Touchstones as sprezzatura: the significance of attachment to teacher literary formation

A touchstone is a smooth dark stone that, when rubbed against gold and silver, proves the metal's quality. Figuratively, it has come to signify ‘that which serves to test or try the genuineness of anything’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Here I consider why certain literary ‘touchstones’ of teachers are more formative than others. This leads to an exploration of the close association between the aesthetics of literary response and the sprezzatura of childhood reading. The pedagogical question of involving teachers and teacher educators in critical reflection on their practices should begin with these formative stories.     

Reading the Local and Global: Teaching Literature in Secondary Schools in Australia

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia’s place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the recently published Australian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of ‘enduring artistic and cultural value’ that are drawn from ‘world and Australian literature’. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ have when young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers’ and students’ interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a ‘literary’ education, whether conceived in ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘global’ terms, have in the twenty-first century?     

大学英语写作训练在大学英语课文教学中的渗透

英语写作能力是大学生必须具备的一项重要语言技能,但如何通过课时有限的大学英语课堂教学来提高学生的英语写作能力,历来都是大学英语教师必须面对和研究的难题。鉴于阅读和写作之间的密切关系,经过教学实践和探索,有目的地利用大学英语课文教学来适时渗透写作知识、写作技巧,并尽可能围绕课文学习的内容和素材来设计作文题目,是一种能有效训练和培养大学生写作能力的可取方法。     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

‘Coherence at Last’: Percival Gurrey’s Contribution to English

Reacting to incoherent English teaching in the 1930s, Percival Gurrey probed the psychological processes involved in literary appreciation. He sought ways of teaching poetry that avoided lifeless tasks such as labelling ‘poetic devices’. Later, in the 1950s, he wrote about the processes involved in learning to write. At a time when psychology dominated educational discourse, he was in touch with new developments in both literary criticism and linguistics, and he evolved a bridging theory of language, learning and development that spanned philosophy, psychology and literary theory. I connect Gurrey’s sense of wholeness of response to his reading in Coleridge. By returning to debates surrounding Coleridge I show how a new appreciation of what language accomplishes emerged. Gurrey discovered that writing has a central place in children’s development as a whole. From such hard-won discoveries a unified theory of development in talking, reading and writing duly emerged.     

Normalizing literary responses in the teacher education classroom

In this essay, the authors present analyses of data emerging from a study of a classroom of pre‐service English language arts teachers' readings of a young adult novel that challenged normative sexuality stereotypes. They argue that when literary fictions are included within teacher education ‘methods’ courses, the possibility that literature might support generative learning is eroded by the normative structures of teacher education, particularly those pedagogical beliefs and practices that separate discourses of experience from discourses of knowledge. The authors offer a brief overview of studies of human consciousness, with particular attention to how literary experiences can contribute to its development. They suggest that the identities that co‐emerge with conscious awareness are structured by normalizing discourses instantiated within teacher education methods courses. The essay concludes with a discussion of how the conscious awareness of beginning English teachers might be more expansively developed within pre‐service teacher education.     

Reading Between the Lines of Reader Response: Constructing ‘the Other’ through the Aesthetic Stance

In this article, the author challenges English teachers of literature to examine applications of reader response theory in teaching reading which posit that readers approach a text from two stances: ‘aesthetic’ (emotional) or ‘efferent’ (literal). The essay presents a case study of pre‐service English teachers and adolescents’ web‐based discussions about a work of young adult fiction based on a transgendered character. The study highlights how the pre‐service teachers’ framing of questions about the book provoked the adolescents to adopt an aesthetic stance with the text that effectively ‘othered’ transgenderism, leaving potential opportunities for critical reflection and analysis of gender and sexuality unexamined.     

Building reading resilience: re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

This paper introduces the concept of ‘reading resilience’: students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: ‘setting the scene’ for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students’ demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.     

Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’: Reflections on the Secondary English Classroom

English teachers select texts for the edifying qualities they possess: a good poem, novel or film can act both as a window looking out over different lives and as a powerful mirror for reflection. When teachers reflect on their professional practice, however, they generally look to education theory, to research or to action learning strategies. But if great works of literature strengthen a student’s empathetic, critical and reflective capacities, they can do the same for the English teachers who prescribe them. The article does not advocate for a rejection of pedagogical expertise in favour of pure literary criticism, but it does consider that these two aspects of English teaching can be brought together for the purposes of professional reflection and development. Using William Wordsworth’s lyric ‘We Are Seven’ as an example, it aims to illustrate how a close reading of the poem leads naturally and effectively from an analysis of content to more general considerations of why and how we teach.     

Missing Something: A Review Essay on Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History

ABSTRACT

This is a review essay of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. I interrogate many of North’s claims, most notably his argument about the way a shift from literary criticism to literary scholarship has blunted the capacity of people working in literary studies to engage in a socially critical praxis. I use his book as an occasion to explore the relationship between literary studies (as ‘knowledge’) and the meaning-making that occurs within English classrooms when students engage with the texts chosen for study. I argue that North’s failure to make connections between English teaching and the literary critical projects of people like I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams ultimately limits the reach of his book. For each of these critics, literary criticism was deeply embedded in an educational project that extended far beyond the confines of the academy, and their literary criticism might usefully be reread in these terms.     

‘An Invested Interest in Language’: Literary Practice in Secondary Classrooms

This essay draws on the work of Raymond Williams in identifying a shift from the attempt to have students engage with literary texts in personal terms to a concern, founded on theoretical innovation, that they should read at a more sophisticated level in order to discern the ideology of a given text. It argues that what Williams calls an ‘expressivist’ view of texts needs to be reconciled with, rather than displaced by, a ‘formalist’ conception of them. It finds that high-stakes examinations reward a focus on abstracted ideological concerns at the expense of responsiveness to language and form. Exploration of the work of a teacher whose career has spanned this shift identifies ways in which she has, in meeting the challenges of the classroom and of theory, sustained a professional practice that has informed and motivated her students’ engagement with literary texts.     

Teaching and Assessing Writing: an Australian Perspective

This article examines issues of writing instruction and assessment as they relate to an approach to English language education that has been developed in Australia. The approach, put forward by proponents of genre theory, is underpinned by the argument that it is essential for all teachers, and especially English teachers, to have a ‘metalanguage’ about language education. The expectation is that such a metalanguage makes it possible for teachers and students to develop shared understandings of how written and spoken language works in their various forms. The related argument is that the teacher represents an authoritative (as distinct from authoritarian) language user in the classroom and is responsible for teaching the linguistic characteristics of texts as well as the relationship between texts and the cultural and social contexts in which they are produced and received. In this article I examine the ‘genre’ position and consider its relevance to the business of teaching, learning and assessing in the English classroom.     

Professional competences to teach English at primary schools in Turkey: a Delphi study

This research aimed to uncover the teacher competences that are necessary to provide age-appropriate English language teaching to primary school students in Turkey. The Delphi technique was implemented to propose a list of competences created through consensus among a panel of experts that consisted of 15 teachers and 16 teacher educators. The data were collected by administering three questionnaires in three rounds. Central tendency and consensus were measured through median and inter-quartile range, respectively. The findings led to a list of 29 teacher competences which were categorised into five groups: ‘theoretical and practical knowledge’, ‘knowing the young learner’, ‘planning and organising teaching’, ‘managing teaching’, and ‘competence in English’. Implications were made for improving the effectiveness of English language teaching to young learners: these included the design of pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes to equip teachers with the necessary skills and knowledge to teach English to young learners.     

高中英语新课程改革背景下阅读教学策略探微

高中英语阅读在英语教学中起着重要的作用,是英语学习过程中极为重要的组成部分。在高中英语阅读教学中,教师存在对阅读教学理论研究不足、缺乏语篇分析意识、缺失背景知识的介绍、缺乏必要的阅读技巧指导的现状;学生存在阅读习惯不良、有效阅读量不够、阅读品质欠佳的现状。通过对图式理论、语篇分析理论和建构主义理论与英语阅读的相关性研究后认为：教师在阅读教学中应注重语篇模式教学,构建课文整体教学观;运用阅读策略指导学生提高分析问题、解决问题的能力;增加课外阅读量,增强语言的输入量,形成良好的英语语感,拓宽英语知识面和间接生活经验;借助于多媒体现代教育技术再现相关英语文化背景知识,丰富学生的内容图式,激发学生的阅读兴趣,增强其理解、分析、推理和鉴赏力,提高其综合语言运用能力。     

The Potential Cultural Differences in Native-speaker Teacher’s Language Classroom

While the majority of nonnative speaker English teachers teach alongside NS teachers,research on the role of native speaker English teachers in China’s teaching context and the attitudes of university students towards them have been rarely conducted.This essay discusses the implications of cultural differences for the language classroom,and the different cultures of learning with regard to language teaching and learning in China and the Wes.The conclusion suggests that it is of great importance to have a good sense of cultural awareness and an open mind for cultural interactions,in order to benefit both language learners and native speaker teachers in the cross-cultural classroom.     

大学英语教学中文学审美意识的价值指向和实践探索

文学审美意识的培养对大学英语教学具有重要价值和意义。学生是文学审美的主体,教师是指导员。在教学实践中,教师要遵循美学规律,善于借助多元手段使语言教学和文学审美有机融合,才能最终达到培养学生文学审美意识的目的。     

回归文学经典的“教”与“学”——高校中国语言文学专业教学改革的方向

当前中国语言文学专业教学存在的问题,是过分注重"概论"、"通史"的教学,而不重视经典原著(理论作品、语言学作品、文学作品),特别是古代经典原著的阅读与教学。教学改革的方向应该是回归经典文本的教与学。这样则能摆脱目前的教学困境,使教师愿意讲,学生喜欢学,既可拓展教师的研究视域,亦可开阔学生的学习视野,从而让学生真正学有所得,嚼出"原典"的滋味来。经典常常是意识形态的凝结,"回归经典"为旨趣的教学改革,就不能不从我们今天时代的需要出发,对经典进行必要的选择。     

高校英语教学要创新教学方法,提高学生的综合能力

随着社会主义市场经济的进一步发展和经济全球化进程的深化,社会对学生的英语水平提出了更高的要求。高校大学生不仅要具备良好的专业素质,更是要具备良好的综合能力,这就要求高校教师在英语教学过程中要革新教育理念,创新教学方法,培养学生对英语语言的综合运用能力。本文在分析当前高校英语教学现状及存在问题的基础上,探讨了高校英语教学应该如何进行教学方法创新,促进学生英语综合能力的提高。     

Selection,Frequency, and Functions of Literary Texts in Finnish General Upper-Secondary EFL Education

Although the number of studies on literature in language education has increased in the past two decades, the subject is still in need of empirical research. This case study examines literary texts, their selection, frequency, and functions in Finnish general upper-secondary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education. The data was collected from 21 Finnish EFL teachers using a survey, and the content was thematically analyzed. In these contexts, literary texts had a marginal role. The texts were mostly twentieth-century poetry and novels. Selections by teachers were primarily based on the texts. Often students chose texts independently. Literature was mainly used to teach language, particularly reading skills, and secondarily as content. In light of EFL teaching, the results suggest a need for a conceptual expansion of literature, the wider use of literary texts with visual components, and the use of literary texts for developing students’ intercultural competence.     

Policy versus ground reality: secondary English language assessment system in Bangladesh

Any policy reform in education is highly effective when it is planned and implemented ‘holistically’ and yet, it is the most challenging way forward. Many countries in Asia have reformed their English language policies and syllabi in the last two decades due to the increasing value of the language worldwide. Motivated by a ‘communicative approach’ to English language teaching, Bangladesh was one of the countries that launched such a reform in the 1990s. However, this reform has been criticised for imposing the changes on teachers without preparing them sufficiently. More importantly, there is limited evidence as to how much the secondary English language assessment system is aligned with the changes introduced in the curriculum. In order to explore this gap, a medium-scale study was conducted in 38 secondary schools in Bangladesh, following a mixed methods approach. The findings highlighted a ‘mismatch’ between the intended English language learning outcomes and current assessment practices, including the resulting challenges faced by the teachers. This paper argues that language education reform is likely to fail if the assessment system is not aligned with the curriculum.