Teachers and professors from Great Britain and from the United States gathered at the Dartmouth Conference in 1969 to ponder their differences in language instruction, especially in composition. This conference signaled the beginning of a movement to reform English education so that writing would be judged not strictly by whether or not it is correct English, but whether or not it communicates anything to an audience. During the 1970s the study of English in most U.S. schools was confined primarily to reading selected great works, then answering specific factual questions about those works on objective tests. As Fred Godshalk reported in A Survey of the Teaching of English in Secondary Schools, commissioned by the Educational Testing Service, "too many teachers seem to think that the ultimate end of instruction in literature is knowledge of and about Macbeth or Silas Marner, rather than...