Teaching English

A Handbook for Primary and Secondary School Teachers

Andrew Goodwyn, Jane Branson, Andrew Goodwyn, Jane Branson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134310340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to teaching English in primary and secondary schools. It brings together the latest standards with authoritative guidance, ensuring that readers feel confident about how to approach their teaching. It explores the context of the subject of English and brings readers up-to-date with key developments, placing the English curriculum in the context of whole school literacy issues.

It introduces readers to key areas such as:

• planning and classroom management
• assessment, recording and reporting
• information and communication technology
• equal opportunities, special needs and differentiation
• English/literacy and whole school issues
• personal and professional early career development.

This practical book gives new English teachers a solid and dependable introduction to teaching the subject. Many of the contributors are practising classroom teachers with enormous experience to draw on. The book is grounded in the realities of teaching and offers practical and relevant advice as well as plenty of ideas to stimulate thinking and teaching.

1
The subject of English Putting English in
perspective

Andrew Goodwyn

Introduction

Everyone agrees that the subject ‘English’ is vitally important and typically it is described as the most important of all school subjects, principally because reading, writing, speaking and listening are needed to a greater or lesser degree in every other school subject, and for adult life. However, that is as far as the agreement goes; even attempting a simple, consensual definition proves extremely difficult. English is also the most consistently controversial and debated subject. It might be argued that English is the subject that many interested parties would most like to control. The history of English is simply a history of constant change. Inevitably, this makes teaching it a special kind of challenge, but it also imbues the subject with energy and excitement. All subjects have their debates and passions but English seems to have the most, and they are very often unusually public and attract plenty of media attention. As media attention is almost inevitably negative, the public perception of English nationally can be that children cannot spell, produce a decent paragraph or even conduct a reasonable conversation; at the same time parents, i.e. members of that ‘public’, will tell you that their children have received excellent English teaching at the local school. This issue of perception will be further discussed in the chapter dealing with professionalism. If you want a quiet life, perhaps you should teach a different subject.

This chapter will provide some more context for these opening remarks, including a brief history of the subject, and it will engage more fully with the issue of definition. There is an extensive range of books providing insights into the development of the subject and a selection of these are listed in the references at the end of the book.

‘What’s in a name’?

Even the word ‘English’ is an issue. English is, after all, essentially a language. However, it is not just spoken by the people who call themselves the English. The first confusion is that even these people may call themselves British and the second is that English is the first language of many other people. In a rapidly changing world, it is the second or third language of a vast number of people and also the basic mode of communication in many of the key discourses that the world relies on to make things work—air traffic control being a neat example. The most salient point for the teacher of English in the United Kingdom, and very particularly in England, is that the great majority of pupils (and their parents) are almost pathologically monolingual. Why should we learn a foreign language, they all say, when everyone everywhere speaks English?

For the teacher of the mother tongue this is a significant issue. Our colleagues in modern languages will tell you emphatically how hard it is to teach pupils another language, partly because of this negative attitude but also because children may lack a language with which to talk about language: this might be called grammatical vocabulary or perhaps a meta-language. We do have pupils who are bi- or even tri-lingual but in British schools they often hide this capacity. This inaccurate problematising of bilingualism has often led to children for whom English is their second language being treated as if they have special educational needs rather than special linguistic needs and abilities. English must be viewed, therefore, as to some extent a dominating language, and pupils can be encouraged by the culture they inhabit to see this as somehow natural and right. English teachers see it as fundamentally important to challenge these assumptions.

Task 1.1 Theory task

What is your linguistic capacity? Do you bring to teaching English an understanding of any other languages? Have your travels given you insights into other cultures and the way they use language, possibly including English? What about ‘American English’ that pupils experience so much of via the media? Write a brief evaluation of your knowledge about language.

If English has many global varieties, then this diversity is matched within regions and even districts. George Bernard Shaw famously remarked in his preface to Pygmalion, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate or despise him.’ This statement was written in 1916 and neatly reveals its pre-feminism in the assumptions displayed in the confident use of ‘man’; we will consider gender issues more fully later in the chapter. Shaw was getting at the notion of accent and linking it to social class and probably to regional prejudices. Despite almost a century of education since and also a far greater acceptance of accentual diversity—television and radio being the key indicators in this respect—there is still plenty of prejudice about the way people speak English. For example, what exactly is the Queen’s English and who speaks it?

One purpose of the subject English therefore does fit the name—i.e. to teach the language as an entitlement to all pupils whether or not it is their first or second language. This purpose is not a narrow one, however. If it were, then it might only involve teaching the ‘mechanics’, i.e. spelling, grammar and punctuation. One controversy over the subject is how central this narrow purpose should be, as the history of the subject reveals (see below). However, most practising teachers are engaged in a broader purpose, as is borne out to some extent in current formal definitions of the subject, i.e. the National Curriculum and the Framework for English. These documents require pupils to have an understanding of the history of language per se, i.e. a more detailed grasp of the development of English as a national and also international language. Included within this would be the varieties of English down to the level of local accent and dialect. This local focus emphasises that language and identity are bound up inextricably. Each pupil belongs to several language communities simultaneously but retains an idiolect, i.e. a unique individual linguistic repertoire.

Task 1.2 Theory task

You will be a ‘role model’ when teaching English, whether or not you like that idea. What does your accent ‘reveal’ about your linguistic history? What has influenced the way you speak? Jot down a few key points about your language history and also reflect on your current linguistic knowledge. How ready are you to teach English as a language?

Teaching English from a linguistic perspective is an exciting and complex challenge. It suggests that all primary teachers and all secondary English teachers would do well to take linguistics at an advanced level, perhaps even as a complete degree. However, this is simply not the case. Although there has been some increase in people entering the profession with some level of linguistic qualification, the great majority of secondary teachers and primary English specialists choose English because of their love of and passion for literature; these are the emotive words constantly used by interviewees explaining their motives for wanting to teach English. Many further define themselves as having always loved reading. The possession of a degree in English can mean many different things, but for most graduates it means the almost exclusive study of literature, a great deal of it English Literature. Embedded within this study is the notion of literary criticism. One important perspective on this is that the highest form of English can be conceptualised as the interpretation of literary texts expressed in the traditional argumentative essay form. The majority of Year 12 and 13 students of English are still very much engaged in that activity. To express this deliberately simplistically, they spend most of their time reading books and discussing them, then are assessed almost exclusively in one very specialised form of writing. It is important to reflect on what a very narrow version of English this represents. Also, it is important to note here that this narrow focus helps to explain the rapid rise in popularity of advanced level English Language, Media Studies (very often taught by English teachers) and of syllabuses that combine language and literature.

These post-16 students have chosen English, so they might well be expected to have a love of reading. It is important to note here that many pupils select English as their third or fourth choice and that only a minority in most A level groups are considering taking English at university. What is more important for the beginning teacher of English, at whatever Key Stage, is to recognise that literature teaching forms a key part of the job. If this seems too obvious, it is time for a pause for thought.

All children are taught to read. A few learn easily at home even before school but most become independent readers within two or three years of primary schooling. Huge problems lie ahead for those who do not achieve this competence, and that is another story taken up elsewhere in this book. It could be argued that after this it should be up to children to decide whether they wish to read any more fiction or poetry. These texts were not intended by their authors to be studied in school, so why do we insist (because we do) that pupils will read them in class and, as they get older, study them? The rationale for including literature in study goes back at least to the Greeks and reminds us that the tradition of the classics (great works) is embedded in the name of that theme as a subject, i.e. Classics—itself the focus of the education of gentlemen in English schools for several centuries.

At this stage it is enough to say that all English teachers will teach literary texts and the definition adopted here is that a literary text has an aesthetic dimension and was typically written to be read for its own sake, i.e. not, for example, to help you mend the washing machine more efficiently. It is also vital to stress that many English teachers see this as the real heart of the subject and a source of their own satisfaction and enjoyment. There is nothing natural about including literary texts in the subject named after the mother tongue; it is a very particular choice and by no means makes sense to all pupils, some of whom detest reading fiction, and poetry in particular. They need convincing, especially as they get older.

No current English teacher is likely to argue that pupils should only read literary texts, and both the National Curriculum and Framework for English emphasise the need to encounter a broad range of texts, including all the key genres from non-fiction and media texts (see Chapter 6). Thus pupils in English can encounter almost any kind of text from a chocolate bar wrapper to Romeo and Juliet. One of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching English can be engaging with this great variety of text types and helping pupils to understand them and often to create their own. This focus on texts—the term ‘text’ being almost neutral—is probably the most consensual area of English and might lead to it being defined as ‘Textual Studies’ without much controversy. However, capital L, Literature, is, as suggested above, a distinctive and powerful element within English often associated with the notion of cultural heritage (discussed more fully below). Such an approach inevitably treats texts in terms of perceived value and relies on a notion of the canon—something still clearly reflected in A level syllabuses and the simple fact that every child is tested on Shakespeare at the age of 14.

Again, to many readers, all this may seem the norm. However, many practising teachers might well feel very happy with all pupils, regardless of ability, benefiting from an engagement with Shakespeare but very few want children tested in the current mode, and they strongly object to the teaching to the test style that often entraps them. In other words, most English teachers develop many strategies for teaching all kinds of texts, including some of the great texts of the canon, but they have many reservations about residual elements of elitism ossified in the assessment system.

This mention of Shakespeare leads into another key area of English. Just as most authors never wrote for school, so Shakespeare wrote for performance not for reading. Again, from the pupils’ perspective, why on earth read Shakespeare, why not watch him on stage or screen? One partial answer is small ‘d’ drama. The subject Drama is not part of the National Curriculum and not all schools offer it as a discrete subject. The National Curriculum requires English teachers both to teach play texts and to use drama in their repertoire of teaching strategies (see Chapter 5). The simple point to make here is that English teachers need to think about using drama techniques, partly to make reading plays more like Drama, but also to make use of drama as an active and creative element in their work.

Perhaps the other consensual part of English is the general agreement about the fundamental importance of speaking and listening, although it is worth reflecting here that in historical terms this is a recent development (see below). The emphasis on drama is partly linked to the need to create speaking and listening opportunities for pupils, role play being an excellent example. Pupils can experiment with language and use their bodies to aid expression and communication. They can try out the language of Shakespeare as he intended it, as an embodiment. English teachers are therefore partly drama teachers, and it must be said that for some a lack of experience and training may make this a relative weakness.

Task 1.3 Theory task

For some, teaching Drama is a worry because it means a loss of ‘class control’. There are real gains for pupils, although some do find Drama difficult From the pupils’ viewpoint, list the pros and cons of doing some Drama in English.

One positive reason you may have included is that Drama is active. This is important because English can seem very inactive as much time might be spent reading, listening to the teacher talk or read, or writing. We all know that writing is a slow, time-consuming process and, because of the concentration it requires, physically tiring. One of the consistent features of good English teachers is their use of variety, and their ability to read the classroom for signs of restiveness if a task is beginning to lose its effectiveness.

But inevitably there is a lot of sitting down in English and never more so than in the last of the four language modes, namely writing. Everyone is agreed that all adults must have good communication skills, but in the age of the phone and the text message it is perhaps harder to convince all young people that traditional writing is so fundamental. Some of these issues will be explored more fully in the chapter on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in English. However, at this point it must be stressed that although ICT would seem to offer wonderful opportunities for English teachers and their pupils, the reality is rather different. Most schools still lack the required resources and the Framework for English is still very print-based in quite a nineteenth-century mode. As almost all assessments must be handwritten, pupils must learn to write in pen and paper mode. Many find this aspect of English the most demanding and unrewarding.

It is worth reflecting once more on what brings people into the profession—typically the love of reading, not writing. Whatever degree the beginning teacher of English has taken, it is almost a certainty that it has involved writing many, many essays and not a single other genre—no stories, poems or plays, for example. So teaching writing is also a very new and also different demand for the beginning English teacher. That teacher will be an excellent role model as a reader—fluent, confident and knowledgeable, able to read aloud with feeling and style. But what about modelling writing? If the pupils are asked to write a poem, should the teacher produce one too? This may depend somewhat on your own implicit view of writing. Is it a craft, made up of teachable skills? Or is it about inspiration, an innate ability that can be unlocked by the right opportunity? Most English teachers consider it a bit of both and teach accordingly.

This point leads us to a brief review of the subject’s development, because one element that unites English teachers is the concern with the person and the personal. For example, they would certainly suggest that writing poetry is worth doing for all pupils, particularly as a means of personal expression. In working towards a description of contemporary English, this focus on the personal will form a key theme.

The origins of English

Beginning teachers are typically very enthusiastic to get on with the job, and rightly so. However, at that moment of their beginning, the subject itself is simply at a particular point in its ongoing evolution and it is vital to understand what has shaped and influenced it. The earlier point, that teaching literature is a very particular choice and not just common sense, is a helpful reminder about subject history. It can be argued that English, more than any other subject, requires teachers who have a genuine perspective on the current definition of the subject and a sense of how that definition has been derived. This particular overview will necessarily be brief and will focus on key influences that are still important. It will also be slightly more detailed from 1989, the year in which the National Curriculum was introduced.

English essentially replaced Classics during the course of the nineteenth century and by early in the twentieth century it was established as a degree subject in several major universities. This is important because it shows how recent, compared to, say, Mathematics, its appearance has been and equally because it inherited from Classics the mantle of cultural heritage. It partly explains the invention of English, capital L, Literature in the early part of the twentieth century. So English came into being at the time of the empire with all of the associated imperialistic and nationalistic baggage of that period. Its first great crisis came as a result of the traumas of the First World War, leading to the first of many reviews of the subject, the Newbolt Report of 1920. If this seems like ancient history, the report makes very intriguing reading, containing many statements that seem current as well as those that no longer pertain. It may raise a smile to know that employers were even then complaining that school leavers were deficient in writing, and spelling in particular. Newbolt is important also because it set the model for many such reviews, i.e. the setting up of a committee of selected worthies, may of whom were writers rather than educators. Newbolt himself was a very minor poet. A member of the committee, George Sansom, produced his view of the fundamental importance of the subject in his book English for the English, in which he made it clear that this new subject was needed absolutely to bind a war-torn country, and to unite the divided classes through their joint and glorious national heritage in their common language and literature. These kinds of argument for what English should be about are always reappearing and again are important in reminding us that many see the subject as an issue of national unity, implying therefore that appreciation, not critique, should be at its heart.

In the 1930s, the idea of the great tradition of English Literature was taken up by F.R.Leavis. He drew on the work of others, notably I.A.Richards, who had invented practical criticism as a way of reading, and Leavis reconfigured English as essentially about the study of English Literature. For Leavis and his many followers, English was a stern moral enterprise. Only by truly close reading of the great texts could we hope to be saved from the vulgarities of modern life, Hollywood in particular. He pursued this theme in books and articles and in his journal, Scrutiny, for over 40 years, directly influencing several generations of teachers. It was this influence that led Margaret Mathieson, writing in the early 1970s, to dub English teachers ‘the preachers of culture’, the evangelicals of literature. Here is a direct link to contemporary English in that much vaunted love of reading and in the selection of texts in the National Curriculum and at A level.

The 1960s and 1970s brought on a counter-revolution of equal force. Leavis’ model was fundamentally elitist. He utterly despised popular culture and believed that there would only ever be a minority who could keep the flame of culture burning; this tended to exclude most of the population. In the radical and democratic times of the 1960s and 1970s, all of this was challenged. With the introduction of the comprehensive school and the raising of the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• 1. The subject of English: Putting English in perspective
• 2. The English curriculum and the Literacy Strategy
• 3. Planning teaching and learning in English
• 4. Assessment, recording and reporting
• 5. The role of Drama
• 6. The role of Media Education
• 7. Information and Communications Technology
• 8. Inclusion, special needs and differentiation
• 9. Professionalism and accountability
• 10. Literacy: wholeschool issues and the role of the English specialist
• 11. Personal and professional early career development
• 12. The future of English
• References
• Index