Department of English CSU San Bernardino

Contact Information:
Elinore Partridge
Chair, Outcomes Assessment Committee
Tel: (909) 880-5842
Fax: (909) 880-7086
Email: lnopar@wiley.csusb.edu

Department of English
CSU San Bernardino

Mission Statement

The mission of the undergraduate English major is to acquaint students with a diverse range of literary texts and their cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts; to develop through literature, writing, and language courses their appreciation of and respect for human values; to introduce them to some of the principal critical and scholarly approaches to the study of literature; to make them aware of the structure and history of the English language; to help them develop the ability to read perceptively, think critically, and write effectively; and to guide those students interested in creative writing to a suitable level of skill.

The department expects all students graduating with a B.A. in English to meet the following GOALS:

1. To be familiar with the major writers, periods, and genres of English and American literature, and to be able to place important works and genres in their historical context.
2. To be able to analyze, interpret, and compare literary works, and to write about literature in a clear, coherent, literate way that demonstrates a high level of understanding both of a text's technical merits and of its emotional impact.
3. To know that literature can be studied in a variety of ways, and to be familiar with some of these critical approaches.
4. To have read some important works in non-western, ethnic, and womenÕs literatures that illustrate the diversity of literary studies and the interconnectedness of literary traditions.
5. To understand writing as process and, in their own writing, to demonstrate an awareness of audience, purpose, and various rhetorical forms as well as a high level of control of the conventions of standard written English.

To have some basic understanding of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of English and their development, as well as to be familiar with theories of sociolinguistics and language acquisition.