New Movements in the Study and Teaching of English [antikvár]

Introduction NICHOLAS BAGNALL We have come a long way since the teacher of English saw himself most of the time as an evangelist casting out original sin, with the great classics as his texts and draconian marking schemes his penances. At least some of us have. There are still teachers (and examiners) who set essays on a pseudo-Baconian model, exercises in uncreative writing starting with a generalisation and ending with an aphorism. There are I still some whose systems of marking are purely subtractive, as in show jumping. (A beautifully clear round - no, there's a spelling mistake in the last paragraph. Two faults. Now let's have another look at that scoreboard. . . .) The numbers of such teachers are dwindling. This book is not about them. It is about - and, to a large extent, written by - their successors. It is not, in other words, a collective jeremiad against the wicked old ways -- although that would have been easy enough - but an account of what's happening now. The first two chapters show how we got here; they are essential to an imderstanding of our present position. The now generally accepted proposition that, in English, 'all the subject-matter is ultimately personal' was, I suppose, always true even in the old, imregenerate days: those set essays one used to write were personal confessions to one's English teacher if they meant anything at all. (It was only later that they became literary excursions, taking one's vocabulary for an airing.) And of course the best prose and poetry was that which one had discovered for oneself Today, all this is openly recognised. We see the absurdity of what ^ James Britton calls 'unproductive busywork' in grammar or gobbets. To say that literature (whether the pupil merely consumes it, or actually produces it) must be for real, is almost to commit a truism. The logical implications of this discovery are another matter. ^ Once you regard English as primarily a function of personal growth rather than as a skill subject, you are in a new dimension. Making it 'relevant' to the child does not mean showing him how to pick things out from the 'Sits Vac' column and to write a nice letter of application for that job in the coimting-house; nor does it mean