Curriculum and Assessment in English 11 to 19

A Better Plan

John Richmond, Andrew Burn, Peter Dougill, Angela Goddard, Mike Raleigh, Peter Traves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351856225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Curriculum and Assessment in English 11 to 19: A Better Plan provides an overview of the subject in considerable breadth and depth, and offers a clear, balanced and forceful critique of the current English curriculum and its associated examinations for 11- to 19-year-olds in England, and of developments in the area during the past thirty years.

The book restates fundamental truths about how students speak, read and write English with confidence and control. It describes how English can be taught most effectively, calls for an urgent review of some aspects of the current National Curriculum and its examination arrangements, and – crucially – proposes viable alternatives. This invaluable resource for those working in English, media and drama education has a wide perspective and takes a principled and informed pedagogical approach.

Based on a series of much-admired booklets released by the UKLA in 2015, this accessible guide to both theory and practice will be of interest to teachers, student teachers, teacher-educators, advisers and policy-makers in the UK and internationally.

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1 Talk

John Richmond

Summary of main points

Speech, and attention to speech through listening, are fundamental to learning.

The spoken language is the mode of language from which competence in all the other modes springs. Literacy could not have come into being historically without the prior existence of speech; it cannot take root and flourish in the human competence of every potentially literate person without that prior existence.

The teacher has a crucial role in guiding learners’ use of the spoken language and in setting contexts in which learners can practise and extend their competence in spoken language through acts of learning.

To be productive, group talk – in groups of whatever size – needs a clear structure and purpose, which it is the teacher’s responsibility to provide. That structure and that purpose may be very simple: one open question and a time limit. Or it may be more complex, involving a series of tasks to be undertaken. Sometimes the teacher will be an active participant in learners’ talk, sometimes not.

Group talk may well involve the other modes of language: reading and writing. But it should not become an automatic preliminary to writing. Talk should be regarded as work of equivalent status and seriousness to other kinds of work.

A key aspect of the teacher’s skill is in setting tasks for learners which make demands at the edge of but not beyond the reach of students’ existing state of knowledge or grasp of concepts. When that happens, the value of collaborative talk, in terms of insights gained and difficulties overcome, may most clearly be seen.

Student talk should, over time, embrace a range of purposes and take a range of forms, from the more exploratory through to the more presentational, from the more tentative to the more declaratory, from the more collaborative to the more individual.

Some 17 per cent of the UK school population now speak English as an additional language. These speakers range from new arrivals speaking no or very little English to advanced bi- or multilingual speakers who outperform their monolingual English peers. Support for these learners should take the form of an adapted version of the means by which teachers support the development of monolingual English speakers, not a different kind of pedagogy.

The teacher’s approach to learners who have access to a variety or varieties of English other than Standard English must be based on respect for the language of the learner’s culture and community. In the secondary school, it is also possible and quite legitimate for teachers to introduce students to the standard equivalents of non-standard forms they use in their everyday speech. This is best done in the context of the study of language variety itself.

The government’s new legal requirements on the spoken language are over-preoccupied with formal and presentational uses of the spoken language in the secondary years. The alternative curriculum in Chapter 9 offers a better balance between the more individual and formal and the more collaborative and exploratory uses of the spoken language.

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Voices from the past

Seven admirers on learning to talk

Linguists, psychologists and educationists compete with each other in expressions of wonderment at the intellectual achievement of almost all children in the first two or three years of life. Here is Roger Brown, the American social psychologist and expert in children’s language development, writing in 1968:

Most children, by the time they are ready to begin school, know the full contents of an introductory text in transformational grammar. One such text is a bit more than 400 pages long and it covers declaratives and interrogatives, affirmatives and negatives, actives and passives, simple sentences, conjoined sentences and some kinds of embedded sentences. The preschool child knows all this. Not explicitly, of course. He has not formulated his grammatical knowledge and he cannot talk about it in transformational or any other terms. His knowledge is implicit, implicit in the range of sentences he understands and in the range he is able to construct.

(Brown, 1968: v)

Here is Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, writing in the early 1930s (but published in English in 1962) and referring to the work of the German psychologist William Stern:

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the most important discovery [made by previous investigators about the genetic roots of thought and speech] is that at a certain moment at about the age of two the curves of development of thought and speech, till then separate, meet and join to initiate a new form of behavior. Stern’s [1914] account of this momentous event was the first and the best. He showed how the will to conquer language follows the first dim realization of the purpose of speech, when the child ‘makes the greatest discovery of his life’, that ‘each thing has its name’. [We might add that, for the bi- or multilingual child, each thing has more than one name.]

This crucial instant, when speech begins to serve intellect, and thoughts begin to be spoken, is indicated by two unmistakable objective symptoms: (1) the child’s sudden, active curiosity about words, his question about every new thing, ‘What is this?’ and (2) the resulting rapid . . . increases in his vocabulary.

(Vygotsky, 1962: 43)

Here is Korney Chukovsky, the Russian children’s poet, in a work published in English in 1963:

To be sure, in order to learn language, the child imitates adults in his word creativity. It would be nonsense to claim that he adds to a language in any way. Without suspecting it himself, he directs all his efforts, by means of analogies, toward assimilating the linguistic riches gradually developed by many generations of adults. But the young child adapts these analogies with such skill, with such sensitivity to the meaning and significance of the elements from which words are formed, that it is impossible not to be enthralled by the power of his understanding, awareness, and memory, so apparent in the very arduous efforts he makes every time he speaks.

(Chukovsky, 1963, quoted in Rosen and Rosen, 1973: 55)

Here is Michael Halliday, the British-born linguist, in his famous 1975 study of his son’s language development, Learning How to Mean:

It seems sensible to assume that neither the linguistic system itself, nor the learning of it by the child, can be adequately expressed except by reference to some higher level of semiotic organisation [by which Halliday means a system-based resource for meaning] . . . The child’s task is to construct the system of meanings that represents his own model of social reality. This process takes place inside his own head; it is a cognitive process. But it takes place in contexts of social interaction, and there is no way it can take place except in these contexts. As well as being a cognitive process, the learning of the mother tongue is also an interactive process. It takes the form of the continued exchange of meanings between self and others. The act of meaning is a social act.

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(Halliday, 1975: 139–140)

And here is James Britton, the British educationist, writing in 1970:

It is, everyone agrees, a colossal task that the child accomplishes when he learns to speak, and the fact that he does so in so short a period of time challenges explanation. We can imagine ourselves cast up on a remote island and living with people whose language we did not know, whose alphabet we could not read: in the course of time, in the course of a great deal of activity where action and speech have gone together, we might succeed in resolving the stream of spoken sound into segments with meaning – given of course that we have infinite curiosity and patience and that the people around us have infinite patience and goodwill! But the endless streams of undifferentiated sound represent only one of two problems that face an infant learning his mother tongue. There is for him also the endless stream of undifferentiated experience. This is something we can imagine only imperfectly, for once in any language we have organized experience to form an objectified world we can never reverse the process.

(Britton, 1970: 36–37)

It was Andrew Wilkinson who coined the term ‘oracy’, and proposed in 1965 that oracy is to speaking and listening what literacy is to writing and reading. Wilkinson extended his definition as follows:

Oracy comes from practice in specific situations, whether these occur naturally in the classroom, or elsewhere, or are created as a specific teaching device. It is helped by unconscious invitation, it is stimulated by the response of others, and speech becomes clear in the necessity of communication. The main job of the teacher is to provide situations which call forth increasing powers of utterance [and, we might add, of comprehension].

(Wilkinson with Davies and Atkinson, 1965: 63)

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Our final admirer is one who qualifies her admiration with a warning: it is that we should not be so overwhelmed by this admiration for the preschool child’s achievement in learning spoken language that we assume that the job is done by the time the child comes to school. The job is very far from done. Katharine Perera, in Children’s Writing and Reading: Analysing Classroom Language (1984), which despite its title has plenty to say about spoken language too, has a chapter on the acquisition of grammar. This shows, with detailed examples, that development towards mastery of more complex grammatical structures continues throughout the school years. Perera concludes the chapter thus:

During the Seventies, it was commonplace for books on language acquisition to suggest that, apart from vocabulary, children had virtually completed the learning of their mother tongue by the age of five; for example, Slobin (1971: 40) wrote: ‘a little child . . . masters the exceedingly complex structure of his native language in the course of a short three or four years’ . . .

although children have acquired a remarkable amount of language by the time they start school, the developmental process continues, albeit at a slower rate, until they are in their teens. [For the speaker of English as an additional language, we might add, the developmental process may begin at any time during schooling.]

There are many grammatical constructions that are more likely to occur after five than before – some, indeed, that are not at all frequent until adolescence.

(Perera, 1984: 156)

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Five points of agreement

Whatever detailed differences there may be between the many thinkers who have studied early language development, there is agreement on at least these five points:

1 ‘Language’ and ‘thought’ are not two words to describe the same thing, either in a new-born baby’s head or at all. However, a moment (or perhaps a series of moments, or perhaps a period) arrives when the two become linked and interpenetrating in the child’s conscious and unconscious mental activities. This linkage is immensely significant, and an essential gateway to future learning.

2 The learning of spoken language is not merely a continuing act of imitation. Imitation is there, to be sure, but far more powerful is the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Curriculum and Assessment in English 11 to 19
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Talk
• 2 Reading 11 to 16
• 3 Writing 11 to 16
• 4 Grammar and Knowledge About Language
• 5 Drama
• 6 Media
• 7 Learners of English as an Additional Language
• 8 Speakers of Non-Standard Varieties of English
• 9 An Alternative Curriculum for English 11 to 16: Andrew Burn Has Written the Proposals on Media
• 10 Assessment and Examinations at 16
• 11 English 16 to 19
• References: The Combined Reference List for this Book and its Sister Volume, Curriculum and Assessment in English 3 to 11: A Better Plan, is Available Online at www.Routledge.Com/9780415784498.
• Index