Making Meaning in English

The Role of Knowledge in the English Curriculum

David Didau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000331554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

What is English as a school subject for? What does knowledge look like in English and what should be taught? Making Meaning in English examines the broader purpose and reasons for teaching English and explores what knowledge looks like in a subject concerned with judgement, interpretation and value.

David Didau argues that the content of English is best explored through distinct disciplinary lenses – metaphor, story, argument, pattern, grammar and context – and considers the knowledge that needs to be explicitly taught so students can recognise, transfer, build and extend their knowledge of English. He discusses the principles and tools we can use to make decisions about what to teach and offers a curriculum framework that draws these strands together to allow students to make sense of the knowledge they encounter.

If students are going to enjoy English as a subject and do well in it, they not only need to be knowledgeable, but understand how to use their knowledge to create meaning. This insightful text offers a practical way for teachers to construct a curriculum in which the mastery of English can be planned, taught and assessed.

1What is English for?

What does the study of English – both in universities and schools – seek to achieve? Why do people engage in linguistic research or literary criticism? Maybe we should start by asking why, in the ‘real world,’ people read and write? Here, reading is either for recreation or is a purely functional activity designed to extract information as efficiently as possible. Writing, though, is rarely a leisure pursuit. In the ‘real world’ – although there is a tiny class of professional writers almost no one earns a living through the proceeds of writing¹ – people only write for practical purposes: to inform, persuade, instruct or explain. Should teaching reflect these utilitarian ends?

Like many English teachers before and since, George Sampson, writing in 1922, thought not.

A very admirable, hard-working lady came one day to a London elementary school on Care Committee business, and found that the ‘leavers’ she wanted to interview had gone with their class to a performance of Twelfth Night. “Of course,” she said, quite pleasantly, “it is very nice for the boys to go to the theatre, but Shakespeare won’t help them to earn their living.” This is profoundly true. Shakespeare will not help anyone to earn a living, not even a modern actor-manager. Shakespeare is quite useless, as useless as Beauty and Love and Joy and Laughter, all of which many reputable persons would like to banish from the schools of the poor. Yet it is in beauty and love and joy and laughter that we must find the way of speaking to the soul — the soul, that does not appear in the statistics and is therefore always left out of account.²

This tension – between pragmatism and ‘the soul’ – has always been at the heart of debates about what English should be for.

It’s revealing to compare the activities of academics with those of teachers in schools. The study of language varies enormously between universities and schools. Essentially, the professional study of language relates to a quasi-scientific investigation whereas the study of literature is more akin to the study of art or music, where texts are explored for their cultural or aesthetic value. Academics studying language explore how English changes, create models for the patterns it follows, and investigate how people use it, whereas the school subject is more narrowly focussed on technical competence. The study of literature in schools is more of a ‘junior version’ of the ‘game’ academics play, although one shorn of much of the trappings of theory.³ Is this as it should be? Should students emulate the academic ‘games’ of English, or should we be satisfied with teaching them to master the foundations and prepare them for the ‘real world’?

As it has many times over the past century, English is once again trying to remake itself. Typically, the arguments about what English should be – and what it is for – are simplistically presented in terms of ‘traditionalist’ versus ‘progressive’ positions (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1‘Traditional’ and ‘progressive’ views of English

Source: These lists are taken from Rob Pope, The English Studies Book, p. 31.

The idea that we can, or should, select from just one side of this dichotomous list is odd. Each of these opposed sets of views has something to offer but neither, taken alone, is satisfactory. This tension between the pragmatic and the idealistic is at the heart of debates about what English should be for. On one hand, there is the notion of functional English – that children must be able to read and write to an acceptable standard and capable of taking a useful part in society – and on the other, the belief that English ought to develop the ‘whole child,’ so that they become more empathetic, more cultured, more capable of participation in the ‘conversation of humankind.’

In an attempt to bring together some of these polarised positions, here are my thoughts on what English should be for:

●English should exist to enlarge and extend children’s capacity to think about the world. Naturally, this should equip them for employment as well as the rest of life.

●English teaching should both recognise and value the many varieties of English but also induct students into the opportunities afforded by the mastery of standard English.

●Whilst attention should be given to spoken English, the emphasis should be on written forms.

●Despite their many limitations, formal written examina-tions are, at the moment, the fairest way to ensure disadvantaged children are not further disadvantaged, but we should resist allowing assessment to warp the curriculum we teach.

●Children need both grammatical descriptions and metalinguistic knowledge in order to think flexibly about the use of English.

●Children should have access to the canon in order to develop their own ideas about taste and to be able to critique from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance.

●The National Curriculum should be viewed as offering a minimum standard that schools, if they intend to introduce their own curriculum, should seek to at least equal.

●We should recognise that although the subject derives from a dominant cultural identity, multicultural differences enrich and enlarge the English language and its literature.

Have a go at resolving each set of binaries to arrive at your own vision of what English should be for. Is English, as it’s currently conceived, inclined more to the needs of employment, or more towards those of life? Place a cross on each of the continuums in Figure 1.2 to indicate where you think the subject sits.

Figure 1.2‘Traditional’ and ‘progressive’ continuum

Having done this, you may now have a better sense of whether English as it is currently taught and assessed is as it should be, or if it has lost its way.

Has English lost its way?

It seems widely accepted (or at least, widely discussed) that English as a school subject doesn’t really know what it is, or has ‘lost its way.’ This is not a new idea. In English for the English, published in 1922, George Sampson railed against the education system of his day. He viewed English as the most important of all school subjects but understood that this depended on “an assumption that the purpose of … school is really to develop the mind and soul of the children and not merely to provide tame and acquiescent ‘labour fodder.’”⁴

In 1956, writing about academic selection, David Holbrook saw that the secondary modern was viewed as where ‘the duds’ went. The fact that over three quarters of children did not make the grammar school cut was of little importance; these unruly masses, it was assumed, could never be brought to appreciate the glories of English literature. Instead they must be taught something practical, something fitting for a life of labour. Echoing Sampson, Holbrook argued that the skills sought by employers should be the business of employers to teach. “We have no need to concern ourselves,” he stated, “with education for ‘earning a living’: we educate for living.”⁵

Sadly, his battle cry went unheard. Or at least, if English teachers ever rallied to its cause, they were roundly defeated by the forces of pragmatism. By 1979, responding to the Bullock Report, Holbrook began English for Meaning with an introduction entitled, ‘English has lost its way.’ There is very little evidence to suggest it has made any great strides in finding itself in the intervening decades. Today some English teachers are more concerned with ‘developing radicalism’ than they are in overcoming the real injustice that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are disproportionately more likely to fail to learn to read and write fluently than their more affluent peers.⁶ But is English actually lost? For it to be so it would once have had to have known where it was. Was there then some halcyon time or place when English was of a quality to which we would now like to return?

Maybe, instead of endlessly reinventing second-rate wheels, English teachers today might be better off knowing more about the history of their subject. I say this as someone who taught for fifteen years with only the haziest ideas about where the set of assumptions I had picked up about what English is and how it should be taught had come from. Some of these assumptions – as we’ll discuss in chapter 2 – have revealed themselves to be based on faulty logic and flawed premises, but how much better if I had been aware of the tensions and debates that have preoccupied English teachers since English first came to take its place in the school curriculum.

How did we get here?

From our 21st-century vantage, it might seem that what was done in the past ought to remain there, but to dismiss the lessons of the past we ought to at least know what they are. Like most English teachers, I had only the vaguest notion of what previous generations of teachers had done or said. What I’ve come to learn is that we can, potentially, learn a lot about the difficulties and debates in which we’re currently entrenched by pondering mistakes and solutions which run the risk of being lost from our collective memory.

Despite its current domination of the curriculum, English is a latecomer to the suite of school subjects students are meant to master. Up until the late 19th century, ‘English’ tended to refer just to the basics of learning to read and write. Only latterly has it come to mean learning to read and write about literature. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Latin was the dominant medium of instruction in schools and universities. Even when English began to take over this role in the 16th century, the languages and literatures studied were classical. The emphasis in schools was on handwriting and grammar and, as the effects of print began to make themselves felt from the 18th century onwards, standardised spelling and punctuation. These were not taught with a concern for children’s intellectual development, but to ensure they could read and write sufficiently well to satisfy the growing demands of the commercial world.

Only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did the state begin to take substantial responsibility for school education of any kind, including schooling in English. At the same time, English began to include English literature, and was increasingly charged with a variety of moral roles previously filled by religion. Chief among these were the tasks of refining sensibility, inculcating public morality, and promoting social solidarity and national identity. One of the first and most influential advocates of this use of literature was the school inspector, poet and essayist Matthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Information
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 What is English for?
• 2 Problems in English
• 3 An epistemology of English
• 4 Noticing and analogising
• 5 Metaphor
• 6 Story
• 7 Argument
• 8 Pattern
• 9 Grammar
• 10 Context
• 11 Connecting the curriculum
• 12 Into action
• Online appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index