Teaching English

Susan Brindley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000153217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

This book offers an opportunity to engage with the debates in English teaching and to explore the viewpoints of writers who have contributed to those debates. It provides invaluable introduction to the complexities of English to Novice English teachers.

Part I

An historical perspective

The historical perspective approaches the evolution of English and English teaching through three chapters. The first, ‘Shaping the image of an English teacher’ by Robert Protherough and Judith Atkinson, traces significant developments since the beginning of the century and links these to the ways in which teachers of English have been formed. Their interviews with teachers of English lead them to conclude that, as far as a definition of English teaching is concerned, ‘There is clearly no consensus here about what is to count as English’ (p. 14). The second chapter, taken from English Our English by John Marenbon, takes quite the opposite point of view. John Marenbon challenges what he calls the ‘new orthodoxy’ of English teaching, which, he says, ‘finds little value in grammatical correctness and has no place for literature as a heritage’ (p. 16). In this chapter Marenbon describes his view of what should constitute effective English teaching. First published in 1987 by the Centre for Policy Studies, this chapter predates the writing of the National Curriculum which in itself began to define English in particular ways. In 1992, the NCC (now part of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority) recommended a revision of the National Curriculum. In his letter of 15 July 1992 to the Secretary of State, John Patten, David Pascall, chair of NCC, wrote:

We have discussed the issues involved at great length and have concluded that there is a case for change to ensure that the Order provides the best basis for meeting the objectives of the Education Reform Act.

The NCC was commissioned in September 1992 by the Secretary of State John Patten to undertake that revision. David Pascall continued in his letter:

We intend … to develop the strengths of the current Order and we think that teachers will recognise that our advice is designed to secure the objectives which they rightly consider to be important.

Professor Brian Cox, chair of the English Working Party whose report formed the basis of the National Curriculum, replies to this statement in the third chapter, ‘The National Curriculum in English’. Brian Cox’s chapter represents an important perspective, since the NCC recommendations were not met with the response by teachers anticipated in David Pascall’s letter. Brian Cox argues that both the timing and the political dimension of the Orders give cause for concern. He foresees that ‘These conflicts will continue through the 1990s’.

Chapter 1

Shaping the image of an English teacher

Robert Protherough and Judith Atkinson

THE PRE-HISTORY OF ENGLISH TEACHING

For how long has there been a separate, identifiable group that could be called English teachers? Not very long, certainly. Before the turn of the century, there was no subject ‘English’ (in the sense of an acknowledged, unified field of study) for them to teach.¹ The regulations of the 1890s treated ‘English’ as concerned solely with parsing and analysis, quite separate from reading, composition and literature, which might all be in the hands of different teachers.² Years later in London’s elementary schools what we should consider English was still being divided and timetabled as nine separate ‘subjects’.³ Even while the subject was gaining wider acceptance in the early years of this century (made compulsory in state schools by the 1904 Regulations; its ‘claim to a definite place in the curriculum of every secondary school’ asserted by the Board of Education report of 1910) it is clear that the various English activities were not seen as the responsibility of one teacher. Indeed, that report had to argue strongly that literature and composition were not really separate subjects, and that it was ‘eminently desirable’ that the same teacher should be responsible for both.⁴

A decade later, the Historical Retrospect of the Newbolt Report opens by remarking that the subject has ‘scarcely any history’: ‘Of conscious and direct teaching of English the past affords little sign’.⁵ In the public and grammar schools, ‘English was not seriously considered as an educational subject’ (para. 105) and further up the educational hierarchy, ‘it is not too much to say that, till quite lately, English had no position at all in the Universities’ (191) and ‘the serious study of English Language and Literature is a comparatively new one’ (193).

Looking back, we can detect three overlapping phases resulting from universal compulsory education and the development of an increasingly specialised curriculum at secondary level. A concern for the discrete skills of English was slowly followed by the gradual establishing of English as a separate subject in the curriculum, and later still by the appointment of English teachers specifically responsible for it. As one significant study concluded, before the twentieth century ‘there were certainly very few teachers who could be called or would have called themselves teachers of English’.⁶

Even for the next twenty years, circumstances were such that very few would have chosen to describe themselves in such a way. ‘English’ activities had a low social status because over the centuries the teaching of functional literacy to the working class had been seen as unskilled labour, and the reading of English literature was only for girls (while their brothers studied the classics). More profoundly, though, who could have been given the title of English teacher? Teachers in elementary schools would not have thought of themselves in such a way, for they were to work as generalists across the whole curriculum. (In the same way today, although some primary teachers will have specialised in English and may have responsibility for curriculum leadership in that subject, few refer to themselves as English teachers.) The certificated teachers, who in any case made up less than a third of those in elementary schools,⁷ were trained in English grammar, reading, recitation, handwriting and English literature among the many other subjects to be ‘covered’ and examined, but there is no suggestion either of English as a single field of study or of teachers being specially trained for it. As late as 1929, English was just one of ten subjects to be included in training and when subject specialism did begin to appear, it was in other areas like physical education, music, art, woodwork and metalwork.⁸

At secondary level also, when the training of teachers began to expand after the 1902 Act, English was seen as a necessary qualification for entrants, but not as a subject for specialist training. Because the university degree was thought an adequate preparation, and training was regarded as socially demeaning, the absence of degree courses in English ensured both the low status of that subject in schools and the lack of qualified teachers to teach it. Such an inevitable correlation between English literature as a university subject and the training of teachers had been pointed out in the 1880s. Arguing for the establishment of the subject at Oxford as a way of disseminating it more widely, John Churton Collins wrote that its ability to fulfil that function ‘depends obviously on the training of its teachers, and the training of its teachers depends as obviously on the willingness or the unwillingness of the Universities to provide that training’.⁹

Because of the relative unwillingness of the universities to contemplate either English or education as academic subjects,¹⁰ it was not until the 1920s and later that graduate English teachers began to emerge in any numbers, and the subject was not regarded as a desirable or even necessary specialism in the public and grammar schools to which most graduates went. According to one headmaster, in 1918 English was viewed with ‘belittlement’, ‘distrust’ and ‘contempt’.¹¹ The same author (lamenting the ‘few and fumbling’ attempts of classics teachers to work with English literature) anticipated a future in which English graduates might take their place in schools, developing new methods, linking reading with writing ‘as the importance of their subject becomes more and more recognised’.¹² But that still lay ahead.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEWBOLT REPORT

We owe the modern concept of an English teacher, symbolically at least, to the publication of the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England, in 1921. By defining English in a quite new way, it created a climate in which English teaching as a specialised profession became inevitable. One simple way of suggesting its influence is to examine the number of texts published on English teaching at different periods. Whereas very few volumes with Teaching of English in their titles appeared in the first twenty years of this century, at least thirteen significant books so named were issued between 1921 and 1932.

In the report, ‘English’ was no longer used to describe a conglomerate of separate skills or a group of ‘English subjects’, but as a single, organic, all-embracing term for a unique, central school subject, requiring – by implication – special men and women to teach it. The particular concepts that animated the committee were by no means new,¹³ but the novelty lay in bringing together under the title of English, ‘taught as a fine art’, four separate concepts: the universal need for literacy as the core of the curriculum, the developmental importance of children’s self-expression, a belief in the power of English literature for moral and social improvement, and a concern for ‘the full development of mind and character’. The frontiers of the subject were thus pushed out to cover a whole range of mental, emotional, imaginative, moral and spiritual goals: ‘almost convertible with thought’, ‘a method’ as well as ‘a subject’ that ‘must have entry everywhere’ (para. 57).

This largely expedient and perhaps deliberately ambiguous map of the subject, colonising areas that had previously lain within other disciplines, has been enormously influential. After the sufferings and doubts of the First World War, English as a newly minted subject was invested with the resonance of ‘Englishness’, defined through the English language and supremely through the heritage of English literature. It was through a shared experience of English, said the report, drawing on Matthew Arnold, that the social class divisions of the country could be healed and a ‘national culture’ be established.¹⁴ The committee could hardly have foreseen that a series of debates and divisions lasting into the 1990s would centre on these interconnected definitions of English culture, of the literary heritage and of the teaching and learning of English. Henry Widdowson could justifiably complain in his note of reservation to the Kingman Report that ‘what English is on the curriculum for, is not really explored here with any rigour’.¹⁵

The Newbolt Report is thin on practical details about the kinds of teaching that might achieve its aims, or about the kinds of English teacher that might be needed. In proposing a quite new curricular framework, the committee had no existing tradition to draw on. A new sort of subject would demand new kinds of teachers to remedy the failings of the past and present and to bring about the aspirations for the future. The section headings repeatedly use words like neglect, problem, lack, difficulties, and misapprehensions. English should be ‘the only basis possible for a national education’ (para. 9), ‘the one indispensable preliminary and foundation of all the rest’ which must ‘take precedence of all other branches of learning’ (6), ‘the essential basis of a liberal education for all English people’ (13). By contrast with this ideal, however, the members of the committee said that what they found in actuality was ‘an altogether inadequate recognition of the place of English in an Englishman’s education’ (para. 191, echoing 1), caused by a failure to establish the subject as important in schools and universities and by the parallel failure to attract and train teachers for it.

The laudable ambitions for English as a subject depended – as the committee realised – on the provision of appropriately qualified teachers, but the report reveals a basic uncertainty about what those appropriate qualifications are, and indeed about what good English teaching might actually look like. The report admits that ‘the methods of teaching English have yet to be explored’ (para. 101), and adds that at secondary level, ‘probably the greatest obstacle to improvement hitherto has been the absence of a good tradition in the teaching of English’ (109). It quotes an Inspectors’ Memorandum on the ‘unfortunate’ truth that ‘methods of teaching English are so far little developed. They have been far less thought out than the methods of teaching some other subjects’ (117). Three years later, making the best of a bad job and referring vaguely to ‘the many difficult questions of method involved in the teaching of English’, the Board of Education remarked hopefully that at least ‘in developing his [sic] method the teacher of English has the advantage of being bound by no tradition’.¹⁶

Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see how several distinct but powerful strands of thinking came together in the 1920s to create a model of English teaching that was formative. In bold oversimplification we can detect three of these. First there was the missionary role of English, called on to confront the forces of industrialism and to counter the growing influence of the media. The recurrent images in the report were of people being starved while weeds flourished in the fields; of the power of literature to feed, to purify, to unify, to redeem. Margaret Mathieson has argued that in a time of crisis the functions traditionally attributed to religious faith were attached to a new and idealistic view of English teaching.¹⁷ This idea ran through the Newbolt Report, and was given celebrated expression in George Sampson’s claim that the purpose of education is ‘not to prepare children for their occupations, but to prepare children against their occupations’.¹⁸ Second, there was the Dewey-in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I An historical perspective
• Part II Speaking and listening
• Part III Reading
• Part IV Writing
• Part V Research
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on sources
• Index