Mission
The mission of the English Department at California State University, Sacramento, is quite close to this traditional but ever evolving and expanding model. As such, and in keeping with its disciplinary functions within a large "comprehensive university," the Department has developed over the years into a very elaborate organism with a complex range of diverse yet dynamically interrelated programs, the overall size of which rivals some entire colleges. The English Department services over 11,000 students annually, including well over 500 hundred matriculating undergraduate majors (an increase of almost 14% since the last Self Study) and 200 graduate majors, in roughly 475 classes. It has nearly a hundred faculty: 30 full-time faculty, 10 FERPing (Faculty Early Retirement Program) faculty, 40 lecturers, and 17 graduate Teaching Associates). It offers a Bachelor, Master of Arts in English, and Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) degree, besides a Minor in English, an English Subject Matter Preparation Program, and Certificates in Teaching Composition and Advanced Study in TESOL. The Department further performs various service functions, particularly in offering composition courses in English as a Second Language, Basic Writing, College Composition, and the relatively new Second Semester Writing Requirement, English 20. The English Department also offers a variety of General Education courses, notably in Areas A (Basic Subjects), C (The Arts and Humanities), E (Understanding Personal Development/Race and Ethnicity in American Society) and in Advanced Study. On campus, English coordinates the Writing Center, which services the entire University; it houses a walk-in computer lab for the campus community plus a new, state-of-the-art computer classroom and administers the Writing Proficiency Exam (WPE), which serves as the University's Graduate Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR). Further, English is vitally involved with the University's Festival of the Arts program each spring. Besides coordinating college-credit sections of English 40AB and 50AB at El Dorado High School through the ACE Program, the Department also administers a growing off-campus internship program with public and private employers like Intel. Finally, it coordinates an Internship in Tutoring English program with local community colleges and has recently begun a Pre-collegiate Partnership Program with designated local high schools in an effort to align their academic writing goals with those at CSUS.
Mission Statement
The English Department of California State University, Sacramento, is a community of teachers, scholars, writers, and support staff whose primary mission is to promote learning in composition, creative writing, English education, linguistics, literature, and the teaching of English as a second language. The department seeks to help students acquire knowledge, develop skills, and realize their own intellectual and creative goals. At the undergraduate and graduate levels, the English Department presents a broad and balanced curriculum designed to develop the reading and writing skills, the interpretative abilities, and the cultural awareness of its students by maintaining and enhancing a tradition of strong teaching, solid scholarship, and vigorous support of creative literary activity. Graduates of the department are well equipped to enter advanced degree programs and to pursue careers in teaching, law, publishing, the arts, and other areas in which the ability to read and write the English language effectively is paramount.
