A Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English

Creativity, principles and practice

Margaret Mallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415661973
• eBook ISBN: 9781317451150
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

A Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English draws on extracts from the published work of some of the most influential education writers to provide insight, guidance and clarity about key issues affecting early years practitioners and primary English teachers.

The book brings together key extracts from classic and contemporary writing and contextualises these in both theoretical and practical terms. The extracts are accompanied by a summary of the key ideas and issues raised, questions to promote discussion and reflective practice, and annotated further reading lists to extend thinking.

Taking a thematic approach and including a short introduction to each theme, the chapters cover:

• Models of and approaches to early years and primary English;
• Speaking and listening in English lessons: story-telling, drama, 'booktalk' and debate;
• Reading and responding to texts in English lessons;
• Writing in English lessons: finding a 'voice';
• Knowledge about language: grammar, spelling, punctuation and handwriting;
• The rich landscape of children's literature;
• Non-fiction in English lessons;
• Planning, assessing and recording children's progress: the learning cycle.

Aimed at trainee and newly qualified teachers, those working towards Masters level qualifications and all those involved in the teaching of early years and primary English, this accessible, but critically provocative text will be an essential resource for those that wish to deepen their understanding of early years and primary English education.

CHAPTER

1	Models of and approaches to Early Years and primary English

Introduction

In this chapter I take the term ‘model’ to refer to a set of principles and beliefs which guide what we do day by day. Whenever teachers plan a lesson, that plan will be influenced by the principles and beliefs they carry with them. When we think about models of English teaching we can learn from what writers have said in the past. So this chapter starts in Section 1, Extract 1, with John Dixon’s particularly clear and helpful analysis. His book Growth Through English has informed approaches to English lessons on both sides of the Atlantic since it was first published in 1967. It was one outcome of the lectures, talks and fruitful interactions between British and American delegates at a conference in America known as the Dartmouth Seminar, which had taken place the previous year. He identifies three models – a ‘skills’ model, a ‘cultural heritage’ model and a ‘personal growth’ model. Each model emphasises a different element of the English curriculum: the debate about how to combine these elements into a single coherent model continues.

But what about children’s learning and experience in early childhood before they come to school? In Section 2, approaches valuing the important role of play in early childhood are considered. James Britton’s inspirational article ‘The role of fantasy’, Extract 2, makes the important link between children’s play in their earliest years and their later enjoyment of all things cultural including art, music and literature. Stories – those that children read, write for themselves or have read to them – as well as poems, plays and improvisations are near the centre of the English curriculum for all age groups. Britton’s link between early play and this later learning and enjoyment is an important one for those who teach and those who learn in English lessons.

What is at the very heart of English? In Section 3, Extract 3, Britton and Newsome identify what they believe to be at the centre of English lessons for all age groups. They begin by drawing attention to the inner representation of the world, or ‘world picture’, we all carry around with us. We can use this ‘world picture’ to operate as ‘participants’ in the real world; simple examples here would be getting from place to place on a journey or making a cake. This way of using our ‘world picture’ is crucial for managing everyday activities and is also important in most curriculum subjects. However, we can use this inner representation of the world in a different way as ‘spectators’ in activities involving reflecting, improvising and musing on this ‘world picture’. These activities take place when we write, when we talk to others and when we read all kinds of literature. For Britton and Newsome, activities and their associated language in the ‘spectator role’ are the essence of English lessons. Still in Section 3, Extract 4, Marian Whitehead argues convincingly for the value to children of becoming ‘spectators of fiction’ and points to the likely cumulative benefits to the imagination of listening to and reading stories and rhymes. But, of course, the cultural context in which children live and learn is constantly changing and the range of media and texts to choose from is wider and richer than was the case when Dixon and Britton were writing; the inspiration innovative texts and new media encourage are very much part of Teresa Cremin’s vision of creative English teaching explored in Extract 5 in Section 4. New texts and constantly developing media are a theme throughout the book and particularly in Chapter 6 ‘The rich landscape of children’s literature’.

Few teachers or those writing about English teaching today would propose exclusively following one of Dixon’s models – ‘skills’, ‘ cultural heritage’ or even ‘personal growth’ – although they might lean towards one of them. Section 4 considers new approaches which are united by a belief that it is a child’s creativity and urge to make sense and learn that should be nurtured and developed. For the age groups at the heart of this book, a ‘creative’ approach is desirable across the curriculum. Here, though, the extract I have chosen, from Teaching English Creatively, considers the implication of a ‘creative’ approach in English lessons. The editor and contributor to the book, Teresa Cremin, integrates what many would feel is the best from each of the Dixon models. She teases out those elements in the English curriculum that require the teaching and learning of skills, although for her the mastery of spelling, punctuation and grammar and the language knowledge this entails involves more than drills and mechanical learning. The emphasis she and other leading writers from this generation place on quality texts of all kinds and on the wider media gathers in the strengths of the ‘cultural heritage’ model. However, the newer version is richer and includes digital texts and quality books from across the world. Cremin’s ‘creativity’ model with its emphasis on children’s active exploring of ideas and their imaginative engagement with literature and their own talk and writing is perhaps closest to the ‘personal growth’ model. Without referring to Dixon’s writing directly, it also helps us address some of the possible limitations of this model, limitations of which Dixon is himself aware.

The ideas and insights in the extracts in this chapter will, I believe, help teachers to reflect on current debates about the English curriculum, whether they work in an Early Years or a primary classroom.

Section 1: Models of English teaching

Extract 1

Source

Dixon, J. (1975, 3rd edn) Growth Through English: Set in the Perspective of the Seventies. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the National Association for the Teaching English, 3–4, 7, 13.

This extract is taken from the third edition of John Dixon’s seminal work published in 1975. The first edition, published in 1967, was an outcome of a seminar held in Dartmouth, Alabama in the previous year. Here teachers and academics from Britain and North America worked to find a way of defining what is meant when we refer to ‘English’ as a classroom subject. John Dixon captures the complexity of this task: ‘English is a quicksilver among metals – mobile, living and elusive. Its conflicting emphases challenge us today to look for a new coherent definition.’ Three models were identified by the participants in the seminar. First, a ‘skills’ model, which emphasises the acquisition of all those things needed to read, write and spell. The problem here was to do with what a narrow interpretation left out. The second model, the ‘cultural heritage’ model, saw a main contribution of the English lesson as the passing on of a canon of great literature to successive generations, a canon which would provide models for children’s own writing. Again, the main problem was with an over-emphasis on one aspect of English, as Dixon explains in the extract before homing in on the ‘personal growth’ model he favours.

During the skills era this was stretched till the operations specific to the written system of language became the centre of English. The heritage era put ‘skills’ in their place as a means to an end. But it failed to reinterpret the concept of ‘skills’ and thus left an uneasy dualism in English teaching. Literature itself tended to be treated as a given, a ready made structure that we imitate and a content that is handed over to us. And this attitude infected composition and all work in language. There was a fatal inattention to the processes involved in such everyday activities as talking and thinking things over, writing a diary or a letter home, even enjoying a TV play. Discussion was virtually ignored, as we know to our cost today on both sides of the Atlantic. In other words, the part of the map that relates a man’s language to his experience was largely unexplored. (Think of the trivial essay topics that still result from this ignorance.) The purposes and pressures that language serves tended to be reduced to a simple formula – a lump sum of inheritance…

It was for this reason that members of the Seminar moved from an attempt to define ‘What English is’ – a question that throws the emphasis on nouns like skills, and proficiencies, set books, and the heritage – to a definition by process, a description of the activities we engage in through language. How important these activities may be to us personally, how deeply they may affect our attitudes to experience, is suggested by much of the best writing, drama and talk that goes on in English lessons. Here we see not only the intellectual organising of experience that goes on in other subjects, but also a parallel ordering of the feelings and attitudes with which pupils encounter life around them…

Language is learnt in operation, not by dummy runs. In English, pupils meet to share their encounters with life, and to do this effectively they move freely between dialogue and monologue – between talk, drama and writing: and literature, by bringing new voices into the classroom, adds to the store of shared experience. Each pupil takes from the store what he can and what he needs. In doing so he learns to use language to build his own representational world and works to make this fit reality as he experiences it.

Comment

Dixon sets his three models of English in an historical dimension. By this I mean that he associates the models in their more rigorous form with particular historical and social contexts. The ‘skills’ model was taken up in the elementary schools established in significant numbers after the 1870 Education Reform Act where becoming literate was the priority and the approach tended to be mechanistic. Large classes sat formally at desks and carried out drills and tasks. The ‘cultural heritage’ model notably held sway in many of the state grammar schools established by the 1944 Education Act: a canon of what were thought to be the finest literary texts dominated English lessons. These two approaches limited children’s experience in English lessons, in one case by over-emphasising skills and in the other by being restricted to a relatively narrow range of texts. Dixon favours a model, the ‘personal growth’ model, that puts children at the centre of their learning in English lessons. At the heart of this approach is the children’s response to literature and the organisation of their thoughts, ideas and feelings in talk and writing. The model could inform teaching of all age phases and was very much in the progressive spirit of the Plowden Report (1967). Current approaches, in the UK at least, as we shall see later when considering Cremin’s ‘creative’ approach to English, are often founded on the ‘personal growth’ model. But, as is nearly always the case with models and approaches, the ‘personal growth’ model has been criticised. Some, for example Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, have considered that Dixon, along with others sympathetic to what have been termed ‘reader-response theories’, moved too far in accepting the validity of children’s subjective understanding of texts, even when these understandings were not compatible with the author’s intentions (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996: 26–7). Reader-response theory will be considered in Chapter 6, ‘The rich landscape of children’s literature’. On reflecting on his earlier views, Dixon himself considered that participant kinds of language, language to do with operating in the real world rather than the world of the imagination, in English lessons were at risk of being neglected if the ‘personal growth’ model was followed to the letter.

Questions to discuss with colleagues

1. What do you think was valuable in the ‘skills’ and ‘cultural heritage’ models? How might they be adapted to deserve a place as part of the English curriculum today?

2. How broadly would you define the ‘skills’ element in English in the light of new technology?

3. What do you think are the strengths and limitations of the ‘personal growth’ model as described by John Dixon?

4. Dixon felt later on that he had neglected ‘participant’ activities in the English lesson. With reference to your age phase suggest how you might introduce and develop a topic

a. involving children in research and debate;

b. writing factual accounts for the class or school magazine.

(See Section 3 for more about ‘participant role’ and ‘spectator role’ activities and language.)

Section 2: Play as the forerunner of cultural activity and the enjoyment of stories, drama and art

Extract 2

Source

Britton, J.N. (1971) The role of fantasy. English in Education, 5 (3), 42–3, 44.

Much has been written about the role of play in the learning of young children. In his article ‘The role of fantasy’ James Britton makes the link between early play and cultural activities of all kinds which come later on. He reminds us that play is essentially a voluntary activity and that although there may be images of the real world in children’s play, the credibility of what they pretend is not a main concern. Britton sees the arts, including literature, as highly organised forms of play.

I want to see play, then, as an area of free activity lying between the world of shared and verifiable experience and the world of inner necessity – a ‘third area’, as Donald Winnicott has called it (1971: 102–3). The essential purpose of activity in this area for the individual will be to relate for himself inner necessity with the demands of the external world. The more the images that clothe inner instinctual needs enter into the play activity, directly or indirectly, and the more they engage and relate to images from the world of shared experience, the more effectively, it seems to me, is the activity achieving its assimilative function. In the range of activities that come into the category of play as we have defined it, some will take up more of the demands of the inner world and are likely for that reason to include features that are inconsistent with our everyday notions of reality. It is activities towards that end of the scale that we shall most readily, and rightly, call ‘fantasy’, whether they are children’s own creations or the stories they read…

Culture, the common pool of humanity, offers the young child witches and fairy godmothers, symbols which may embody and work upon the hate and love that are part of a close, dependent relationship: he will read of witches and tell stories of his own that arise directly from his needs. In doing so, he performs an assimilative task, working towards a more harmonious relationship between inner needs and external demands. Culture offers him, at a later stage perhaps, Alice in Wonderland, which among other matters must certainly be concerned, if covertly, with s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Models of and Approaches to Early Years and Primary English
• Chapter 2: Speaking and Listening in English Lessons: Story-Telling, Drama, Booktalk and Debate
• Chapter 3: Reading and Responding to Texts in English Lessons
• Chapter 4: Writing in English Lessons: Finding a Voice
• Chapter 5: Knowledge about Language: Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation and Handwriting
• Chapter 6: The Rich Landscape of Children’s Literature
• Chapter 7: Non-Fiction Literature in English Lessons
• Chapter 8: Planning, Assessing and Recording Progress in English: The Learning Cycle
• Index