Teaching English

Carol Evans, Alyson Midgley, Phil Rigby, Lynne Warham, Peter Woolnough

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446245378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Reflective practice is at the heart of effective teaching, and this book helps you develop into a reflective teacher of English. Everything you need is here: guidance on developing your analysis and self-evaluation skills, the knowledge of what you are trying to achieve and why, and examples of how experienced teachers deliver successful lessons.

The book shows you how to plan lessons, how to make good use of resources and how to assess pupils? progress effectively. Each chapter contains points for reflection, which encourage you to break off from your reading and think about the challenging questions that you face as a new teacher.

The book comes with access to a companion website, www.sagepub.co.uk/secondary, where you will find:

- Videos of real lessons so you can see the skills discussed in the text in action

- Links to a range of sites that provide useful additional support

- Extra planning and resource materials.

If you are training to teach English this book will help you to improve your classroom performance, by providing you with practical advice, but also by helping you to think in depth about the key issues. It also provides examples of the research evidence that is needed in academic work at Masters level, essential for anyone undertaking an M-level PGCE.

1	ENGLISH TEACHERS AND ENGLISH TEACHING Phil Rigby

This chapter considers:

• the nature of the English curriculum and the way it is viewed, both by society at large and by English teachers themselves
• external pressures on the English curriculum
• internal conflicts about the nature of English as a subject
• the development of the National Curriculum, its style, content and structure
• the Framework for secondary English
• the teaching of grammar and the standards debate
• Shakespeare and the literary canon
• frequently encountered texts within English lessons.

Finally, in focusing upon a discussion between four experienced teachers around the topic of planning to deliver an aspect of a GCSE set text, the chapter reflects upon different ways of presenting material, according to the particular needs of the pupils in a class.

INTRODUCTION

English is vital for communicating with others in school and in the wider world, and is fundamental to learning in all curriculum subjects. (QCA, 2007: 1)

Literature in English is rich and influential. (QCA, 2007: 1)

This is it: your opportunity to train as an English teacher; your chance to play your own unique role in the development and evolution of the English curriculum! This opening chapter deliberately begins with two key quotations from the English National Curriculum programme of study (2007), each emphasizing the importance and centrality of the subject to all pupils. The very nature of English is ‘vital’ because it is in a constant state of change: it moves and breathes in the same way as the English language itself. It is ‘influential’ because of the way that it impacts not only on every subject area, but also on pupils’ lives beyond school. Equally, English is ‘rich’ because of its unlimited diversity. In essence, these two quotations encapsulate the significance and the enjoyment of English teaching.

As a successful practitioner you will need to develop the skills to discuss, explore and evaluate the learning and teaching within your classroom in an informed manner. Equally, you will need to develop the reflective, evaluative and critical thinking skills which are a crucial part of developing Master’s-level professional practice. This opening chapter is deliberately designed to be thought-provoking, raising issues and asking the kinds of questions that you will encounter not only during the course of your English training, but also throughout your teaching career.

THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM

In order to begin to explore the centrality of English as a subject, it is first important to understand its position within the school curriculum as a whole. Just as, within the early years of primary education, reading impacts disproportionately upon every other area of the curriculum with the result that the good reader is at an advantage over other children in a whole range of subjects, so in the secondary age-phase English has a unique relationship with every other subject area. As an English teacher, that places you in a rather special position, a member of a key department in the school, one that links with every other subject and whose influence is felt across the whole school. However, like many of life’s benefits, such privilege also has its drawbacks. For instance, your colleagues will think nothing of berating you for their pupils’ poor spelling in their lessons; worse still, as native speakers of English, many will consider themselves experts on the subject, and consider it their duty to explain to you what and how they feel you should be teaching, in ways that you would never even consider doing with them.

Similarly, on a wider and more public stage, the more vocal elements among the press will relish every opportunity to comment on what they perceive to be poor levels of spoken and, particularly, written English among school leavers (it makes no difference when you point to pupils’ consistently rising examination performance; to them this is merely another manifestation of falling standards and further serves to fuel their argument). They salivate over spelling errors on public signs, incorrect word choice and – the worst sin of all – misplaced apostrophes! Such lapses in public standards are again clearly the fault of – you have guessed it – English teachers. The English teacher is singled out by society at large in ways that simply do not happen to, for example, the geography teacher, the biology teacher or the information and communications technology (ICT) teacher.

The two viewpoints mentioned above are linked to the ‘anyone can teach English’ discourse that has been in existence almost as long as the subject itself. Everyone has been to school, so the logic goes, everyone can speak English; therefore everyone must be an expert on English teaching. However, if you are anything like me, that is at least part of the attraction of wanting to be an English teacher: to be involved in teaching such a crucial subject, one that has such a profound and lasting impact on pupils, affecting them and staying with them in ways that other subjects do not. When you chance to meet former pupils, sometimes many years after they have left your class, they will often tell you how English was not only the subject that they enjoyed most at the time but that its relevance has become increasingly apparent with the passage of the years.

Point for reflection

The Spanish teacher tells you in the classroom that the pupils in his class do not understand what a verb is; how do you react? The geography teacher tells you that her pupils cannot spell the simplest of geographical terms; what do you say? The science teacher tells you that she never corrects grammatical errors in her pupils’ work because, as far as she is concerned, it is science that she is teaching, not English; does she have a point? On passing the notice board outside the head’s office you notice an absolutely howling error (surely you can’t be the only one to have noticed it); what do you do?

---

As you begin to explore others’ views, both of English as a subject and of English teaching itself, it is important that you consider what English really means to you. How do you view the subject? What kind of English teacher will you be? Perhaps these are questions you have never considered up to this point; however, they are valid questions that you ought to be aware of and consider at this early stage in your career. It is important that you reflect upon and develop an opinion about English teaching and what it means to you, otherwise you will find yourself buffeted by the vagaries of public opinion or by circumstances as they change.

EXTERNAL PRESSURES

Because English is such a crucial subject, so central to pupils’ educational, cultural and social development, it can become subject to significant external pressures, often of an overtly political nature. In a sense, this is simply a manifestation of its importance: people have strong and diverse opinions about it and want to influence the way it is taught precisely because it matters so much. Such pressures on the content and structure of the English curriculum derive, broadly, from two sources: first, from other groups and individuals within education and, second, from society in general, often in the form of comment in the press or statements by politicians.

English, after all, is the subject at the heart of our definition of national cultural identity. Since English teachers are the chief custodians of that identity we should not be surprised to find that revolutionaries intent on using the subject to transform society have gained a powerful foothold, attempting to redefine the very meaning of reading itself. (Phillips, 1997: 69)

As a member of the English teaching community, it is important both that you engage in the debate and that you are prepared to be flexible, but it is also important that you remain resilient in order to stand up to the pressures, the questions and, at times, the criticism that you will face as a member of the profession.

I have already hinted at some of the types of comments that you will face from your colleagues in school. This may seem an obvious point, but experience shows that it is worth making: it is important that your colleagues do not see English simply as a service subject, as a content-free, skills-based curriculum shell whose only justification for existence is to benefit other subject areas. That is not to say, of course, that there can be no carry-over from English into other subjects: the best learning is one that is deeply contextualized; one that actively seeks to create links between different facets of the curriculum; where subjects (and here I mean subjects, not just teachers) do actually talk to each other and benefit from such dialogue. Because of its position in the curriculum, English is almost uniquely placed to involve itself in cross-curricular initiatives; to develop skills and understanding; to explore through literature the human aspects of social or historical situations in ways that will certainly benefit other subject areas. Yet it certainly does not exist simply to service the particular demands and needs of other curriculum areas; indeed, if you were to follow such a route through to its natural conclusion, you would find yourself in a situation where other curriculum subjects totally dominated and controlled the shape and structure of the English curriculum, and where English as a subject was left without a core, intellectually, emotionally or morally.

In recent years, attitudes such as these from among the teaching profession have become less widespread, as the National Strategies have become embedded, with their clear emphasis on the development of cross-curricular literacy and of the particular literacies of each different subject area. It has now become more widely recognized and accepted that pupils’ progress in individual subject areas is inextricably tied up with the development of the particular literacy of that subject. So the Spanish teacher wanting his pupils to understand verb formation will be expected to find ways to teach it so that pupils can see its importance in context; similarly, the geography teacher wanting her pupils to develop sound strategies for knowing how to spell key geographical terms cannot simply pass the responsibility for the pupils’ prowess at spelling to their English teacher.

Over 30 years ago a seminal report on English teaching entitled A Language for Life (DES, 1975), more commonly known as the Bullock Report after its author Lord Bullock, advocated the development of language across the curriculum and put forward the view that every teacher is a teacher of language. However, in the years between the report’s publication and the launch of the National Literacy Strategy in 1998, language across the curriculum became seen almost as the Holy Grail in language development, an almost unattainable target. Responding to the Bullock Report’s recommendations, individual schools and local authorities had adopted a number of creative schemes in an attempt to develop a cross-curricular approach to language teaching; however, by and large, such small-scale and individual approaches had failed to achieve a breakthrough at a national level, until the advent of the National Literacy Strategy with its focus on every teacher’s responsibility to develop the literacy of their own subject.

If the pressure upon the English curriculum from within schools could be identified as being driven by debate over standards and the accuracy of spoken and written expression, the pressure from outside the educational community tends to come from the same direction. There are a number of contentious issues within the field of English that could attract such comment: the importance of the literary canon, the role of new media in textual study, the teaching of Shakespeare, to name but three. All these do attract comment from politicians and the press from time to time, usually as a part of the ‘dumbing down’ discourse. However, as in schools, the main area for comment is in terms of standards and accuracy. In terms of vitriol and vehemence, the days leading up to the introduction of the first National Curriculum document in 1988 probably saw the most outspoken comments on what was wrong with English teaching.

Typical of the criticism were the remarks of Norman Tebbit, then Chairman of the Conservative Party, who pointed out the causal link between the decline in the teaching of grammar and the rise in street crime:

If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy at school … all these things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime. (Cameron, 1995: 94)

In simil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• How to Use the Book
• 1 English Teachers and English Teaching
• 2 Planning for Learning
• 3 More Than One Way to Teach a Lesson
• 4 Managing Learning, Managing Learners
• 5 Monitoring Performance and Securing Progress
• 6 Teaching Different Pupils, Teaching Different Abilities
• 7 Catering for an Assessment-Driven Curriculum
• 8 PSHE: Developing the Whole Child Through English
• 9 Using ICT in English
• 10 Beyond ITT: What Next?
• References
• Index