English Teaching in the Secondary School

Linking theory and practice

Mike Fleming, David Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317441274
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

English Teaching in the Secondary School is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of teaching English. This updated 4th edition has been revised to take into consideration changes in national policy, drawing on the most recent research and theory to produce engaging, practical ideas for use in the classroom. It challenges mechanistic and formulaic approaches to teaching, instead placing an emphasis on reflection, understanding and informed practice.

Guiding students and new teachers through the whole process of English teaching in the secondary school, this edition has been fully updated to include:

• a report of the most recent developments in national policy

• discussion of multiple literacies and critical literacy

• a new chapter on English as an additional language

• a new chapter on cross curricular themes

• new sections on approaches to the teaching of grammar

• reflections on international developments in language teaching and their relevance

• a guide to further reading on resources and research

Written in an accessible style, with a wealth of advice and ideas, English Teaching in the Secondary School forms essential reading for all those training to become secondary English teachers.

CHAPTER

1
	The English teacher and the curriculum

Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Setting the scene

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS – although to many it may seem more like an eternity, and not in the liberating Blakean sense – English teachers in secondary schools have become increasingly used to living with number, weight and measure. However, with the recent government dismantling the obligatory nature of the National Curriculum (NC) across all maintained schools (the independent sector, of course, has never had to teach it, although most private schools have elected to) while maintaining ever more rigid and punitive policing of curricula, it may be timely now to re-evaluate just what the NC means for English teachers. Ushered in by the 1988 Education Act and, for English, substantially revised since, the NC was generally seen as largely responsible for the obsession with measurement. Now, many teachers, and not just of English, view it rather more positively – as symbolizing a certain entitlement for pupils and as a clear guide for teachers (although one of the many issues with the current version of the NC is its very lack of clarity and relative inaccessibility online). Historically, 1988 was certainly not a year of dearth as far as most secondary-school English teachers were concerned: new examination syllabuses at 16 and 18, based largely on coursework, opened up exciting opportunities for effective and innovative teaching of both language and literature, increasingly integrated at all levels. At the same time, pioneering work was going on in English departments in a range of other areas: speaking and listening; integration with drama; media education; active approaches to literature, including Shakespeare; awareness and knowledge of the workings of language; and collaboration with other curricular subjects. If there was dearth, it perhaps arrived as a result of and simultaneously with the fashion for ‘objective’ measurement, rather than pre-dating it, and this is of course precisely what I imagine Blake himself meant. As Knight (1996: 22) has it:

the desire for an unattainable objectivity is the key to many of the difficulties we have faced in formulating an adequate version of National Curriculum English. The quest for objectives and certainties where none is to be found produces paradoxical results: that matters in which we (teachers and pupils) should trust our intuitive understanding are made both more complex and more shallow when we do not.

This is quite an indictment. But what English teachers have done, and in many cases are still doing despite the increasing pressures towards conformity, is to convert this threat into an opportunity: not only to live with the NC, but actually to make it work for us in imaginative and engaging ways despite what D’Arcy (2000: 30) has described as ‘the increasingly formalistic emphasis’ and the ever more terse, instructional tone of official documents.

Fortunately, the NC, in the hands of creative teachers, has come to be not only about measurement and targets, but also about establishing a framework for teaching through planned, coherent schemes of study. More broadly, it has served to focus attention on the nature of English teaching: why the subject has such a prominent place within the curriculum, and what to do with it once it is there. This is not some esoteric debate undertaken solely by those professionally involved in the teaching of English: for better or for worse, education has been opened up to an unprecedented degree to the wider public – New Labour’s battle-cry during the 1997 general election, ‘Education! Education! Education!’, for example, clearly struck a chord with the electorate; subsequent developments have borne this out, even when (or perhaps especially when) government policies have been contentious or negatively perceived by the majority of professionals involved – as is clearly the case at the time of writing. Most people feel that they have something to contribute to the education debate; certainly, most have an opinion to offer, based either on their own remembered education or on their children’s continuing schooling, in a way unlikely to apply, say, to the processes and professions of law or medicine. The position of English is perhaps even more extreme, in that the English language is almost universally shared by the citizens of the UK and virtually everyone feels a degree of expertise. In a sense, of course, there is a great deal of truth in this – language is by its very nature owned by those who use it, and the learning of spoken English is achieved without any formal teaching – but these same people would be less likely to pronounce upon the nature of art, geography or mathematics in education. The special position of English teachers in this context presents an opportunity both to influence opinion and to draw on existing views; but it is an elusive opportunity, all too easily missed.

In the reality of English teaching in a secondary school, one can expect huge diversity of opinions and expectations as expressed by parents, governing bodies, colleagues and many others, and it is part of the English teacher’s function to integrate, discuss, deflect, confirm and argue the viewpoints as the case may be. In a world of flux, the NC, or indeed any curriculum, must be seen as a reasonably broad church: it may appear – indeed it seeks to appear – as completely authoritative; in truth, it offers a series of touchstones, and the real nature of the subject has to be discovered and invented ever anew by those most intensely involved.

This process requires a certain immersion in the subject, and at the same time an ability to see both wood and trees in formulating overarching aims and values. It is all too easy, especially perhaps in the first year or two of teaching, to be drawn into thinking that mechanistic teaching of a given curriculum is an end in itself, spawning its own self-justification. Following Rex Gibson (1986), we could term this position ‘instrumental rationality’: the dichotomous separation of fact from feeling, demanding an absence of thought about the consequences and context of one’s actions in any profound sense. The process thus becomes its own legitimisation with its own particular – sometimes impenetrable – rationality. This, of course, is nothing new. The poet Thomas Traherne (1960: 132), for example, writing of his own Oxford education in the seventeenth century, having initially paid tribute to the breadth of learning possible there, went on to regret that:

Nevertheless some things were defective too. There was never a tutor that did expressly teach Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences. Nor did any of us study those things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our enjoyments. We studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner.

So in Traherne’s view of the curriculum, felicity, for him the full and visionary enjoyment of life’s possibilities, becomes the central tenet, the ‘mistress’, of all else. What was lacking in the Oxford education of the mid seventeenth century is still perhaps avoided by the curriculum legislators of today. It is important to keep a broad sense of what is the purpose of education.

Models of English teaching

In the version of the National Curriculum for English based on the Report of the Cox Committee (DES 1989), it was suggested that there were essentially five models of English teaching, and that most English teachers combined in their teaching several if not all of these. The types of English teaching posited by Cox were as follows:

■ a personal-growth view, which tends to emphasise the pupil as a creative and imaginative individual developing, in terms of the teaching and learning of English, primarily through an intensive engagement with literature and personal creative writing;

■ a cross-curricular approach, stressing the distinctive nature of English as the language of learning for virtually all curriculum areas and implying a definition of service to these areas and to education in a generic sense;

■ an adult-needs emphasis, as essentially a preparation for the demands of life beyond school in terms of effective understanding of and communication through the English language in its many forms, including those vocationally based;

■ a cultural-heritage model, with the teaching based heavily on ‘great’ works of literature, generally drawn from the past;

■ a cultural-analysis view, leading pupils to a critical understanding of the social and cultural context of English, particularly the value systems which are inevitably embedded in the ways language is used.

In many ways, these characteristics also underpin the subsequent versions of the NC (1995, 2000 and 2008), and indeed broader-based views of English teaching – but do they suffice as a statement of principle? In particular, it is worth considering whether the five models of English are as comfortably compatible as Cox implies in his accompanying gloss: ‘they are not sharply distinguishable, and they are certainly not mutually exclusive’. Is there not rather something of a struggle for ascendancy between some, if not all, of these views? In what sense is the second formulation a view of English as a distinctive subject at all? Certainly, the subject English has been something of a battleground for years – since its comparatively recent inception, in fact – and it is all the more important to take a principled position with regard to its teaching, eschewing the temptations of a superficial compromise; as Goodwyn (1997a: 39) puts it:

English teachers do not … recognise the cross-curricular model as a model of English … They are quite clear that this model belongs to the whole school and should not be identified with English … The other four models are acknowledged as a normal part of English, but they do not have a comfortable or neutral relationship with each other; neither are they politically or historically innocent, they are not simply ‘there’.

There is some value in differentiating between views, if only as an aid to reflection about one’s own practice. It may be possible – in the best tradition of teenage magazines – to undertake a self-analysing quiz to ascertain where you stand. Asked to devise a scheme of work for a Year 8 mixed-ability group, is your first instinct to:

(a)	plan alongside other departments in, for example, giving presentations and conducting library-based research, or
(b)	examine advertising as an introduction to media education, focusing on the manipulation of language and images to boost product sales, or
(c)	base the scheme on a celebration of character and plot in Twelfth Night, exploring also the development of English theatre during Shakespeare’s period, or
(d)	block-book the IT facilities with a view to examining the ways in which IT skills could be used in a range of vocational areas, including journalism, advertising and the promotion of tourism, or
(e)	plan around the theme of the environment, aiming for the production of a series of colourful anthologies of creative writing celebrating personal relationships with aspects of the environment?

Clearly this is something of an artificial exercise, and the answer is not to be found on the back page, but it may well serve to illustrate how teachers of English will differ in the weight they give to different views of the subject. Before the NC an English teacher (depending on the degree of autonomy given by a department or school) was able to follow individual strengths and preferences. This had clear advantages. It meant, however, that pupils’ experiences could be very narrow and unbalanced.

Tensions in the nature of English

It is also interesting to consider the name of the subject English. Clearly, as it stands, it carries many connotations beyond its definition as one subject in the curriculum: some, perhaps, of nationality and exclusivity, which may not be entirely desirable; and the appearance of ‘British Values’ in Section 2 of the Teachers’ Standards (2011) perhaps adds weight to this perception. ‘What’s in a name?’ you may ask, but thinking about alternative names will focus on what precisely the subject is all about and where the thrust of its teaching should be situated. Possibilities are:

■ the language arts (favoured by Abbs 1976 among others);

■ rhetorical studies (implied by Eagleton 1983);

■ literacy studies (in line with the present government’s concern);

■ cultural studies;

■ communications;

■ discourse awareness;

■ language and literature studies.

Examining English from the perspective of different people in society – parents, professionals, curriculum legislators, teachers of other subjects or phases, for example – can help us think about the name and nature of the subject, and may illustrate a wide diversity of thinking. A principled position is necessary but it is of course practicable to remain reasonably eclectic in approach, keeping an open mind not only to different philosophies – which assuredly will develop and change with time – but to the different needs and ideas as discerned in and expressed by the pupils themselves. It is perfectly feasible, for example, to cover all five of the hypothetical schemes of work designed for the Year 8 class within one year; indeed, this may be a very effective way of ensuring breadth of entitlement. What we need to do, above all, is to reflect on our own preferences and predilections, compensating when appropriate for any personal shortcomings through ...