Department of English Language and Literature

Student Learning Outcomes

Students graduating with a Bachelor's Degree in English Language and Literature should demonstrate competency in six categories (based on Bloom's Taxonomic Theory).

  1. in the category of knowledge, ability to recognize literary form, genre, and structure and to recognize historical literary periods and their characteristics
  2. in the category of comprehension, ability to discuss literary texts from various theoretical and critical perspectives, formulate ideas and connections between literary concepts and themes
  3. in the category of application, ability to recognize canonical authors and text; recognize race, gender, and class issues with respect to canon; and recognize differences between aesthetic and cultural concerns; for Creative Writing: the ability to recognize competent creative work in the genres of poetry, essay and fiction
  4. in the category of analysis, ability to demonstrate command of literary terminology and methodology, construct complex arguments, formulate hypotheses and thesis sentences to validate arguments; for Creative Writing: the ability to write persuasively about creative work, and offer constructive critiques
  5. in the category of synthesis, ability to employ interpretive strategies –e.g. to perform exegesis, to show relations between form and content, to parse connections among individual words with respect to emotional connotations and denotative significance, and to construct arguments about the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual relations among literary components of individual texts; for Creative Writing: the ability to apply critique to one's own creative work
  6. in the category of evaluation, ability to write short essays, impromptu essays, and long research papers, showing knowledge of conventional rhetorical strategies; for creative writing, ability to write competent creative work in one or more genres
Last Updated: 6/27/22