Issues in English Teaching

Jon Davison, John Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134624362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Issues in English Teaching invites primary and secondary teachers of English to engage in debates about key issues in subject teaching.
The issues discussed include:
*the increasingly centralised control of the curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy in the school teaching of English in England and Wales as a result of initiatives such as the National Literacy Strategy
*new technologies which are transforming pupils' lived experience of literacy or literacies
*the accelerating globalisation of English and the independence of other versions of English from English Standard English. A National Curriculum with a nationalist perspective on language, literacy and literature cannot fully accommodate English
*what has become 'naturalised' and 'normalised' in English teaching, and the educational and ideological reasons for this
*hierarchies that have been created in the curriculum and pedagogy, identifying who and what has been given low status, excluded or marginalised in the development of the current model of English.
Issues in English Teaching will stimulate student teachers, NQTs, language and literacy co-ordinators, classroom English teachers and aspiring or practising Heads of English, to reflect on the identity or the subject, the principles and policies which, have determined practice, and those which should influence future practice.

1 Reading Rights and Responsibilities

Eve Bearne and Gabrielle Cliff Hodges

Controversy about the teaching of reading has a long history, and throughout it there has been the assumption, at least the hope, that a panacea can be found that will make everything right…there is no one method, medium, approach, device or philosophy that holds the key to the process of reading. We believe that the knowledge does exist to improve the teaching of reading, but that it does not lie in the triumphant discovery, or re-discovery, of a particular formula …A glance at the past reveals the truth of this.

(DES, 1975)

What Rights and Whose Responsibilities?

The informed words of the Bullock Report, written a quarter of a century ago, are a reminder that current concerns about reading are part of a long history of debate. What is it about reading that so fires an emotional response in educators and politicians? Just as there is no easy answer to the teaching of reading, there is equally no slick summary of why debates rage so fiercely—in every generation it seems. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that satisfying or satisfactory reading does not just depend on the range of texts available to a particular age group, but on readers, contexts and communities. Since contexts for reading, the experience of readers and the communities they inhabit are not static, it is no wonder that the issues have to be regularly revisited. The fact that every age invents new types of text (see, for example, Alberto Manguel’s splendidly wide-ranging A History of Reading) is another consideration, and it becomes clear that teaching reading is still a hot issue because the precise nature of reading changes with time (Manguel, 1996).

This chapter explores what reading means for young people and their teachers, in particular their rights and responsibilities. Using examples from students in Key Stages 2 and 3, it asks some key questions such as what do teachers know and what can they find out about readers? How can teachers use what they know to develop fruitful ways of teaching reading?

However, there are some important matters of principle to get into the open before trying to deal with all the complex factors involved in teaching reading. In his wry and incisive book, Reads Like A Novel, Daniel Pennac (1994) offers the following as ‘rights’:

1 The right not to read

2 The right to skip pages

3 The right not to finish a book

4 The right to re-read

5 The right to read anything

6 The right to ‘bovarysme’ (that is, reading for the instant satisfaction of nothing but our feelings)

7 The right to read anywhere

8 The right to browse

9 The right to read out loud

10 The right to remain silent.

What emerges strongly is the right to be a committed reader, an individual making choices according to inclination as well as need. It would be good if we could make this our target for the nation’s children rather than ‘reaching Level 4 by the age of 11’! The cool prose of government documents cannot, of course, capture such fervent determination. However, it is not so much the wording of National Literacy Strategy or National Curriculum documents which deserves attention; the new text element that needs scrutiny is the format (with its attendant implications for teaching approaches). For example, the National Literacy Strategy presents a framework for teaching, which, together with its multiplicity of training materials, begins to look very like the kind of ‘triumphant discovery’ of one particular formula, precisely the approach against which the Bullock Report cautions us. Teachers are having to make space within the framework to meet the needs of individual students’ development, interests and preferences. Is space also available for students to exercise their right to choose?

The principle of fostering avid, committed and critical readers can only be realised in practice if students are motivated. If students are not motivated to read, then they will not engage in the breadth and depth of reading necessary for that development to take place. Jerome Bruner’s analysis of what he calls ‘the will to learn’, although written over thirty years ago (Bruner, 1966), provides some valuable pointers to anyone teaching reading. Motivation, says Bruner, is fuelled by the satisfaction of curiosity. Experienced readers learn not just to decode text but also to satisfy curiosity through reading and to sustain their curiosity ‘beyond the moment’s vividness’. They learn, if given the opportunity, how to channel their curiosity actively to accomplish their own ends, not just passively to meet the demands of others. Bruner goes on to explore another intrinsic element of motivation, namely ‘the drive to achieve competence’. Most people know, if given the chance to experience it, the pleasures that can be derived from a sense of achievement. Furthermore, ‘we get interested in what we get good at’. However, for pleasure and interest to be sustained we need ultimately to master things for their own sake rather than for extrinsic rewards. A third point about motivation, crucial for teachers of reading, is the power of role models, in reading as in so much else. What Bruner means by ‘role model’ is ‘a day-to-day working model with whom to interact’ (our italics). Teachers are very well placed to interact with less-experienced readers, not so much because they offer behaviours for students to imitate, but because they are more experienced readers with whom students can engage in dialogues about reading: dialogues which they later learn to internalise.

Burner’s analysis is predominantly sociocultural. It reminds us how important reading is to our concept of what it means to be human. Reading is therefore inevitably political. Being political implies enfranchisement and the right to vote; it also means that the voter carries responsibilities to the community. It follows, then, that if reading is politically situated and a political act, then readers—teachers and students—have both rights and responsibilities. A recent report by an Advisory Group on Citizenship, entitled Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (QCA 1998b), reinforces this view, linking the twinned concepts of rights and responsibilities with skills and aptitudes such as the ‘ability to use modern media and technology critically to gather information’ and the ‘ability to recognise forms of manipulation and persuasion’. The more experienced members of a community are those who carry the responsibilities until the younger ones can take full status, so this chapter will give weight to teachers’ responsibilities and younger readers’ rights, suggesting ways in which these gradually move towards a more equal distribution of each. Since this is a chapter about teaching reading, and about what it is to become a reader, it will also be important to look at how success as a reader can be measured. Just what kinds of assessments are most likely to provide useful information for all members of the ‘voting’ community—for readers, families, educators and employers—about standards of reading?

Reading Experience and Experiences

One of the most significant shifts in thinking about reading over recent years has been not just the acknowledgement, but the value, given to reading and prereading experiences in homes and communities. The greatest emphasis in this area, however, has been given to the early stages of reading. The later years of Key Stage 2 and the early secondary years do not figure as much in discussion of how to teach reading, or in this case of how to build on the experience and experiences of young, already fairly fluent, readers. This lack of attention to older readers reflects a view of reading which measures successful reading according to how well young readers can decode the words on the page and demonstrate this by reading aloud. In its worst manifestation, the idea is that once children can decode and read aloud fluently, then we don’t need to teach them any more about reading. Nothing could be further from the truth. Surface-skating the text is potentially more harmful to a young reader than still having problems in articulating complicated text. If you are struggling with a text, you have to be engaged with it in some sense. But if you glide over its surface you never have to get to grips with it at all. Margaret Meek describes her unease about those who ‘decontextualise reading in order to describe it’:

The reading experts, for all their understanding about ‘the reading process’ treat all text as the neutral substance on which the process works as if the reader did the same things with a poem, a timetable, a warning notice.

(Meek, 1988)

A full reading curriculum goes beyond this basic assumption, and considers the range of texts which a reader needs to tackle, alongside the range of reading processes and strategies which might help. It also takes into account the development of reading preferences and reading experience drawn from homes and communities.

There are many assumptions and prejudices about young people’s reading at home. Difficulties lie in how reading is being defined—both by students and by those who question them—and in methods of gathering information. For example, pupils are often reluctant to admit to certain types of reading— newspapers, comics, magazines, computer texts, television—because they think that these are not the kinds of things teachers want to hear about and don’t count as reading. If reading is much more broadly defined to include everything that students read within and outside the school, then the reality is usually complex and quite a shock.

For example, the responses of one Year 5/6 class in a Cambridge primary school to a questionnaire about home and school reading showed both boys and girls reading twice as much at home as they did in school. Another example involved information gathered from interviews carried out for a small-scale research project with six Year 7 students from a Cambridge secondary school (whose Ofsted report noted that ‘pupils do not usually read for pleasure or elect to tackle challenging texts’). The group was mixed ability and included three boys and three girls, for one of whom English was an additional language. For pleasure and interest they read Roald Dahl novels, film and TV tie-ins, e.g. The X-Files and Jurassic Park, series books such as Point Horror, Famous Five and Sweet Valley High, Horrible Histories, humorous poetry, joke books, wildlife books, comics, special interest magazines, local and national newspapers, novels, picture books (with younger siblings), encyclopaedias, books about computer programming, information and letters received from charities and clubs they belong to, CD-ROMs, the Internet, catalogues, and more besides. The EAL student also read letters, forms, and so on, for her mother who knew too little English to be able to do so for herself. Judging by this evidence, if we do not find out about, or pay attention to, the whole picture of young people’s reading, then our conclusions about their reading experiences, capabilities and the curriculum we provide for them are going to be simplistic and lacking in precision.

Information from a very large-scale survey directed by Christine Hall and Martin Coles adds to the complexity of the picture. Their Children’s Reading Choices project sought to replicate Frank Whitehead’s earlier study for the Schools Council, Children’s Reading Habits 10–16 (Whitehead et al., 1977). The survey’s findings not only support the view that young people, both boys and girls, read a wider variety of texts than we might suppose, but also that within those texts, especially magazines, they encounter an extensive range of genres: fiction, non-fiction and ‘faction’ (Hall and Coles, 1999).

When students note the television, video and computer reading they do, the range is equally diverse. Teachers, analysing the results of a survey carried out in their Essex secondary school, comment:

Over and over again pupils made comments like I watch TV for fiction and while no-one would want to advocate that this should mean we do not encourage reading of fiction we do need to expand our concept of reading so that we can teach pupils to be critical readers of all sorts of text—fiction, fact and the communications media.

(Spratt and Sturdy, 1998)

Forms of ‘cineliteracy’ play an increasingly important part in students’ reading and have significance not just for the content of the programmes, but particularly for the structures of the verbal and visual texts involved. While soaps depend on dialogue, news coverage combines commentary with analysis. Sitcoms use more visual and verbal humour and are often concise in their plot structures, while film plots cover wide ranges of space and time. The verbal and visual language of advertising and exquisite 30—second narratives offer yet more text experiences, which feed into other kinds of reading. The huge popularity of Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo and Juliet (even taking into account the Leonardo DiCaprio factor), which involves a sophisticated multiplicity of verbal and visual texts, provides evidence of the highly developed cineliteracy of most young people today. Building on the success of the film, as so many did, teachers acknowledged the value of linking the pleasures and interests of voluntary reading with the possibilities of studying Shakespeare’s plays in the classroom. Such a wide range of home experience of reading serves as a very strong platform for the reading demands of a varied curriculum.

Several questions for teachers arise from even the limited findings of the small-scale classroom research referred to above. How can teachers find out as precisely as possible what students read beyond the classroom, and how does this relate to their reading at school? How can teachers build on aspects of reading with which students already feel confident, and help them to learn more about the kinds of reading and texts with which they are not already familiar or confident? There are many possible answers to these questions, but one thing is absolutely cle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction
• 1. Reading rights and responsibilities
• 2. Can teachers empower pupils as writers?
• 3. (Re)Defining literacy: how can schools define literacy on their own terms, and create a school culture that reflects that definition?
• 4. The current status of oracy: a cause of (dis)satisfaction?
• 5. Drama sets you free—or does it?
• 6. What is(n’t) this subject called English?
• 7. ‘Correct’ or ‘appropriate’? Is it possible to resolve the debate about which should be promoted in the classroom?
• 8. Variation in English: looking at the language from the outside
• 9. Exploring other worlds: escaping linguistic parochialism
• 10. Student teachers and the experience of English: how do secondary student teachers view English and its possibilities?
• 11. The cultural politics of English teaching: what possibilities exist for English teachers to construct other approaches?
• 12. The canon: historical construction and contemporary challenges
• 13. How should critical theory inform English teaching?
• 14. What has sexuality got to do with English teaching?
• 15. Gender difference in achievement in English: a sign of the times?
• 16. Literacy and social class
• Bibliography
• Index