance, and Writing Studies), and a Master of Arts graduate program (MA in English), with the option of a certificate track in Rhetoric and Composition.

To further the professional study of literature in particular and of the liberal arts in general in relation to the on-going formation and transformation of culture, the Department of English is committed to promoting the faculty's scholarly and creative work and the free pursuit and dissemination of that work.

Finally, to further the overarching aims, purposes, and concerns of the academy, the Department of English seeks to abide by the principles of democracy and equity that must superintend the work of higher education.

Student Learning Outcomes

Graduates will be able to:

Content/Discipline-Specific Knowledge/Skills

demonstrate understanding of key course terms and concepts.

Communication Skills

1. formulate thesis statements that summarize complex, analytic arguments;
2. formulate topic sentences that develop thesis statements;
3. write clear sentences;
4. write coherent paragraphs;
5. write without committing common grammatical and stylistic errors; and
6. accurately employ the citation, formatting, and stylistic conventions of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Critical Thinking Skills

• Students will be able to formulate thesis-driven analyses.
• formulate, develop, and marshal evidence in support of complex analytic arguments and in investigating their implications.

Assessment Approaches

The department directly assesses the learning students demonstrate on tests and term papers for the student learning outcomes in each category, using rubrics, holistic grading, and objective testing.