Teaching English, Language and Literacy

Dominic Wyse, Helen Bradford, Russell Jones, Mary Anne Wolpert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351986779
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Are you looking for one book that gives a comprehensive account of primary and early years English, language and literacy teaching?

This fully revised fourth edition of Teaching English, Language and Literacy includes up-to-date research and updated discussion of effective teaching. Throughout the book there is guidance on England's new National Curriculum and its impact. Rooted in research evidence and multidisciplinary theory, this book is an essential introduction for anyone learning to teach English from the early years to primary school level.

The authors draw on their research, scholarship and practice to offer advice on:

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• inclusion and equality, including working effectively with multilingual pupils

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• speaking and listening

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• developing reading, including choosing texts, and phonics teaching

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• improving writing, including grammar and punctuation

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• planning and assessing

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• the latest thinking in educational policy and practice

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• the use of multimedia

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• maintaining good home--school links

All the chapters include examples of good practice, coverage of key issues, analysis of research and reflections on national policy to encourage the best possible response to the exciting challenges of teaching. Each chapter also has a glossary to explain terms and gives suggestions for further reading.

This authoritative book is for all those who want to improve the teaching of English, language and literacy in schools. Designed to help inform trainee teachers and tutors, but also of great use to those teachers wanting to keep pace with the latest developments in their specialist subject, this is an indispensable guide to the theory and practice of teaching English, language and literacy.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
The history of English, language and literacy

One of the important aspects of historical knowledge is that it enables us to better understand the present. This chapter briefly examines three significant historical angles: the history of English as a language; the history of the teaching of English; and the history of national initiatives to improve the teaching of English. We conclude in the present by looking at the National Curriculum and the phonics screening check.

The three words ‘English’, ‘Language’ and ‘Literacy’ in the title of this book are significant because they are central to many of the debates that have raged about the teaching of English in primary schools. During the 1970s and 1980s, the teaching of ‘Language’ was the focus. The job of primary schools was to foster the development of children’s language through reading, writing and, to a lesser extent, talking. This focus included the need to support multilingual children’s development in English and other languages. The teachers who coordinated the subject were known as ‘language coordinators’. The teaching of language in primary schools was seen as different in many respects from the teaching of English conducted in secondary schools.

With the coming of the Education Reform Act 1988, ‘English’ was re-established as the main focus for primary education. The subject was, however, still to be concerned with the teaching of the three language modes of reading, writing and talk. ‘Speaking and Listening’ became of equal importance to Reading and Writing for the first time, and this was prescribed by the National Curriculum. Coordinators were now to be called ‘English’ coordinators. The advent of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) ☞ in 1997 resulted in a heavy focus on ‘Literacy’. You will probably have guessed that subject leaders were renamed ‘literacy coordinators’.

The first part of this chapter looks at some of the historical aspects of the subject that have shaped its development. It is important that all teachers have a historical perspective on their work; at the very least, this can give you a means to critically examine modern initiatives and to check how ‘new’ they really are.

We start with a brief look at some of the significant moments in the development of the English language and reflect on their continuing relevance to classroom teaching. This is followed by reflections on the history of the teaching of English. We conclude with an outline of some of the major national projects that have been undertaken and finish right up to date with a look at the phonics screening check.

The English language

English, like all languages, is constantly changing. The Oxford English Dictionary has a large team of people who are constantly searching for new uses and new additions to the language. For example, here is an extract from the OED website:

June 2017 update

More than 600 new words, phrases, and senses have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary this quarter, including bug chaser, chantoosie, gin daisy, and widdly. You can read about other new and revised meanings in this article by Katherine Connor Martin, Head of US Dictionaries, and explore our timeline of veil words.

(OED, 2017, online)

The online version of the dictionary is a spectacular resource, including as it does all known meanings for words; their grammatical function; etymology, including changes in usage and spelling over time; audio files for pronunciation by different types of speakers; sources for the examples of use of the words; etc. As well as recording language change, dictionaries play a major role in the standardisation of the language. It is interesting to note that American Standard English is represented by specific dictionaries such as those published by Merriam-Webster, but British Standard English is, for example, represented by the Oxford English Dictionary or Chambers Dictionary.

The significant influence of publishing has also resulted in standard reference works that lay down particular conventions. So if you have ever wondered how to reference properly using the ‘Author – Date’ method, try The American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide (or for a simplified version, try The Good Writing Guide for Education Students; Wyse and Cowan, 2017). For teachers, the idea that language is always changing is an important one. If we place too heavy an emphasis on absolute and fixed ‘rules’, we may be teaching in a linguistically inaccurate or inappropriate way (➞ Chapter 16). Effective teaching needs to be built on an understanding of those features of the language that are stable and those that are subject to constant change.

This process of change is by no means a recent phenomenon. Human beings’ creation of alphabetic written language was a highly significant development. All alphabets were originally derived from the Semitic syllabaries of the second millennium. The developments from both Greek script and the Roman alphabet can be seen in the use of the Latinised form of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet in the word itself, ‘alphabet’. ‘Alpha’ was derived from the Semitic ‘aleph’ and ‘beta’ from ‘beth’ (Goody and Watt, 1963). Historically, the alphabet has been at the heart of some of the most enduring debates about the development of written communication, for example whether the alphabet simply emerged from logographic or pictographic forms. In Harris’ (1986) examination of the origins of writing, he called this particular idea of emergence an evolutionary fallacy, arguing that the alphabet was ‘the great invention’ because its graphic signs have almost no limitations for human communication, unlike logos or pictographs. The continuing development of writing, for example through internet and electronic text forms, is further testament to written language’s extraordinary capacity to adapt to, and be part of, cultural change.

It was during the fifth century that the Anglo-Saxons settled in England and, as always happens when people colonise, they brought changes to the language, a process that resulted in ‘Old English’ being established. The few texts that have survived from this period are in four main dialects ☞: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian. The last two are sometimes grouped together and called Anglian. West Saxon became the standard dialect at the time but is not the direct ancestor of modern Standard English ☞, which is mainly derived from an Anglian dialect (Barber, 1993). If you take the modern word ‘cold’ as an example, the Anglian ‘cald’ is a stronger influence than the West Saxon version, ‘ceald’.

In the ninth century, the Vikings brought further changes to the language. Place names were affected: ‘Grimsby’ meant ‘Grim’s village’ and ‘Micklethwaite’ meant ‘large clearing’. The pronunciation of English speech was also affected, and it is possible to recognise some Scandinavian-influenced words because of their phonological form. It is suggested that ‘awe’ is a Scandinavian word and that this came from changes of pronunciation to the Old English word ‘ege’. One of the most interesting things about Scandinavian loanwords ☞ is that they are so commonly used: sister, leg, neck, bag, cake, dirt, fellow, fog, knife, skill, skin, sky, window, flat, loose, call, drag and even ‘they’ and ‘them’ (Barber, 1993).

In more recent times, words from a range of countries have been borrowed. Here are a small selection of examples: French – elite, liaison, menu, plateau; Spanish and Portuguese – alligator, chocolate, cannibal, embargo, potato; Italian – concerto, balcony, casino, cartoon; Indian languages – bangle, cot, juggernaut, loot, pyjamas, shampoo; African languages – banjo, zombie, rumba, tote. However, for many of these words it is difficult to attribute them to one original country. To illustrate the complexities, consider the word ‘chess’:

‘Chess’ was borrowed from Middle French in the fourteenth century. The French word was, in turn, borrowed from Arabic, which had earlier borrowed it from Persian ‘shah’ ‘king’. Thus the etymology ☞ of the word reaches from Persian, through Arabic and Middle French, but its ultimate source (as far back as we can trace its history) is Persian. Similarly, the etymon of ‘chess’, that is, the word from which it has been derived, is immediately ‘esches’ and ultimately ‘shah’. Loanwords have, as it were, a life of their own that cuts across the boundaries between languages.

(Pyles and Algeo, 1993: 286)

The influence of loanwords is one of the factors that has resulted in some of the irregularities of English spelling. David Crystal (1997) lists some of the other major factors. Above we referred to the Anglo-Saxon period; at that time there were only 24 graphemes (letter symbols) to represent 40 phonemes (sounds). Later, ‘i’ and ‘j’, ‘u’ and ‘v’ were changed from being interchangeable to having distinct functions and ‘w’ was added, but many sounds still had to be signalled by combinations of letters.

After the Norman conquest, French scribes – who had responsibility for publishing texts – respelled a great deal of the language. They introduced new conventions such as ‘qu’ for ‘cw’ (queen), ‘gh’ for ‘h’ (night) and ‘c’ before ‘e’ or ‘i’ in words such as ‘circle’ and ‘cell’. Once printing became better established in the West, this added further complications. William Caxton (1422–92) is often credited with the ‘invention’ of the printing press, but this is not accurate. During the seventh century the Chinese printed the earliest known book, The Diamond Sutra, using inked wooden relief blocks. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the process had developed in Korea to the extent that printers were manufacturing bronze type sets of 100,000 pieces. In the West, Johannes Gutenberg (1390s – 1468) is credited with the development of moveable metal type in association with a hand-operated printing press.

Many of the early printers working in England were foreign (many came from Holland in particular) and they used their own spelling conventions. Also, until the sixteenth century, line justification ☞ was achieved by changing words rather than by adding spaces. Once printing became established, the written language did not keep pace with the considerable alterations to the way words were spoken, resulting in weaker links between sound and symbol.

Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, published in 1755, was another important factor in relation to English spelling. His work resulted in dictionaries becoming more authoritarian and used as the basis for ‘correct’ usage. Noah Webster, the first person to write a major account of American English, compared Johnson’s contribution to Isaac Newton’s in mathematics. Johnson’s dictionary was significant for a number of reasons. Unlike dictionaries of the past that tended to concentrate on ‘hard words’, Johnson wanted a scholarly record of the whole language. It was based on words in use and introduced a literary dimension, drawing heavily on writers such as Dryden, Milton, Addison, Bacon, Pope and Shakespeare (Crystal, 1997: 109). Shakespeare’s remarkable influence on the English language is not confined to the artistic significance of his work; many of the words and phrases of his plays are still commonly used today:

He coined some 2,000 words – an astonishing number – and gave us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him. Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remembrance of things past, the sound and fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two in one sentence, as in Hamlet’s observation: ‘Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.’ He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: ‘Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.’

(Bryson, 1990: 57)

Crystal (2004) makes the point that although spelling is an area where there is more agreement about what is correct than in other areas of language, there’s still considerable variation. Greenbaum’s (1986) research looked at all the words beginning with ‘A’ in a medium-sized desk dictionary which were spelled in more than one way; he found 296. When extrapolating this to the dictionary as a whole, he estimated 5,000 variants altogether, which is 5.6 per cent. If this were to be done with a dictionary as complete as the Oxford English Dictionary, it would mean many thousands of words where the spelling has not been definitively agreed. Crystal gives some examples including: accessory/accessary; acclimatize/acclimatise; adrenalin/adrenaline; aga/agha; ageing/aging; all right/alright.

Many of Greenbaum’s words were pairs but there were some triplets: for example, aerie/aery/eyrie. And there were even quadruplets: anaesthetize/anaesthetise/anesthetize/anesthetise. Names translated from a foreign language compound the problems, particularly for music students: Tschaikovsky/Tchaikovsky/Tschaikofsky/Tchaikofsky/Tshaikovski.

It is tempting to assume that the grammar of the English language has stabilised, but recent work indicates the scale of change that continues. In one study, more than five million books, approximately 4 per cent of all books ever published, were analysed. The units of analysis in this study were the 1-gram and n-gram. The 1-gram is a meaningful sequence of characters not separated by a space that includes words, part-words (such as SCUBA), numbers, and typos (such as ‘excesss’). An n-gram is a sequence of 1-grams, such as the phrases ‘police station’ (a 2-gram) and ‘the United Kingdom’ (a 3-gram). The analyses revealed significant results in relation to the ways in which the English language continues to change. At the time the study was published the size of the language had increased by more than 70 per cent in the past 50 years, adding about 8,500 words per year. An analysis of irregular verbs showed much stability over a period of 200 years but also that 16 per cent went through change of grammatical regularisation:

These changes occurred slowly: It took 200 years for our fastest-moving verb (‘chide’) to go from 10% to 90% [regular]. Otherwise, each trajectory was sui generis ☞; we observ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Language
• PART III Reading
• PART IV Writing
• PART V General issues
• Index