Talk:Handbook of English Language Standards

= What are English Language standards? =

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The Handbook of English Standards wikibook exists to provide distributed authorship of standards--compiling and categorizing them for teaching and learning English. This may be for English as a primary language or for English as an additional language. You are welcome to contribute to the English Standards wiki or to use this area to discuss the writing of the wiki.

Why wiki standards?
Wiki is completely open and distributed. The idea in creating this book is to encourage a plurality of approaches to standards and benchmarks. The word on the street is that the US government discontinued the standards project because of the plurality of viewpoints. A wikibook can allow for contribution without sponsorship beyond the wikibooks group. Can a wiki Handbook of English Language Standards succeed? What is success?

Who owns educational standards?
What do you think? A number of professional organizations and states have published their standards. Many states accredit schools and higher education institutions based on standards. Most (if not all) of these documents were created in committees or by task forces. Do you know who wrote the standards being mandated in your area of the world? If you could have contributed, how would you have done things differently?

Why standards at all?
The standards movement is critiqued from a variety of viewpoints. What help or hindrance are standards in the world of teaching and learning?

What viewpoints need to be represented?
Rather than beginning from existing standards documents, this wikibook has been organized to allow for a variety of viewpoints on what it means to learn and know. If you want to discuss a particular viewpoint, use this talk page (or add a viewpoint to the wikibook itself).