Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School

A Companion to School Experience

Jon Davison, Caroline Daly, Jon Davison, Caroline Daly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429016912
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Fully updated to reflect changes in teacher education and the curriculum, the Fifth Edition of Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School explores the background to debates about teaching the subject, alongside tasks, teaching ideas and further reading to expand upon issues and ideas raised in the book.

Including chapters on planning, changes to the assessment system, language teaching, and cross-curricular aspects of secondary teaching, this new edition features:

• 
  
  

• changes in policy and practice, including the most recent GCSE reforms;

• 
  
  

• a new chapter on 'Media literacy in English';

• 
  
  

• a consideration of modern digital technology and how it underpins good practice in all areas of English teaching and learning; and

• 
  
  

• cross-referencing to guidance on assessment and well-being and resilience in the core text Learning to Teach in the Secondary School.

A key text for all student teachers, Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School combines theory and practice to present a comprehensive introduction to the opportunities and challenges of teaching English in the secondary school.

1 Which English?

John Moss

Introduction: where are you coming from?

As you begin your secondary English initial teacher education (ITE), you will bring to it a perception of what English teaching is about that has been formed from a combination of the following: your own school experience of being taught English; your undergraduate studies in English, and perhaps other subjects; information you have gleaned from the media, observation visits to schools, and conversations with teachers you know; and, in some cases, work experience that is related to your planned career, such as working as a Teaching Assistant, teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) or running a youth club drama group.

Any analysis you have undertaken of these experiences will have engaged you in thinking about one or more of three ways in which the identity of English is constructed: by those who determine its scope and limits as an academic subject in higher education; by the definitions that apply to the statutory school curriculum and its assessment mechanisms; and by the teachers interpreting its lived-out identity through the teaching and learning that actually goes on in schools.

If you were asked what English is during an undergraduate literature or language seminar, you would probably have concentrated on the first of these matters, and it is also likely that you feel more confident about it than the others. You may be expecting your Initial Teacher Education to require you to focus on exploring ideas about the teaching and learning of English and the relationship between these ideas and the statutory curriculum. You will, however, probably find that these explorations will also challenge you to re-evaluate your understanding of what English as an academic subject is or could be beyond school.

Objectives

At the end of this chapter you should be:

• aware of the major versions of English available to you and their implications for your work;
• aware of the complexity of the debates about English; and
• able to place your own past, present and future experiences of English in the context of these debates.

The diversity of English

Your re-evaluation of English may well begin as soon as you meet other members of your ITE English course and/or other student teachers at the school where you are learning to teach. You will find that a wide range of different academic experiences of English has influenced their ideas. You may find, in any group of aspiring teachers, individuals who have experienced:

• A Levels in English that explored English literature, the English language, or both, in varying combinations, as well as media studies and drama;
• chronologically structured English literature degrees, whose overarching questions and concerns were with the relationships between literary tradition and originality or issues of canonicity;
• degrees in English language that explored historical and geographical variations in English, and in which they learned to use sophisticated tools to analyse spoken and written language;
• degrees in English language and literature in which studying the history of the language and stylistics has given them a perception of the significance of language change and writers’ language choices to the analysis of literature;
• degrees centred on current debates about the value of different kinds of literary theory and the ways in which they can inform reading practices, which have been explored with reference to a range of literary and non-literary texts;
• joint honours degrees in which the study of media, philosophy, history or art has given students particular perspectives on ways in which the study of literature can be enriched by a knowledge of one or more types of social, historical or cultural context;
• joint honours degrees in English and drama in which, among other things, students have experienced the value of practical drama methods in interpreting texts;
• joint honours degrees in English and education in which students have explored issues such as language development which have a direct bearing on the teaching they will undertake in school.

You may value highly the versions of English you have experienced, or you may have developed a critical distance from them. In either case you may expect the school English curriculum to be underpinned by clear theoretical positions about the subject that you can compare with those that have influenced your own educational experiences to date. In fact, the variety of ideas about ‘what English is’ is represented in an ongoing debate about the English curriculum that takes place through academic writing both about English and English-in-Education, the frequent publication of new curriculum policy documents produced for government, and through the development of classroom practice.

The Cox Report’s five views of English

The task you face in defining your position as a teacher of English is similar to that which has been faced by those responsible for defining and redefining a National Curriculum for English since the late 1980s. Brian Cox and his team, the first group to attempt this, pointed out:

Throughout our work we were acutely aware of the differing opinions that are held on a number of issues that lie at the heart of the English curriculum and its teaching. Our Report would not be credible if it did not acknowledge these differences and explain our response to them.

(Department of Education and Science (DES), 1989, para. 1.17)

The development of your own credibility as an English teacher requires you to engage with these opinions and to be able to explain your position in relation to them.

Before you continue, complete Task 1.1.

Task 1.1 The educational purposes of English

Write a 50-word statement defining the educational purposes of English as you understand them from your own educational experience at A Level and/or degree level. Exchange your statement with another student teacher and write a 50-word commentary on his or her statement. In a group discuss the statements and commentaries you have produced, identifying repeated words and ideas and any contradictions. Try to achieve a consensus statement, and consider the reasons for your ability or inability to do so.

The Cox Report (DES and WO, 1989) famously defined the different views of English that its writers found in the teaching profession:

2.21 A ‘personal growth’ view focuses on the child: it emphasises the relationship between language and learning in the individual child, and the role of literature in developing children’s imaginative and aesthetic lives.

This view is associated with work undertaken in the 1960s on the need for a child-centred approach to learning in English, which permanently changed the subject at the time. John Dixon’s Growth Through English, first published in 1967, was a particularly influential book, making a strong case for the importance of activities such as creative writing, talk and improvised drama, which many teachers had sought to prioritise in their teaching and wanted validated by the National Curriculum.

2.22 A ‘cross-curricular’ view focuses on the school: it emphasises that all teachers (of English and of other subjects) have a responsibility to help children with the language demands of different subjects on the school curriculum: otherwise areas of the curriculum may be closed to them.

This view had been promoted by the recommendations on language across the curriculum of Chapter 12 of the Bullock Report, A Language for Life (DES, 1975) that was strongly influenced by the work of Barnes, Britton and Rosen (1975) in Language, the Learner and the School. In the 1970s and 1980s many schools had devised language across the curriculum policies in response to Bullock, but implementation was patchy, and some interest groups wanted this work to be consolidated through the National Curriculum.

2.23 An ‘adult needs’ view focuses on communication outside the school: it emphasises the responsibility of English teachers to prepare children for the language demands of adult life, including the workplace, in a fast-changing world. Children need to learn to deal with the day-to-day demands of spoken language and of print; they also need to be able to write clearly, appropriately and effectively.

Cox’s reference to a ‘fast-changing world’ implies that an adult needs view of English will also place considerable emphasis on communications technology and the literacies involved in using digital technologies. Both before Cox and since, government has been concerned to take into account the views of employers, as represented by groups such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), about the extent to which the curriculum is providing the communication skills needed in the workplace. From time to time, and to varying extents, the assumption is made that it is the primary function of English to provide these skills.

2.24 A ‘cultural heritage’ view emphasises the responsibility of schools to lead children to an appreciation of those works of literature that have been widely regarded as amongst the finest in the language.

This view is associated with those schools of literary criticism that claim to be able to determine which books are most worth reading. A leading figure in the history of the idea of cultural heritage is F. R. Leavis, who, for example, in his book on the novel The Great Tradition (1948), argued that the great novelists could be identified as those who are ‘distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’.

2.25 A ‘cultural analysis’ view emphasises the role of English in helping children towards a critical understanding of the world and cultural environment in which they live. Children should know about the processes by which meanings are conveyed, and about the ways in which print and other media carry values.

This view is associated with forms of criticism that acknowledge that the interactions among writers, readers and texts are influenced by a range of social, cultural and historical factors. Holders of the cultural analysis view may believe that the investigation of these interactions in relation to any text – literary or non-literary, print or digital, written or spoken – is potentially of equal value, since the value of any text is not absolute but culturally determined. In the 1970s and 1980s, students of English in higher education had become increasingly exposed to a broad range of critical approaches which challenged Leavisite positions, and as teachers, sought to embed them in the school curriculum.

These views of English have been the subject of much discussion and research, both by those who have attempted to find out to what extent each view is represented in the teaching profession (e.g. Goodwyn, 1992), and by those who have questioned the validity of the categories or their definitions, or suggested other ways of defining viewpoints in the debate about what English is (e.g. Marshall, 2000). You may be particularly interested in a contribution to this debate, made shortly after the Cox Report (DES and WO, 1989) was published, by a group of student teachers (see Daly et al., 1989). The historical context of the debate among views of English that Cox identified is explored further in Chapters 2 and 3.

Consensus or compromise?

What has become most clear from the debate is that the position that Cox took when deciding what to do about the different views of English that he found, which was to assert that they ‘are not sharply distinguishable, and … certainly not mutually exclusive’ (para. 2.20), fudges the issues. Reading between the lines of the definitions of the ‘cultural heritage’ view and the ‘cultural analysis’ view, for example, it is not difficult to find a sharp distinction between the ‘appreciation of those works of literature that have been widely regarded as amongst the finest’, and ‘critical understanding of the … cultural environment’ (para. 2.24–2.25). The distinction is between being taught a taste for what a particular group in society, whose identity is hidden by the passive construction, wishes to have culturally transmitted, and learning to make an active analytical response to all the signs and sign systems of the cultural products available to that analysis.

You may find this distinction reflected in positions held by other student teachers, whose ambition as teachers is ‘to pass on’ something (e.g. a love of a particular kind of literature) and those who seek ‘to change’ something, perhaps their pupils’ sense of their own power to influence the development of society. Daly et al. provide an important statement of one version of the second position: ‘we must develop goals, classroom approaches and materials which will transform “English” into the study of how and why our entire culture is produced, sustained, challenged, remade’ (1989, p. 16). The distinction between ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘cultural ana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tasks
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction to the Fifth Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Which English?
• 2 Battles for English 1894–2018
• 3 English as a curriculum subject
• 4 Speaking and listening
• 5 Reading
• 6 Writing
• 7 Teaching language and grammar
• 8 Media literacy and English
• 9 Working with digital technologies
• 10 Drama in teaching and learning English
• 11 Approaching Shakespeare
• 12 Possibilities with poetry
• 13 Advanced Level English
• 14 Critical practice
• Bibliography
• Index