You Are An English Teacher!

You Are An English Teacher! A Guide to the True Basics (For parents, pupils, pedagogues, politicians …and probably even Prime Ministers.)

By Mark Wilson

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Contents

Preface

1. The True Basics 2. Who is responsible for this! 3. What, exactly, do you mean? 4. Read me a Story? 5. The (Place) of Grammar 6. Tell Gran what you did today! 7. She can make a pen speak!

Acknowledgements

Index

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For my family.

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Preface

“I’m not going to be popular with my colleagues,” I said to my mother in law, at the supper table. “Vy Naaaht?” she protested encouragingly. “Because I intend to show kids how to spell, and use punctuation. I’ll encourage neat handwriting,” I said, “and many teachers, these days, think that’s wrong.” This was August 1988, and I was starting an English teaching post that September. The angry rumblings of the coming conflict, to be fought on the battleground of education, could already be heard. My relatively modest aspirations flew in the face of prevailing fashion, which thought that perhaps ‘fish’ might be spelt ‘ghoti’ (with the gh of laugh, the o of women, and the ti of addition). Fortunately, I was to discover there was in fact room for a wide spectrum of approaches at the ‘chalk face’ in 1988.

In tune with the tenor of the times, I had been relatively unencumbered by prescriptive training at my teachers’ college. I was given, in a manner of speaking, some simple shapes and outlines, and I could colour them in how I liked. This seemed odd to me at the time, and it certainly didn’t suit all of the students. I was looking for more instruction; I thought they really showed you what, and how, to teach. But eventually, I came to see the situation as a blessing, although not necessarily the one that was intended. One absolutely crucial piece of advice I did receive from that era was this: “Don’t think you know the kids before you meet them.”

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Following this good advice meant that I could approach the teaching of my subject from the real life perspective of my classroom, where I was prepared to meet children, with an open mind, and teach them according to their needs, rather than trying to match them with some theoretical, constantly shifting paradigm. Exam results and levels, while they can be very useful as paper qualifications, have never been as informative to me as talking to a child, hearing them read, and reading a short essay on their likes and dislikes. Another very valuable concept I took with me from college was Action Research. This is the type of research in which, instead of going somewhere, observing others, and making notes; you get fully involved over a considerable period of time, think about what you are doing - and you make notes. I didn’t call it research when I began, I called it learning how to teach English, but perhaps I am in a position to call it research now. My manner of presentation here accurately reflects the methods by which I have obtained my information: by paying attention to, and reflecting upon, my experiences as a teacher of English, and as a parent, over the past twenty years or so. You might call it a considered opinion.

I am not qualified to write a book about all varieties of teaching. I have little enough idea about what really went on, day in day out, in the Maths or Science classrooms in my own school. I can’t even say, in any definitive sense, what it was like to be a pupil in my English colleagues’ classrooms, yet they were generally less than twenty yards away, for nearly twenty years. I have, perhaps, as much of an inkling as a school inspector might have, though differently gained. I covered, watched, and discussed aspects of colleagues' lessons; and children have a habit of making their reports. Such experience

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may be useful for the odd tip or anecdote, but true research requires a more steady knowledge of actualities, I think. Neither am I an expert in the entire field of language and linguistics, I have no profound knowledge of all the intricacies of those subjects. To become an expert in such things would be, I believe, a lifetime’s work, and certainly would leave no time to become a school teacher. I do, however, know how to enjoy good conversation and discussion. I know how to enjoy texts and how to develop an understanding of a writer’s intentions and methods, and I know how to express myself in writing. Apparently, I also know how to help other people learn how to do these things for themselves, in ways that are at least somewhat enjoyable. That’s how and why I am an English teacher, and why I am qualified to write this book.

I did a year of supply before I settled into a school, working in primary schools, city comprehensives, and a more suburban setting. I also taught French, Science, and P.E. and worked with Special Needs children, on fixed term contracts. Although I was impatient to teach English, these experiences, along with the extremely valuable teaching practices, gave me a well rounded view of classrooms, and myself within them. There were no strict schemes of work in those days, particularly when it came to students and supply teachers, so I had the opportunity to discover and develop my own approach to teaching English in classrooms, with pupils. But I am most grateful to those teachers who allowed me to take over their classes while at college, and to those teachers who left good work and trusted me to teach it, conscientiously, in my own way, as a supply teacher; and to those pupils with whom I learned so much. I also want to pay tribute to the two thousand or so children, and young adults, who have passed through my own classrooms on their way to meet their destinies. Our research and

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development was not some extra activity done in times set aside, in some other place. We called it ‘English’!

Back in 1988, I was good naturedly considered, as the saying went, “Somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun”, because I wanted to teach punctuation. These days the climate could hardly be more different, and I’m somewhere to the left of that great footballer Sir Tom Finney which, due to his great versatility, and depending on your point of view, puts me anywhere from inside right to observing from a seat on the left hand touchline.1 But here’s a thing: my methods are the same today as when I began, except they’ve been developed and refined, regularly appreciated by pupils and parents, and approved by management, and by inspectors, during the intervening years. And I’m still smiling.

As an English teacher, my fundamental concern has always been: “How can we get all children from minute one of their lives, to success in the more advanced levels of English, with as much enjoyment, and as little fuss, as possible?” That’s exactly what this book is about. However, because I’ve been an English teacher for twenty years, this is not a book about ‘how to teach English’. I don’t think any real teacher would presume to write such a book, and no real teacher would want to read one. Of course, such a statement depends, quite rightly, upon one’s definition of the word ‘teacher’. My definition appears in Chapter Two. I am not sure that we all agree on, for example, working definitions of the words ‘parent’, ‘pupil’, or even the term ‘Minister of Education’ either. Undoubtedly we have the concept of the ‘biological mother’, the ‘biological father’, the egg, the test tube, the sperm bank, but do we still have a precise concept of 1

On the way to the current situation, we passed through a fairly balanced period around 1991.

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what it is to be, well, whatever it was that the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’, presumably, used to mean? Is being a ‘biological mother’ being a mother in name only? If so, then what do you understand as the total concept behind the word ‘mother’? Or father? A large part of chapter one The True Basics looks at the meaning of these particular words.

The definition of terms is an important part of this whole book which has enabled me to keep it brief, and I hope very clear. For example, within a year of becoming an English teacher, I came to refer to my subject, as Communication through Language. Put this way, most of the ideas expressed in this book are so fundamental that they have been applied without question to the learning, and subsequent development, of most ‘mother tongues’2 for centuries. The problem, today, is that this quite natural activity of teaching children their language can, for any number of excuses, be neglected. Language acquisition for children then tends to become very haphazard, and lost in a welter of ‘expert’ interference. All of this leads mainly to delay, only partial remediation, and a degree of unnecessary misery and deprivation for many children, from all walks of life.

English is not the same as other school subjects, simply because it absolutely must be learned to a considerable degree whether or not someone goes to school. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, the subject we all know and love as English is meant to be taught, in the first instance, by a child’s parents, with the wider family, and friends all as able learning support – and all without any need of formal training. I had to rediscover the importance of these basic realities for myself, in order to teach my subject satisfactorily. Having a wife and a baby daughter helped me immensely. 2

I think this term could usefully be changed to ‘family tongue’.

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There is, in fact, an unofficial English syllabus, beginning at minute one of a person’s life, which I believe really must provide the foundation for all of our formal education and especially for success in English; and this unofficial syllabus is why, whatever else you may wish to be at this time of our civilisation, if you have anything to do with children, I think you are also an English teacher. But, as our society continues to change, being an English teacher has become a responsibility which seems to be increasingly difficult for some of us to fulfil. This can be a serious problem for children, and for the adults they will become. Following the natural order of things, I will discuss this very early aspect of English teaching, in Chapter One: The True Basics. I include the word True in the title because I am aware that the phrase “The Basics” has been batted back and forth with increasing ferocity over the past twenty years, and yet has led to very little, if any, improvement in education. The reason why talking about ‘The Basics’ has had little positive effect on education is because most of the people who have been shouting about the basics don’t really understand what they are. They seem to think that being able to spell correctly, to use punctuation accurately, to read, to think, and to write essays coherently and legibly are the basic skills of English. Actually, these are quite developed skills, which children will certainly not be able to practice until they have received the true basics of English. The true basics of English should begin at around minute one of a child’s life and continue being taught at home for several years, and it is these true basics which are being neglected. I will discuss all of this in chapter one, and look at the problems many very young children face today through the lack of instruction, and I will offer possible solutions to their, and our, problems. *

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Once the true basics of teaching and learning a family tongue have been established (and they are not mysterious) it then becomes possible to discuss the development of English within schools, in terms of a coherent syllabus. When the early learning of their language is acknowledged, as it should be, as an integral part of an infant’s life (the original meaning of the word ‘infant’ is non speaker, and it is often noticeable that children who have not been taught how to express themselves in language remain relatively immature in outlook and behaviour) only then can the effective teaching of English in schools be properly managed. In devising a lasting English syllabus, we should keep in mind that using language quite quickly becomes an activity which is, potentially, at least ninety percent thought: the same basic skills, achievements and satisfactions are involved in understanding and discussing Spot Goes to the Circus by Eric Hill at age two or three, and Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, whenever we are ready. It is a matter of personal development, and therefore deep foundations in the true basics of English (discussed most fully in chapter one, but referred to throughout this book) are essential if children, and the adults they will become, are not to be disadvantaged when presented with the tasks, opportunities, and expectations in school and in later life. A closely related theme running through this book is the importance of the early, natural, trusting, and discriminating partnership created between children and parents, through early language learning. This partnership can and should pave the way for later pupil/teacher partnerships, to the benefit of all concerned. This is the main subject of Chapter Two: Who is Responsible for This!

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Defining the word teacher led me to the definition of several other key concepts when I first started out, and in a relatively short time I had a firm theoretical basis for my whole approach to teaching English. The further definition of terms is the main subject of Chapter Three: What, exactly, do you mean? Besides acknowledging and discussing the beginning of language learning, the opening three chapters also take care of most of the socio/political context, and commentary.

The three chapters: Read Me a Story? Tell Grandma What You Did Today and She Can Make a Pen Speak! provide a practical overview of the link between an infant’s learning of the fundamental skills involved in using a language, and the subsequent enjoyment, development, and refinement of those skills, which should take place within the school subject we know and love as ‘English’. And finally, no book about English would be complete without a good, unsentimental look at a chronic cause of unease about English, outside (and increasingly inside) the classroom. I’m referring to the long standing confusion of the word ‘grammar’ with just about every other element to do with language. The word ‘grammar’ definitely should not be confused with, nor allowed to usurp the positions held by: Conventions; Personal Style; the True Basics; Language itself; and even Linguistics - but it regularly is. However, it is similarly misguided to go to the other extreme and throw out every concept with which the word ‘grammar’ has been mistakenly associated – but this also happens.

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This ongoing and very unsatisfactory situation is what has perpetuated the pernicious grammar wars (sadly this is an actual term within the academic world) which have had such a detrimental effect on schools over the years. Therefore, the place of grammar is an extremely interesting and controversial topic in English, and I will be looking at it in detail in Chapter Five. You will find it nestled right in amongst the chapters on Speaking and Listening; Reading; and Writing, like a cuckoo’s egg. But to do all of this effectively I must begin at, what appears to me to be, the beginning. *

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Chapter One: The True Basics

The subject we all know and love by the name of English involves helping children to develop the skills of Speaking and Listening, Reading, and Writing. These skills are currently known, in the state system, under the code names: En1; En2; and En3 respectively. And that is fine. When discussing school subjects, I think it’s essential to have in mind, from the very beginning - in the case of English from minute one of a person’s life - and quite succinctly, what you actually want children to be able to do when they leave you. That is, a commonly understood destination, represented by tasks (and there may be many suitable choices) of sufficient width, and depth, that a grading will communicate clearly to pupils, and to all concerned, their distinct current levels of ability in Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening. Right away, you will realize that everybody should be taking the same exam, which is currently not the case.

Perhaps you would agree that if, by the age of seventeen or eighteen, young adults could read King Lear and analyse it with classmates, teachers and any other interested party; present a twenty minute talk on a related topic – say, the treatment of old people in various cultures; and respond to an essay assignment beginning, or ending, with the word Discuss (for example: Discuss the Importance of Eyesight in King Lear) with a 3000 word essay, which was: always focused on the task; clearly expressed; well organized and well presented; intelligibly punctuated, and correctly spelt; well

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referenced; and included an interesting personal response; they’d be doing excellently in the subject I’ve come to refer to as ‘Communication Through Language’? I don’t think you would be disappointed. And if they can do these things (discussed in subsequent chapters) they will certainly be able to read, analyse, and sit exams on all sorts of other texts; from letters to diaries; recipes to handbooks; newspaper articles to web pages, and poetry to polemics. They will be able to write critical analyses and appreciations on all of these, as well as create their own examples; for these are all conventional uses of language and natural inclusions in an English syllabus, culminating in a close study of Shakespearean tragedy. The ‘King Lear’ task is straightforward. It is not the most difficult task we could come up with, but, because Shakespeare has written some of the most demanding, yet rewarding, texts, dealing with universal themes, it’s probably one of the most compact and complete; with a wide scope for showing one’s ability with En 1, 2 and 3. (A more difficult task would be one which required the same level of response to an inferior text.) All school leavers should be able to understand, and attempt, the same kind of tasks in, for example, History and Science: a concept widely known as language across the curriculum since the nineteen seventies, and tacitly for several centuries before that, I suspect. But each discipline has its own particular style with language, the teaching of which should also form a natural and important part of the syllabus. And, by the way, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t start a sentence with ‘but’ either.

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Given the proper chance, children from all walks of life will at least be equipped to attempt all of this; and, I suggest, the differences between their levels of success will be mainly a matter of their personal willingness to engage with such tasks; which, in turn, will depend upon their individual interests, degree of personal responsibility, and their perceived purposes in life. This book is also about proper chance. *** Once we have come up with a suitable destination for our children, the next question must be: How do we get them there? Depending upon the political era in which we live, this concept has either been, or has not been, partially expressed as an official Syllabus. The absence of a coherent list of essentials (a syllabus) was very noticeable when I first looked for teaching jobs in the mid eighties. I enquired, once, where handwriting fitted into the scheme of things at a particular school, and was briskly informed that if a child wants to write something badly enough, they will find a way. So, I asked what action we should take if a child wants to write something ‘goodly’ enough. The seeds of this book were being sown, and the subsequent twenty years or so have provided a mountain of fertilizer. My next host seemed slightly embarrassed at not having a syllabus: tacitly communicating that such things were frowned upon at the time. And finally, a syllabus from a previous political era was found in a drawer in the English office - it was actually entitled ‘English Syllabus’ - and I was told that, by all means, I could refer to it if I wanted to. And for all the current fashion for rigour and robustness, we have no definitive, coherent English syllabus even today. What we have is a growing stack of ring binders

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and booklets full of frequently revised recommendations and suggestions covering almost every concept and opinion available. That’s not actually a syllabus; it’s a gargantuan lump of clay that someone seems to be calling a sculpture. It seems that the journey itself has become the destination. When this happens we travel hopefully, and lifelong, but never arrive, which may sound wonderful, unless, that is, you are simply on your way to the airport, as school children are. I think the main reason why official syllabuses have not survived the vagaries of political fashion (which, incidentally, education needs to be placed above as quickly as possible) is because there can never really be an official syllabus which addresses, in sufficient detail, the crucial first five years of a person’s life. But it’s all very fine to point out the failings of a system; what are we to do? *

In the normal course of events, communication through language begins around minute one of a human being’s life, perhaps even earlier. The very first of the skills of En 1, 2 and 3 to be approached in a teaching and learning sense would seem to be the Speaking and Listening parts. A mother is almost certainly going to be giving her new born child a multi media communication fest, which will include some of her own skills in Speaking, and will make use of her baby’s ability to hear, who may well be expressing themselves and responding in some fashion as well. The other things a mother is likely to be doing at the same time: smiling, cuddling, will encourage hearing to become Listening by providing an appropriate context for her

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words and sounds. (Context is always crucial to communication through language, and can be manifested in a variety of ways. The importance of context will be evident throughout this book.) Meanwhile, if stories of babies, deprived of parental attention and, in extreme cases, kept locked up in cages for twenty years, creep into your mind, please keep them there for the duration of this journey. There’s an ancient Jewish phrase I like to keep in mind. I read about it in Leo Rosten’s Hooray For Yiddish! (Subtitled: A Book About English) and it goes like this: One mother can do as much as a hundred teachers. That’s certainly worth consideration, no? People I’ve discussed the unofficial English syllabus, the true basics, with have reminded me that mothers are often communicating with their children before they are actually born into this world. However, discussing this with school children, they tell me of cousins, brothers, and sisters who are abandoned at a very early age to computers, cartoon DVDs and television, and who cannot read or write at all at age five or six. School children think this is a poor state of affairs, and frequently tell me so. *

Though I do believe in the existence of common knowledge, and common sense, it is probably not scientifically provable that, in our society, everyone is capable of imagining for example: waiting excitedly for a child’s first word; showing them picture books; reading to them; telling them stories at bedtime; giving them colours, pens, paper and pencils, and showing them how they work; telling them the names of people, places and things; devising imaginative reinforcements and repetitions every day over a period of years; asking them questions; putting alphabets up around the room; chatting with them, and listening to them.

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But I am not sure we have sufficient time to wait until the world of scientific research catches up with human intuition and imagination in such matters as this. When you really look at what children try to do from minute one of their lives, it seems pretty clear that En 1, 2 and 3 have developed out of, simply, who we are. Alright, I’m sure there are people around for whom this type of explanation simply will not do. Perhaps they (both men and women) could get more in touch with their feminine side; for a properly functioning civilisation usually tries to give its children what they need to survive within the culture it has created for them, does it not? In fact, this seems to happen in most animal cultures without a question. In our human culture, we seem to agree that ability with language is a necessity. All of the above activities are laden with creativity, often spontaneously generated. They pretty well have to be, because there can’t really be an imposed scheme of work for this vital unofficial syllabus, and earliest of teaching partnerships. It is impossible to police, and enforce. Something more is required of people. This lack of an official scheme of work should not be a problem though, because the authority and the ability of the teachers (the parents) are taken as ‘understood’. Unfortunately, in the present era, it is not a given that the parents will actually accept their responsibility. While I think that just about everyone, from their own positive or negative experiences, can understand just what a new born baby might be needing and even, in some visceral way, expecting, as he or she makes their entrance into the world, this is not to say that we all will receive, or give it, to the same degree. And, alright, some people might even deny it, like the camp commandant at Belsen, who caused the poet Chinua Achebe to drag the poor innocent vulture into this sometimes sad human condition, with his poem Vultures (very popular in schools over the past decade).

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Yes, the teaching and learning of the unofficial syllabus is certainly subject to extenuating circumstances. It is not guaranteed and, common knowledge or not, it certainly cannot be taken for granted. The fact of life is that the further we travel away from those first few loving moments of human existence as the centre of attention, the more varied our experience of being taught the true basics becomes. But, over the years, I have noticed how children of two, three and four years old still want that unofficial syllabus, if they’ve never had it. They want ‘one to one’ communication with an adult, preferably mum, or dad. It’s what they do. I don’t think they’re wrong to want that. I think they know what’s good for them. Kids of seven and eight years old still want that kind of communication. Children of fifteen, if they’re lucky, if they haven’t given up, still want that kind of communication; though many think their only chance, now, is to have a child of their own as soon as possible. And so it goes. But a school teacher, with as few as five linguistically deprived children in a classroom, clearly cannot give the one to one, focused, special attention which even remotely approaches that which children, who are “leaning out for love” as Leonard Cohen puts it, need and expect (have a birthright to?) in their early lives. It may be demanded of a teacher, and inspected by officials inhabiting theoretical worlds, but forget about it. It is not going to happen. In light of this, it is from day one of reception class that the growing army of learning support assistants, nannies, personal tutors, mentors, celebrities and football stars (they are all, in effect, surrogate parents but are referred to as ‘role models’ these days) would, in theory, need to become involved, one to one, with very young children, if they were to stand a chance of remedying the earlier deprivation of these children.

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Closely linked to this topic is the testing of pupils and it is a highly charged, emotional subject these days, perhaps because of perceived inequalities of opportunity. With the passage of time, it becomes debatable whether politicians actually have the necessary vision and know how, with regard to education, to improve matters. Statistics can be used for many purposes, and numbers can be plucked out of, or thrust into, the air. Yet, the important early estimation of a child’s ability in English cannot but remain outside the realms of officialdom: How much skill in communicating through language does our prospective ‘A’ level student have in En1, 2 and 3, at ages one to four? In discovering a young child’s level of ability with language; league tables and exams are irrelevant from the educational point of view. Opportunity, nurturing, and care are relevant. Official passing and failing are also irrelevant concepts at this level, particularly for the child, whose learning experience is more bound up with the quality of their life. The simple truth is that testing at this level is a day to day affair, and would be better defined as taking a natural interest in your child. It still might be called ‘teaching and assessment’, but young children require a far more organic relationship with the ‘teacher’, which, I think, again highlights the potential of the parents. Linking the parents to the nursery, via a webcam, might create an illusion of responsibility for the adults involved, but I don’t think you can expect a two or three year old child to grasp the virtue of such expedience. It is quite clear, from the strategies traditionally employed by Primary School teachers, that they have always been aware of everything about this situation: the importance, and the impossibility of it. How could they fail to be? Primary school teachers are the first official employees to fully experience the good, or bad, effects of family nurturing, or neglect. But, as teachers, they simply have to cope as best they can. More recently they’ve been required to teach according to very detailed

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instructions which cannot deal with the situation. What, for example, would be the point of asking seven year olds to read and devise Recipes, if they cannot read and write properly? What happens is frustration, learning to fail, and clinging to infancy, waiting for their proper chance. And getting fed up.

Acknowledging the present disparities between individual children’s exposure to the unofficial English syllabus also sorts out the correct educational, rather than political, sociological, or merely fashionable approaches to the debate about setting and mixed ability. The pros and cons of mixed ability teaching and streaming have been explained to me incessantly over the years by people going alternately red or blue in the face. The main argument for mixed ability teaching, as I understand it, is that the ‘less able’ pupils will learn from the ‘more able’, and in this way we can painlessly correct the imbalance of financial opportunity. Closely linked to this argument, however, is the fact that, with ‘setting’, children quickly become aware of which set they are in. They love being in the ‘top set’, but often start telling you that they are thick if they are in the lower sets. With regard to this argument it is worth remembering that even a streamed class is mixed ability to a considerable extent, but the pupils are close enough in ability that they can actually learn from each other in a discreet and self motivated fashion. And would you, if taking a course in electronics, want to be put in a class of people building an amplifier while you needed to learn how to use a soldering iron? Which brings us right to the nub of the matter: if those people building the amplifiers started calling you thick because, being a complete stranger to the subject, you were still learning to wire a plug, how would you react? An interesting topic for Speaking and Listening might be:

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“Why are we a society that feels good about mocking those less fortunate than ourselves? Is this a form of conscience denial, and/or a way of enhancing our own self esteem?” I will discuss individual learning plans in a moment.

* Children use language in all school subjects. Currently, by the time children reach secondary schools, they may, at least, be expected to read a couple of pages of a text book, and respond with a page or two of notes and writing, for homework. A surprising number of children might find this an impossible task to complete because, through no fault of their own, they simply do not possess the necessary skills in communicating through language. But there’s the task, scrawled in their optimistic and enthusiastic year seven complimentary ‘planner’. Nevertheless, within the system as it stands today, schools could quite easily be asked to ascertain each pupil’s current ability with language, at a practical subject related level. One simple way would be to give pupils that same reading and writing homework assignment to do, right in the first lesson in September, and see how they get on. When you actually work with children, this is not a difficult thing to do, and it tells you far more than an exam result ever can. The various Faculties could then compare each pupil’s demonstrated ability with language in their subject, with the level of ability actually necessary to participate fully in the optimum year seven curriculum. If they can do the work, great, but if they cannot, they need to be taught there and then how to read and write well enough to participate. They should not merely be sent to languish in a lower set and start calling themselves ‘thick’. Nor should they be put out of their depth in the same mixed ability classroom as pupils who have, fortunately, acquired the

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necessary language skills, and start to disrupt these pupils as a response to their constant embarrassment and frustration. Given proper language skills, many of these pupils could join in on an equal footing within weeks! It is that simple. Doing this would also make it much clearer who really was incapable, and their problems could be more directly addressed. It is important that the teachers involved in helping children to catch up with their language skills should be English teachers, not ‘remedial’ or ‘special needs’ teachers – that is, they should be people who know and love the subject of English. Such teachers will have their own ways of helping children to become able to read and write and get on with their lives (see my definition of English Teacher in chapter two). The important thing here is to teach children from the level of skill they can demonstrate in context when asked to read, write, speak and listen. I might combine such lessons in ‘communication through language’ with humanities content, such as learning about the continents, countries, deserts, jungles, and ocean of the world; the history of writing; natural disasters; and so on. The ‘special needs’ brigade should be used to help children, directly in the classroom if necessary, to cope with the emotional issues they have developed due to the early neglect which has caused their shortfall in language ability in the first place; and which now inhibits their learning and development. Meanwhile, pinning the weekly ‘literacy focus’ on the staffroom wall, and asking children to remember to write in complete sentences, is what’s known as simply ‘covering your backside’, but it is all many teachers at present have the time and authority to do. Problems of control often occur when children feel threatened by the work, if they don’t understand it, or they know they don’t have the skills to tackle it properly. They

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feel they are made to look stupid, and then they resent the teacher. Really this is a problem of trust, and relationships. It’s no different from a parent presenting a child of four with Lord of the Flies for their birthday, and then giving them a hard time because they have scribbled all over the pages.

The suggestion that there should be an individual learning plan in each subject for each child in school is just silly. To have a chance of being effective, class sizes would have to be drastically reduced, and, as soon as they were, it would become apparent that individual learning plans were no longer desirable or necessary. The value of intense training in language skills, setting, and small group learning at the appropriate level, with a teacher leading, would become obvious. However, it is understandable that such an idea should arise from a mountain of theory and practice which simply ignores the vital importance of a child’s intended, natural, very early learning of language. Individual learning plans are precisely what very young children need, and should, in the natural course of events, receive. There is no academic problem when children do receive the unofficial syllabus as and when they should, and are then handed on to good teachers. As a society we need to work smarter, not harder: the teaching and learning of language is a multi purpose activity, during which children also learn how to develop relationships with people, beginning with parents. This natural activity is precisely how they prepare for their more responsible relationships with teachers, as part of a larger class. *

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Meanwhile, the government announcements of plans to extend the national curriculum below the age of five, and the more recent flurry of interest in parents’ responsibilities to their children, suggest a general awareness of the effects, and the symptoms, but not the precise nature, of the problem, which, in summing up, is this: Language initially needs to be taught intensively by parents, and this takes at least four or five years. Many children are not receiving this tuition from their parents, and this is causing all sorts of problems, for these children, and for other people.

When you think about children learning their language, a mother returning to work after a year of maternity leave could hardly be worse timing, though the subjective glow of producing a child and thereby having it all may have cooled somewhat. That way of thinking is geared towards adult selfishness, not child welfare. Nobody is forcing people to have children, and having a child is not necessarily doing the rest of us any particular favours. I would be quite happy with smaller classrooms. Parents’ willingness, or ability, to teach their children is certainly not only dependent upon financial circumstances. I think it has much more to do with attitudes to human existence. In wealthy families, some form of surrogate parenting is certainly not a new idea, even when it has not been necessary. In fact surrogate parenting is often seen as a luxury item, or status symbol. In our society it is perhaps something to aspire to. Drop the kids off at the day care centre and go off and have a life. Some parents have, from ancient times, considered the day to day bringing up of their children an activity they would simply rather pass on to some stranger. But, whether surrogates can actually sustain the level, and quality, of interaction a very young child needs, and in some visceral way seems to expect, in order to develop

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the communication skills and early relationships they require in life, is by no means assured. Indeed we already have a wonderful example of the bad effect that the farming out of children to surrogates can have, in the very popular Romeo and Juliet: Juliet, nurtured by her nurse, and desperately in need of good advice and understanding at age thirteen, ultimately chooses to confide not in her mother, but in her nurse, who makes every effort at wise counsel. However, the nurse is constrained by loyalties to her out of touch employer - Lady Capulet, Juliet’s ‘biological mother’ (an interesting term). Lady Capulet, the inventor of the handy equivocation quality time, cannot relate to her daughter. Neither woman is equal to the special role of mother. This has disastrous results – and don’t even ask about Juliet’s dad.

So really we need to examine and discuss the whole subject of having children in the first place. From a child’s point of view, perhaps we should not even consider bringing a child into the world until we can give them the attention they clearly need, and which is exemplified, and accommodated in nature, by the teaching of their language. We should treat this human activity as a natural resource. Meanwhile, as a step towards becoming a society that really does care about children and education, we should make a steady attempt to provide all present parents, and parents to be, with an appropriate mental environment within which they can teach their children the true basics of English. And we should try to educate children as to the importance of parents, and how to fulfil that responsibility, should they decide to become parents. I am well aware that schemes of this nature exist in some inner cities, but as I have mentioned, child deprivation is certainly not confined to

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the less wealthy members of society. Just as excellent child rearing practices are not confined to the well off. It’s a matter of attitude. There could very easily be pre-natal classes where the needs of infants with regard to language can be discussed. The deadened instincts can be reawakened, and given the opportunity to flourish. Teaching a child their language is a kind of focussed baby sitting and, as a stop gap, I think there are many young adults who would like, and be good at, helping out with this kind of work, at this time. This would be a great way for young adults to cultivate good habits and gain experience for the future. But (and there really is no other way) teaching young children takes time, patience, repetition, reinforcement, and ‘one to one’, as any parent or close family member who’s tried it will tell you; and there is no one better suited. This aspect of parenting, which I am sure emerges naturally within the lessons of some English teachers, should be given the high profile it deserves all across society. Not just as media hype, not just as a school subject, not only in pre-natal classes, and certainly not as the latest political football, but by every day example, and personal experience of growing up. It should, that is, become what we do. In many cases people will simply be reminded of the blindingly obvious needs of children, which nevertheless, along with healthy food, fresh air, and exercise so often become taken for granted; lost among myriad self absorbed distractions, and pressures, and thus neglected. I think that many adults will then be encouraged to think about their responsibilities, a baby’s rights, in an altruistic sense, before bringing another child into the world. It would seem to be good value for money: sustaining an excellent natural system, and dealing with shortfalls directly, rather than constantly trying to recreate and correct this failing, artificial, system. Unfortunately, it is not a nanny the state needs to

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provide, but intelligent husbandry. The sooner we admit this the better, for then we will realize that perhaps there are things in life for which there are no adequate substitutes. For all the initiatives, smart targets, and cosmetic changes of the past twenty years, taught so well by one government and learned so well by another, there are children who have had the benefit of the unofficial syllabus doing as well in English as the current system will allow them to, while many other children struggle. Money talks loud and clear, but its vocabulary seems to remain limited. It is extremely depressing to go into a newly refurbished secondary school, and see children in uniforms, even in blazers and ‘ties’, many equipped with mobile phones and mp3 players, who still cannot read, write, spell, or punctuate properly and who frequently have no pen. They are frustrated, becoming hopeless, and badly behaved.

Taking steps to create the conditions within which mothers can teach their own very young children their language, would seem not so much another desperate measure, as an awareness of the reality of human life. It would show a pleasing ability to adapt modern life to our real needs. For some time I was tempted to think that perhaps the solution to all this lay in a return to old fashioned family values. But it doesn’t take much thought to realize that, until quite recently, old fashioned family values meant that children were traditionally being produced merely to carry on the family business; to be sent out to work before they reached the age of ten; to be killed because of their sex; or as just one of a hundred other things to experience before you die. What we might correctly call ‘good old fashioned family values’, in terms of bringing up children, are simply good practices which have been employed by many

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people for centuries, in amongst all of the not so good ones. Today, because everybody has access to more information, perhaps we can make better informed decisions about our behaviour. Every Child Matters is a beautiful thought, but until it acquires practical meaning, from the very beginning of a child’s life, rather than being screwed to the walls of staffrooms and nurseries up and down the country, it cannot become reality.

But surely I’m not suggesting that five years of family based language tuition is not only the way to build the foundations for success for all our children, but also the way to solve many of society’s prob… Godammit! That’s exactly what I do suggest! In the ensuing chapters I will discuss how we might build a durable English syllabus upon such foundations. ***

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Chapter Two: Who is Responsible for this?

Teacher: A teacher is someone who knows how to do something, knows how to show others how to do it for themselves, and enjoys doing so. That’s pretty much what any pupil is looking for. There is no need to complicate things with comments like: “Oh no! Teaching is so much more than that. I mean what about, for example, what about being a class tutor?” As any child knows, if you can teach you can be a tutor. You may not love being a tutor as much as you love teaching, but, if you’re a teacher, you can do it. You can also be a mentor, and you can tap dance a bit, or something similar, like grandma. So I will not here be suggesting lesson plans, or schemes of work. For, whilst I own that a teacher of English must be able to write in a legible hand, spell, punctuate, construct articulate and varied sentences both spoken and written, decide on paragraphing and other features pertaining to the amenable presentation and organization of ones ideas; must be able to create characters, express themes, write poems, dream up headlines, design advertisements; be able to be communicated with across space and time by authors great and small, and more immediately via the voices of persons small and large; that is, must be able to receive as well as to give; such human beings as English teachers be, by the very virtue and nature of their calling, will certainly devise their own particular and personally efficient methods for enabling children to do these same things for themselves. When left to get on with teaching English, at whatever level, the vocation, for me, is similar to reading, thinking about, and discussing the expressions of an immensely absorbing author. In such a partnership; close attention, reflection, imagination,

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inspiration and an open mind are important. But, since about 1991, teaching has gradually become like trying to do all of these things with several officious busybodies leaning over one’s shoulder, asking inane questions, and making irrelevant comments, while munching cheese and onion crisps. “Those who can, teach.” It’s a vocation, and you can’t really thrive in a classroom if you cannot, or are not permitted, to teach as I have described above. It is therefore a very strange denial of this modern axiom, the way that back seat driving, under the guise of expertise, has become a lucrative profession for precisely those who do not, teach. And yet, their opinions and recommendations, strategies, leaflets and pamphlets, DVD’s and videos, brochures and manuals now pervade the media, and inundate English offices throughout the country. They sell many things from minute by minute (fully scripted) lesson plans and ‘recommended’ practices, to courses in Cornwall, at two hundred pounds a head, on how to deliver them. This need to recommend, or even to prescribe, lessons within schools, after a person has been trained, has graduated, and has been hired as a teacher, indicates a lack of wisdom and sheer know-how on the part of those involved with the preparation, and employment, of teachers. The place for the expert is the driving seat, which, in the case of teaching, is located first in the home, and then in the classroom.3 As the word ‘learner’ begins to replace ‘pupil’ in the education world, it is interesting to examine the difference in concept. A learner can be any age, and anywhere, but a pupil is precisely someone who learns with the help of, and considerable dependence upon, a teacher - initially a parent. It is interesting that the phrase ‘independent learner’ has been coined, and the concept of the ‘pupil’ has been 3

There’s a Hank Williams song which captures all of this perfectly. The first person to hand me a slip of

paper with the name of the song on it gets a chocolate bar of their choice, as usual.

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slipped up the sleeve by this intellectual sleight of hand. For the term ‘independent pupil’ would be an oxymoron, and the concept illusory. Whereas ‘independent learners’ as a concept just means children don’t need teachers, and so everything is fine. This is a far fetched idea but, now that children in schools are having independence thrust upon them, what the adult legally required in the classroom is doing, has become known as ‘delivering the curriculum’ to the learner. And, since the curriculum is delivered to independent learners, perhaps a learning assistant, or even a computer, might do the delivery job just as well. Nevertheless, the presence of adults carrying the name of ‘Teacher’ is still required in schools, to bear the responsibility for children’s progress, and especially to take the blame for the lack of it. But teachers’ authority with regard to their subject, and thus in the eyes of their charges, has been diminished, and teaching, which not so long ago was, ideally, considered a dialogue between pupil and teacher, has become a bureaucratic form of ‘Chinese whispers’. In this way, with just a few changes in vocabulary, the proper relationship between, and even the existence of, pupils, teachers, and education, and the relationship between responsibility and authority, and the true meaning of each of those words, have all been foolishly undermined.

Meanwhile, the resilience of humans being what it is, many children still quite naturally consider themselves as pupils, and many have also always accepted some of the responsibility for their education. And when a teacher meets one who has, it makes instant sense, because it is a natural partnership, nurtured at home. Generally, children expect and respect knowledge of subject and good leadership from their teachers, and thus they accept control, and they welcome responsibility

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within that framework. Children do not appreciate, or respect, being told, openly or tacitly, to get on with it, though they will play such a system mercilessly and with contempt. Of course we can by-pass all of this hassle of having real teachers and parents, simply by telling children that, for example, from now on they can be independent learners, and find out for themselves what everything they come into contact with is called. No doubt they’ll ask a pleasant looking stranger. Calling children independent learners is just modern jargon for “go away I’m busy”, at home; or “we’ve completely lost our way” in schools. Lots of children and lots of teachers know this, and continue as best they can in the current situation.

One thing success won’t depend on in school, however, is corporal punishment, which has, rightly in my view, been outlawed. But before we move on, we might look more closely at what should have, but certainly has not yet, replaced it: Personal Responsibility. I think it is now clear that, in the first instance, it is the parents who, albeit tacitly these days, do have the authority and are expected to accept the responsibility for an infant’s initial instruction in English. Young children are certainly willing partners in this, though many parents choose to delegate their responsibility to a paid stranger. Ultimately though, whatever the attitude a parent may have towards their young child’s learning of language, an English teacher is going to have to work with the results. It’s clear, from being an English teacher, that some parents try to take responsibility for their children’s behaviour, right through school. But the responsibility for learning, at all levels, should really be shared between the teacher and

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the pupil. The unofficial syllabus is naturally based on close, one to one observation and monitoring of a child/pupil on a daily basis, in vastly diverse family settings. And yet, many of these teachers of the true basics employ almost identical methods: repetition, reinforcement, variation, development, all geared to the perceived needs of their own children. These methods, it seems, occur quite naturally and consistently to people when they are ready, willing, and able to take responsibility for bringing up their own children. It is tempting to think, perhaps, that one such person, one mother/teacher might be able to bring up several infants not her own. But this is to discount the emotional development and bonding which nature has quite ingeniously built into this early language tuition; the one to one interaction which language brings with it and which young children seem to need, want, and flourish under. Later on, however, precisely because they have received this early nurturing attention and tuition, many school-age children can quite easily form teacher/pupil partnerships within classes of twenty five in schools; although, while private schools continue to attract customers by promising considerably smaller classes, with connotations harking back to the desired parent/child partnerships, the ideal class size must still be a subject for intelligent debate, and subsequent open agreement. In my experience, many children do instigate this teacher/pupil working partnership as a natural progression from their earlier experience at home. They are seeking something similar to a parent, but at the same time they want what is quite clearly to them, the next step. They want more autonomy, and they also need more advanced and specific expertise from their teachers. When a child understands the concept of being helped by an adult who knows what they are doing, from early experience with their parents, the transition to school life can take place quite smoothly.

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And teachers need to be open, and equal, to the role– which children generally recognize. But without this early teacher/pupil experience at home, I also see many children who are at a loss as to how to benefit from their time in school, because they have not received the early training at home. They are then, perhaps, labelled as being of low ability, or perhaps as having behavioural problems, and special needs. A harassed and unfairly blamed teacher once threw up his hands and shouted “Perhaps some kids are just plain thick!” Low ability, behavioural problems, or ‘just plain thick’, are really symptoms of deprivation, and it seems to me that we treat symptoms, not the ‘illness’. Incidentally, I say this while remaining aware that the blame for poor learning, and poor behaviour, will continue, for at least the next academic year, to be placed upon school teachers. Unfortunately, although authority and responsibility are rationally seen as the two sides of the same coin, they are often, in reality, completely different currencies.

*

Many children, who do willingly share the responsibility for their education, and are able to make good use of their teachers, are trying hard because they still want to please their parents. This will probably be true if parental encouragement has been a feature of their early life. Again, it is not scientifically provable, but I think we all know that children want mummy and daddy, and later mum and dad, to “watch!” and “look!” and “see what I’ve done!”

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Very young children desperately want us to see when they write their first letters and numbers, or even when they scribble. They want to show us how they can read a word. (It’s what they do.) Later, they want us to read their stories and essays, listen to them read, and practice their oral presentations. They want us to come to the school play, the concert, and achievement evening. And a lot of parents go. But sometimes, for many reasons, they don’t, can’t, or won’t watch, look and see, or go to the concert and the achievement evening. I think this is often seen by children as a betrayal. In most schools there are children who will go on to university, and children who will leave with barely a GCSE, yet taught by the very same teachers. Surely this tells us something about the effect a child’s experiences at home might have upon their preparation for, and attitude to, school, teachers, and their own learning and well being. But if, as shown in the previous chapter, the full relationship can rarely be provided by a ‘hired surrogate’, there does seem to be a strong, forgiving, mental and emotional element involved when circumstances such as bereavement or adoption force the issue. Grandparents, for example, might bring up their grandchildren excellently, with considerable experience in what is required. And people taking in a bereft child, usually do so with the precise aim of providing love and nurturing, on an intuitive level. Teachers, and others in schools, can really only be an important second in line. Perhaps teachers are, ideally, the link to the outside world, in which children will eventually perform. Many children with earlier positive experience will seek, and get, something akin to actual parental recognition from a school teacher. Ideally, this will supplement the

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attention the parents give, but often, it seems, the ‘teacher’ type is the only recognition and true encouragement some children get. Amazingly, some teachers have the wherewithal to go a long way towards developing the self esteem and emotional security a child needs. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for a child to wonder aloud if Miss and Sir might get married, and adopt them. *

The psychological measures currently deemed necessary to motivate pupils to become independent learners, seem to reflect the fact that the efforts at transforming education, so far, have been mainly cosmetic. At present, the hype attached to exam results across the board, the humiliations of failure, and the phony praise of league tables, are all superficial and damaging in their way. The overuse of words like excellence, and the seeming confetti of A* grades, make their appearance confusing to some, rather than the unequivocal celebration they should be. There is considerable irony in the fact that while newspapers regularly report on league tables and schools which are doing well, they also carry stories about increased levels of stress in these schools, the use of drugs by children, along with suspicions of making exams easier, and massaging numbers, all caused by this relatively new pressure to succeed in exams as a measure of educational excellence, which has been placed upon pupils and parents, pedagogues, politicians, and prime ministers... prime ministers... prime ministers. *

If we want children, or anyone for that matter, to truly accept responsibility, rather than, for example, merely passing the buck, or burdening them with it, it has always

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seemed to me that we must be prepared to explain why we want them to do things. Why something is important. For example, why should anyone care about spelling? Why should anyone try to write legibly, and use punctuation? Being prepared to answer such questions, and discuss them, can become the very basis of one’s teaching. It is also a check for anyone at all, with respect to what they might ask someone else to do, or to believe. Defining your terms index links your methods to the changing times, it keeps you alert and honest, and takes care of all kinds of inflation. Teaching can certainly be seen as one of the higher forms of leadership. And so, without further ado –

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Chapter Three:

What exactly do you mean?

So, one day I walked into my classroom and said to my little Year Sevens “You know, the subject we call ‘English’ is really about Communication through Language.” And what do I mean by that? The definitions which follow are simply the ones with which I agree. I don’t claim them as originals, but neither would I want to attribute my own actions to anonymous and often changing definitions. I may even have made some of them up, it doesn’t matter; the actions informed by these definitions are what count, and everything is influenced by our experience, reading, discussion, thought and ultimate interpretation. And remember, I’m talking to eleven year olds here, so don’t expect any jargon.

Communication is expressing your thoughts and feelings to somebody, including yourself, and getting through to them. If you don’t get through to them, then you have not communicated. However, it’s good that you tried. Someone might hear, or read your particular combination of words, but if they don’t understand what you mean, then you haven’t communicated. Still, they might, by thinking about your words, communicate something to themselves. That is just fine, as long as they don’t then blame you for what they think you said….apparently this happens with religious texts all the time. Therefore, studying any text is certainly about trying to understand what someone else has to say, and analysing how they’ve gone about it.

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How many ways can we communicate? Typically: Facial expressions Music Speech Writing Telepathy Body Language Painting Sculpture Dancing

Telepathy is what we’re really after with communication. Getting something directly from your mind into someone else’s mind, and vice versa. What’s the difference between Telepathy and all the others? All the others involve the use of a Medium, to achieve the desired communication. Language is a medium.

And there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.

Language: My definition of language is simply the words we use be they in English, French, Spanish, Punjabi, or Japanese – words, vocabulary, lexis. So, in ‘communication through language’, we want to get what’s in your head into my head, through the use of words, spoken or written. And don’t forget: Question everything!

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“Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free, don’t let an egg get laid in it by something you can’t see.” Bob Dylan.

But, what is actually involved in ‘Communication through Language’?

For me, it breaks down into three main parts, as follows:

Intention & Expression – Intelligibility & Recognition – Understanding & Response (where it all starts again at Intention).

Your intention and mode of expression: what you want to say and how you want to express it, are your own personal choices.

Similarly, the understanding of your intention and the response to what you have tried to communicate are, ultimately, personal choices for whoever you are trying to communicate with. People can also, and regularly do, choose not to make an effort to understand. That’s life.

By personal I mean ‘yours’: How you will choose to express yourself, and how well you will try to allow someone else to communicate with you, and how you respond.

But Intelligibility on the part of the communicator, and Recognition on the part of the communicatee, both depend upon the use of Conventions: that is, “an agreed way of doing things”. And the conventions of English are incredibly sturdy and simple, as we shall soon see, but they have been alternately weakened, and complicated, down the

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centuries by various people. Indeed, it has taken me a whole chapter The (Place) of Grammar to discuss conventions properly, and to rescue them from the grip of various phoney grammatical rules. Phoney grammatical rules are simply a specific version of accurate English which someone would prefer you to use, rather than your own perfectly good version of accurate English. The phoney grammatical rules have been responsible for the petty but pernicious squabbling of the grammar wars over the years and school children have been caught in the middle, like in a custody battle. A good example of phony grammatical rules right here would be the issue of the, now largely forgotten, “Parts of Speech”, which were thrown out years ago by the curriculum makers in power at the time: subject, predicate, object and so on, which were offered to us by the previous incumbents for the parsing of written down sentences. And those ‘parts of speech’ did need throwing out, because they were not parts of speech at all, they were much more to do with some pretty sterile analysis of writing. But, disagreeing with someone’s definition of the ‘parts of speech’ is no reason for doing away with the entire concept of ‘parts of speech’. After all, many people throw out the entire concept of a God, just because they don’t like to think about the old man with a long white beard which their minds were bathed in as a child, and so on. But this throwing out of the baby with the bathwater, apart from being a very careless thing to do, is more about problems with politics and authority, than with the calm study of theological beliefs, evolution, or communication through language. But that’s sociology. In preparing to teach children, after throwing out the dirty bathwater, I noticed sitting there the actual parts of speech, which are as follows: Intention, Vocabulary, Syntax, Phrasing, Pronunciation, Intonation, and Context. These have always been with

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us, and are far too obvious and integral to our existence to have been anyone’s invention, or to be replaced, or discarded. More about this in chapter five, and in chapter seven I will discuss how these actual parts of speech have been applied to writing for centuries.

For the present, we need to know what the main agreements (conventions) are. We generally agree on the following:

•

Words/Vocabulary/Lexis

•

Pronunciation, to a degree

•

The Alphabet and Punctuation

•

Letter shapes, within limits

•

Spelling

To this list of true basics I will now add The Parts of Speech, as outlined above. The rest: having something to say, and how you say it (Speaking and Writing) or being interested in what someone else has to say and how they have said it (Reading and Listening) have more to do with personal desire, involvement, and style, than anything else.

To recap:

Intention: What you want to say.

Expression: Getting your idea out into the world in some form or another.

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Intelligibility: Ways of using the conventions of a language which are recognizable to the person, or people, you want to communicate with.

Recognition is where the other person starts to kick in. They at least have to recognize the words you are using, although some meaning can certainly be communicated by tone and context (and to the very young, perhaps most, or even all meaning, is communicated by tone and context at first).

Generally, the participants in communication through language have to at least be speaking the same language. It’s no use me saying to a pupil: “Donnez moi votre cahier, s’il vous plais,” and getting angry if they don’t hand me their exercise book. But, if I say, “Please give me your exercise book,” I can expect to receive it – or an explanation. There is responsibility for intelligibility on both sides, and that’s what children readily understand when it is explained to them (see chapter two… “Why?”).

Understanding: this is the trickiest element [and at this point I would like to welcome all of our deconstructionist friends aboard]. If the person you are trying to communicate with doesn’t get your meaning, but gets a meaning, then they are communicating with themselves, even if they are sitting right in front of you nodding and smiling and making all of the right noises (a rather disconcerting, but all too relevant thought). What is going on in their head still is understanding. And all of this is perfectly fine, as long as they don’t then think that what they understand is necessarily what you meant, and start getting stroppy, or making wedding plans.

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When reading a text, or indeed when hearing words, those words are very likely to illuminate associations within our own minds depending upon who we might happen to be at the time, and what our life experience is, as distinct from the intentions of their present author. Depending on how much time we are prepared to spend, and on how much critical analysis of our own responses to other people’s words (spoken or written) we are prepared, or encouraged, to do; and depending on where our frame of reference happens to be at the time; we are quite likely to imagine that we know all about an author’s, or a speaker’s, intentions the minute we read or hear their words. We all start out as deconstructionists, and, with regard to texts, no writer I’ve ever heard of would deny the reader the right to their own personal interpretations whether or not those interpretations agree with the writer’s original intention. But, on a less ego-centric level, our own interpretations of texts, priceless in themselves, might also be seen as stages in a journey towards understanding the intentions of, and thereby really communicating with, the original author, should we deem that a worthwhile pursuit. Communicative results are often much easier to gauge with the spoken word than with the written, that is, until things become heated, and I finally realize that you are simply twisting my words to suit yourself (you bastard!).

Response: Once someone understands a meaning, they will think or feel something, and that is their response - which they might then want to express. This response then becomes their Intention. They will be responding to their understanding of what you’ve expressed, which may well coincide with your intention; when this happens, it’s very effective when the other person is right there with you, and it might be just as effective if they are twenty four hundred years away in a book, like Sophocles.

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When all of the above come together, it can lead to all night sessions; text and fax relationships; bitter arguments; pen friends; marriage; diaries; and the art of conversation. I was tempted to throw in world peace - but hey.

When I started teaching, the ideas outlined above began to develop and inform my teaching methods. For a short while, I even attempted to present these ideas as baldly as this to children, as a theory. But gradually I was able to allow these ideas to emerge as and when appropriate; depending on what area of communication through language we were studying at the time. Setting them out like this, twenty years later, these ideas still seem simple and quite obvious. However, I don’t think I invented these ideas, but, if I was to develop a coherent syllabus for my teaching, I was left to discover them and to articulate them for myself. I now realize that these ideas are natural and direct developments of the true basics. For example: Often, pupils will tell you that they have no idea what a text is about. But by resurrecting the concept of ‘conventions’ as agreed ways of doing things, and good personal style as, simply, an accurate individual application of conventions, it has always been reasonable to suggest to pupils that our job is to discover simply how and why a poet has used certain conventional words. In the earlier quote from Bob’s song, the words are all very familiar, it’s just the way he’s arranged them that spark the thoughts; and what could Keats possibly mean by “the faery power of unreflecting love!”? The words of a text are generally words that we know and use ourselves all the time, with one or two exceptions which we might need to look up in the dictionary – ‘faery’ for example - thereby naturally expanding our vocabulary. But you could probably get the intended meaning of Keats’s ‘faery power’, or Bob’s use of ‘something you can’t see’ from the context. Studying a poem requires only that all participants in

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this act of communication be well versed in the conventions, which are few, uncomplicated, and basic. Recognizing the words on the page should be quite easy, if the text is appropriate. I call it a responsibility, but, as such this responsibility deserves to be fully explained to children. Explaining this responsibility motivates pupils to use their powers of concentration and imagination; motivates them to think, and perhaps to engage in some research, in order to allow communication to take place fully. As a mnemonic for the overall concept behind everything that has gone before in this chapter, I keep a poster on the wall which looks like this: COPNEVRESNOTNIAOLNS Because, you can think and say whatever you want and you can respond to what you read or hear however you like. But, if you want to communicate with someone, or to be communicated with, you need an agreed way of doing things in order to achieve intelligibility – and that’s what the conventions of English are: an agreed way of doing things. And this brings us quite naturally to my definition and consideration of the conventional skills of Reading; Writing; Speaking and Listening, which our one minute old child will need, in order to be able deal on an equal footing with King Lear when she meets him at age seventeen or eighteen, and which I will now discuss in the remaining chapters. ***

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Chapter Four: Read Me a Story?

There’s an old saying I recently discovered that goes: “If you start off simply, it’ll always be simple, no matter how complex it gets.” So how do we get from minute one of life, to reading Shakespeare with understanding? Well, first of all, for me, there are two main definitions for Reading (and two for Writing). ***

Reading: Elementary: Elementary Reading is coming to realize that The Alphabet is actually a collection of signs telling us to say the words we learned to say when we learned to speak; like we’re doing now.

We call these signs ‘Letters’, and that’s the function of the Alphabet, its raison d’etre. Although, when children get a little older, I think they should know that punctuation is really part of the alphabet, also.

As I mentioned in Chapter One, when talking about the unofficial syllabus, it’s essential for a child to be given the opportunity to pick up this type of thing at an age when they are going to be suitably impressed. And they usually are mightily impressed. I think this is their birthright, and absolute need. Reading and Writing are the two sides of the Spelling coin. I believe that Spelling might even be what writing used to be called. Maybe magic spells were always written down in a book of spells, and they had to be spelled correctly or the magic would not

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work. Correctly is nothing more, nor less, than using the conventional letters of the Alphabet in various agreed combinations, in order to get people to say those words you want them to say. Spelling is a conventional activity for the purpose of intelligibility. There are lots of ways of getting this over to children, and developing it. Ask a mum, a dad, a brother or a sister, a grandmother, and later on, ask a real school teacher. More about this in a minute. It starts with setting an example; reading to a child, showing them the books, the words and pictures. I think that letters, from people children know, are one of the best ways of getting the concept of what writing and reading really are, across. It’s pretty natural: “Look, grandma’s written to tell us how she’s getting on in her new flat. She’s written it down using a pen and paper, like you can. Let’s read what she says together. Do you want to send her a few words?” The readiness is all. Clearly, the concept of ‘pen friends’ was invented as an exercise in reading and writing, which would be personally relevant to children.

As people read to a young child, they usually demonstrate what they are doing, pointing to words, and putting expression into their voice. It’s part of the human condition. And, if you say that the ‘gh’ in ‘laugh’ sounds like an ‘f’, that’s what your little pupil will learn, and do, because they trust you and they want you – they want someone! Please! - who knows, to tell them the way that it is.

Although, as a secondary school English teacher, there’s been little time to do this in the past ten or twelve years, I used to meet pupils who found it interesting to explore what the Alphabet actually is, how it developed, and why punctuation is part of it. Exploring the alphabet and punctuation in an historical fashion can be a natural reinforcement

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and extension of earlier learning; and, for those who missed it, a very welcome opportunity to quietly catch up, and learn something new all at the same time. This is very easy to do today just by typing the word “Alphabet” into Google.

Exploring the brass tacks of the alphabet, punctuation, reading, and writing, is a natural way of handing over some responsibility to children. With an understanding of how and why conventions like the alphabet may have come about, come the beginnings of independence, empowerment, and the motivation to take responsibility to try and use them properly, and individually. Although all of these ideas are tacitly present in the study and creation of any text, and can be referred to at any time, perhaps they deserve to be studied in their own right at some point in a person’s life; for a child of two or three will say ‘buh’ and ‘cuh’ and ‘wuh’ when you point to B and C and W because they know you love them, they trust you implicitly, they want to show you and themselves that they can do it, and they want to please you. But a child, of say around nine to twelve, will renew that trust when you empower them with their own responsibility, by showing them why they’ve been doing things this way, and how it relates them to the larger world. That’s where “Why should I?” comes from, and answering that question properly will keep you honest, and them interested in hearing what you have to tell them.

*******

Actually, I think that spelling is one of the most democratic activities currently available. You can see why I haven’t been popular with some (but by no means all) of my colleagues. But then, it’s pupils in my classroom I have to make sense to.

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A writer may hear words in one accent in her own head, as she writes; and the reader may hear them in an entirely different accent in his head when he reads. That’s fine. She has a personal intention, and makes it mutually intelligible through conventions; therefore he recognizes the words. All he has to do now is lay aside any preconceptions, concentrate, and, by using his own experience and imagination, and by paying attention to the context, he’s got a great chance to understand exactly what she is talking about. Why wouldn’t you want to do that? That’s a good question actually, Adam. One of life’s little ironies is that we spend all this time teaching you how to use punctuation, and then some of you go off to university for several years to learn how write without it. In law there is communication in writing in which no punctuation is used; there may even (I’ve heard tell) benospacesbetweenwordsisthatunconventional Not really. It’s all still intended to be mutually intelligible to the right people. And it shows us that the spacing and phrasing and intonation are actually all in the heads of the people communicating in this way, in the first instance, where they started - in speech. That way of writing is a kind of code, a variation. People used to write quite long and innocuous letters while, between the lines, there was another message written in invisible ink.

Perhaps because people grow up with very different accents, while speaking the same basic language, the conventional way of spelling words seems to have as much to do with their etymology, as with their general sound. That’s where the democratic part comes in.

For example: Why spell the word laugh like that?

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Because I said so! Whack! No. So you’ll get a level 7, dummy! No. Because, if everyone spelled words how they pronounce them, could they understand each other’s anarchic written communication? Try it out. Lairf - American Larf - Queen Laff - Up North Lehff - Australian

Imagine those four exchanging letters, or writing and reading books with thousands of merely anarchic spellings in them. Are you feeling lucky? The fact is that ‘Laugh’ comes to us from northern Europe – LACHEN (in the Chambers dictionary) But, at least nowadays, we don’t particularly like to make that roof of the mouth sound, so perhaps that’s why we changed the ch to an ‘F’ sound, signified by GH. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? I mean, you can make it your life’s work to get that changed if you like. But that must be done in your own time. You might even get a grant for it! In the classroom you show children the conventions, and let them practice. Still, you pronounce it, and hear it how you like. That’s personal. But you spell it conventionally, so as to be intelligible. If you don’t care about being intelligible, why are you going to bother writing to someone else in the first place?

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There’s more to it than that. I mean, why is there a ‘U’ there? Why does GH tell me to make a sound like ‘F’? Good questions. Sounds like homework? And while we’re at it, how many other words with GH together in them can you find and write down, and have a test on next week, followed by a spelling bee with a bar of chocolate as a prize? Say it how you like, but spell it conventionally to be understood in writing. Accent is to do with your mind, your mouth, your lungs, and your vocal chords. Spelling is to do with everybody’s alphabet. Could it be fairer? Well, yes. We could all get an equal chance to learn these ways of getting on in the world when we’re babies. *****

While we’re on the subject: can Spelling be taught? To tell you the truth, after twenty years I think you have to go right into etymology and maybe linguistics and phonetics to actually teach spelling. But I don’t need to do that in school, although regular trips into etymology are a must, because it’s interesting. I can persuade people to take responsibility for their own spelling by explaining a few things, as above, and following it up regularly. Today, though, individuals have a fantastic opportunity to sharpen up their spelling, just by proof-reading their own texts and emails.4

I think some spelling can be taught, some caught, and some can be memorized; there are some useful rules, patterns, and effects - like the magic ‘e’, and doubling consonants - but a lot can be looked up quite easily in the dictionary.

I think it’s important to motivate people to want to spell properly. And it’s not always going to be because you’re big and they’re little, and they want to please you. 4

For essays and books, we can probably all use a little help with proof-reading, including myself!

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I met a teacher on supply once who, when a child asked her how to spell a word, chucked a dictionary on the table and said: “How do you spell dictionary?” Not too helpful, and I challenged why she marked spelling in pupils’ work.5 But it was perfect for getting me thinking, during that first year, about what I was going to do with spelling in my English lessons

The thing is you need to know about Syllables, and then the dictionary. Take a word like ‘Articulate’. If you’ve never seen or heard it before, this could be hard to spell in one go. So, slow it all down, break it into syllables; say it: AR - TIC - U - LATE.

It’s just like watching a slow motion video of a goal being scored to see what really happened: did the ball really get a deflection off Welbeck? Did Lampard’s shot really not cross the line? But, we’re not going to examine every multi coloured ‘phoneme’ on the video, or we won’t be graduating til we’re ninety, and it is not necessary to do so. Syllables are fine.

Here is how it might sound in the classroom:

- Everybody got a dictionary? Ok, the first syllable is - ‘ar’, how do you spell that? - A, R - Thanks Maddy, how many pages in your dictionary? - 1583. - How many pages have words beginning with A, R on them? 5

There’s an old Chinese saying that goes: Never expect anyone to know anything that you have not taught them yourself. Especially true when working with children, these days.

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-9 - So we can forget the other 1574 pages and look only on 9 pages. What’s the next syllable? - Tick - Good Craig. Spell it - I, T - Don’t be funny Craig - T-I-C-K - How many words beginning with ARTICK? - GOT IT SIR! There’s no K. - What page is it on, Dan? - Sixty eight. - How many pages could it have been on Dan? - One. - GOT IT SIR! - What does it mean Kayleigh? - It means ‘jointed’, composed of distinct parts; composed of recognizably different sounds, as human speech; clear, able to express one’s thoughts with ease; to attach... - OK, thanks Kayleigh. That took eight seconds. - I found it before you! - Give us another one sir! - Hmmm. OK. Here’s one you won’t be able to find ... no way… let’s see, I’m going to say it quickly, but clearly, and I am not going to repeat it. Don’t forget, break it into syllables first, that’s what syllables are for. You won’t have heard it before, probably, but that does not matter.... Gargantuan!

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And off we go. There are only two words in the Chambers that begin with ‘gar-gan’. How hard is it to spell ‘gar’? There are only two pages it could be on. They’ll probably see the word ‘garganey’ at the same time. As you do.

They’ll come in the next day and ask to do the same thing again. It doesn’t mean you have to use the dictionaries again the next day; no matter how they clamour. But you’re happy they’ve asked, just as a mother is happy when her child asks for some more greens. But what we will do is some Haiku; and from there on to poetry, and rhythm.

- So now when you ask me how to spell a word, I will tell you to get a dictionary, and to think of syllables. If it’s only one syllable, think of the first letter. And remember this: Spelling is a lot about the willingness to slow a word down, break a word up, see how it starts, have a guess, look it up in the dictionary, and eliminate pages.

- And it’s also about when you’re pretty sure how to spell a word, looking it up to check. Why? Because you want the person reading your writing to really understand what you are saying, or else there’s no point writing to someone else in the first place, is there?

- And that is why it is ridiculous not to allow dictionaries in exams.

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- If you are willing to look up a word to spell it correctly, or to check the meaning, you deserve credit for that. You care about communicating. And one day I’m going to put that in a book and get it changed. - I’ll buy your book, sir - Thanks Craig - I mean, in real life, some people look up words and check them all the time if they care what they are writing, or reading. They get friends, and even pay people to proof read. Being a good speller, if you are not a Rain Man type of a guy, is at least partly about using a dictionary. Anyone seen that film, ‘Rain Man’? Take a look, it’s not a bad movie. - I’ve seen it, sir. - Did you like it, Jason? - It was weird, sir, like you. - Thank you, Jason.

- Meanwhile, context is essential for giving words which are spelled the same, their specific meanings, depending on where and when and how they are used. For example: If I write the word ‘wave’ on the blackboard, or if I just say it, you don’t know what it specifically means. But it gains specific meaning in context:

A large unruly wave crashed against the ancient black rocks.

My friend Abdi’s got a short wave radio.

“Put a nice wave in the front of my hair, please, Trace.”

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“Wave Nan goodbye, then.”

The last time I did this with a class someone noticed that although the meanings are quite different in each sentence, there is an interesting similarity: all of the meanings of wave tend to suggest something temporary. It’s the same with ‘heat wave’ and ‘crime wave’. It is probably possible to track down why that may be. Products for permanent waves are interesting then, aren’t they?

All of those ‘waves’ depend upon the context into which I have placed them, for their specific meaning, right Liam? And this is true whether spoken or written. So do all the other words in those sentences. Context is what critical analysis, understanding, appreciation, and response - but not politics - are all about. Whilst on the subject of words making sense; browsing through a recommended Literacy Progress Unit (DFES 0066/2003) on sentence work, one day, I came across the following idea attributed to David Crystal. It goes like this: Sentences make words yield up their meanings. Sentences actively create sense in language. Contacting David Crystal for permission to quote and discuss this idea, I discovered that it is actually an attempted distillation of ideas expressed at greater length on page 8 of the preface to his book ‘Making sense of Grammar’ where David shows the natural importance of context in time honoured fashion. But, however the above statements came into being, for the edification of children, I’m not happy with either of them, and that is because the rather muscular, and, since these sentences appear to be talking about themselves, conceited, anthropomorphism, seems to take those pesky little things called ‘people’ right out of the equation, and sentences seem to be masterfully, and energetically, expressing ideas, all by themselves.

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To me, this is a bit like saying that shapes and colours created wonderful pictures of starry nights and sunflowers, without the organisational and inspirational talents of a human being called Vincent Van Goch. Both of these ideas might lend themselves, perhaps, to some amusing animation, rather like ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, or ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. In chapter three I gave a brief description of the half drowned, original parts of speech, I found in the bath, after throwing out the dirty water which had accumulated around them up to the 1980s. These original parts of speech being: Intention, vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, pronunciation, intonation, and context. For the present discussion, it will be sufficient to note that all of these parts of speech relate directly to the action of people expressing themselves in language, either spoken or written, even if their sentence consists of no more than a suitably intoned “Huh?” as a response to a perceived context. Therefore, far from sentences actively creating sense in language, or hammers hitting nails on the head all by themselves, I think it is, as ever was, people, motivated by an innate need to communicate, who need to be taught from a very early age just how to make words yield up whatever meanings they choose, and it is people who, thereby, actively create sense in language - in the form of sentences.

So, initially, Reading is making the sounds the alphabet tells you to make, in order to say the words which someone has written. When we write or speak, we are putting words into people’s minds, including our own, and it is an interesting responsibility. Usually just the letters, and then the single printed words, are involved in reading at first, probably with a picture to link the spoken letter or word with the written letter or word; ‘A is for Apple’ and in the time honoured fashion, ‘X is for Xylophone’.

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The letters of the alphabet, and some words may well be put up around the bedroom, and will be found on mugs and clothing. And then there are all those stories about kids and caterpillars. This is not a luxury, or an option, it is as essential as fresh air is for health, but it doesn’t happen for many a child, yet.

******

Reading (Part Two):

As a child catches on to the Alphabet and its function, the second stage of Reading starts to develop. These stages then appear to develop side by side, but not exactly equally. A child of four may well be able to read and understand the meaning of: “Somebody once dug a hole right in the middle of our living room.” But that same child will also find the word ‘Interrupt’ somewhere, and proudly ask you if you think she can read that word. And if you say, “No way!” she will likely respond with, “Interrupt!” Beaming. And if you ask her what it means, she will happily admit, “I don’t know”. It’s a ‘hard’ word. It’s nice that it is intelligible, and she recognizes it, though. She’s probably heard it somewhere. So, the secondary meaning of the verb ‘to read’ is what many people have come to distinguish as ‘reading with understanding’.6 This means that the words on the page are like the tip of an iceberg, and being able to say them is one ninth of what it’s all about. Once you can read in the first sense – recognize as words the sounds you’re supposed to make - the second sense more or less depends upon the text, the reader’s 6

Do you think the more modern ‘reading for meaning’ is an improvement on this? I don’t.

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experience, and their willingness and ability to think and to get at the eight ninths that lie beneath the surface, and between the lines. It’s the only reason why you probably wouldn’t give ‘King Lear’ to our young lady at three years old. Readers need to be able to interact (think and respond). Texts have always been interactive, and they go far beyond pushing the red button in order to choose what to look at next. For example, when children complain about Shakespeare’s language being too old fashioned and difficult, it’s tempting to try and translate passages into what’s called ‘modern language’ for them. This is, actually, to try to understand the text for them; which I think is taking learning support just that tiny bit too far. Better to show them The Wrong Trousers, and leave Macbeth’s clothing imagery a year. I‘ve come to the conclusion that Shakespeare himself could have written plays in ‘modern language’ if he’d wanted to. Damn it all, he could have invented today’s language if he’d thought it would express his meaning economically! His actual words are not necessarily old fashioned, by and large. In any case, most texts have notes to help with the truly obscure words and phrases, and usage. That’s simply reading with a dictionary close by, which we all should do. No, Shakespeare’s language is complex because of the way he uses words, which is incredibly economically, has a lot to do with his syntax and phrasing, and demands concentration and memory. In short, if you or I tried to express the ideas Shakespeare expresses; where he uses twenty words, we might take forty or fifty. And the effect is cumulative during one of his texts. Not only that, but I am increasingly of the opinion that it may well be impossible to express some of Shakespeare’s ideas completely, in any words other than the ones he uses, no matter what era you live in.

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And, I’d have to be dead certain that I understood his text perfectly, before I tried to express his ideas in other words, wouldn’t I? But then I wouldn’t need different words, would I? I’d have succeeded in allowing Shakespeare to communicate with me through his use of language, so shouldn’t I try to teach that to a child? Try expressing the ideas contained in the following twenty five words, from ‘Hamlet’ in fewer than forty: For in the fatness of these pursy times Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good. ***

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A Word on a Door:

Now, I’m going to be talking about God in this section, and that can make some people nervous. But wait a minute. Everyone loves ‘Romeo and Juliet’, we teach it to our children, and some folks put on very convincing productions. Within the World of the Play it’s about Fate and Retribution from somewhere. Shakespeare uses the phrases ‘Star-crossed’ and ‘Fatal loins’ perhaps because most philosophies bear some relationship to the idea of ‘cause and effect’. And, of course, ‘star-crossed’ is not a million light years away from the Eastern idea of Karma; and neither is the Ancient Greek religion, or the wrath of the Gods. And so on. The action of the play is, to borrow Thomas Hardy’s phrase from ‘The Woodlanders’: “Truly Sophoclean in its Grandeur”; and quite ‘Oedipal’ in its inevitability, as well as in its use of ‘dramatic irony’.

The fact is that many authors treat notions about a supreme being. Choose your reading list carefully, and English can become truly catholic in it’s exploration of various mentalities. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an excellent example of this.

I think it is interesting that the word ‘Poet’ comes from the Greek verb ‘Poieein’ which means “To make”. So a poet is a maker. It’s about being creative, and some poets believe they are imitating ‘the creator’ as much as any human being can, by creating worlds in your mind. Many others, perhaps, don’t give it a thought. And there’s probably a lot of middle ground.

Nevertheless, a Poet makes ideas of things, in our heads, by the skilful use of words.

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Poems are made by fools like me. But only God can make a tree. An idea can be a picture, a thought, a feeling, anything in an abstract form. A tree that may in summer wear, a nest of robins in her hair God, or nature, is the power, or life force A poet has the power of words. The world is a dream. Poets’ works are ‘shadows of the dream’. Poets might show us something true about life, for A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

Originally, all writers were poets, but poets didn’t all write what we call poems. Because they were ‘makers’, and some of the best early poets were dramatists, like Sophocles and Aeschylus, who wrote Plays which we still have today, they are still called Dramatic Poets.

And the word ‘Drama’ is Greek for ‘Action’. So a dramatic poet is a writer who ‘Creates Actions in our Heads’ - which we call plays. They often hold up a mirror to human nature.

Although he was far from being the first, Thomas Hardy (who greatly admired the Greek Dramatists) moving with the times, reaching a more widely spread community, was one of the best at creating a ‘stage’ for his characters, within his novels – he called it Wessex.

I heard on a TV programme for school children once that there’s no right answer to a question about poetry. That’s not quite correct. There may be more than one right

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answer to a question about a poem. Call me Ishmael, but this is not the same thing as saying there is no right answer. For there may be twenty eight right answers, as long as you can back them up from the text. But there may not be a twenty ninth right answer. Call me a taxi, but that’s a different idea to ‘there is no right answer’. And let’s not forget that the poet might have actually had something specific in mind. If someone told me that the poem “Blessing” by Imtiaz Dharker is about a Jamaican man waking up in London, I think they’d have a hard job to make that a right answer. But, as a teacher of the subject we all know and love, I’d be wide open to them having a go. When you say something about a text, you must quote from the text to prove your point. It doesn’t matter what the text is, you do the same thing. It doesn’t matter if you are five years old, or eighteen sitting your ‘A’ levels, you quote from the text to prove your point. Here’s what seems an easy text:

The cat sat on the mat.

Given that we’re not, in this example, talking about a hip young fellow from the fifties or sixties, but an animal; here’s an explicit question which invites you to commit to an answer: What kind of animal are we talking about here, and how do you know?

An implicit question might go something like this: Why do you think the cat sat on the mat?

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For the implicit question you have to use what you know about all of those words and their specific context here. You have to think and reflect, and that takes energy, so you need a decent breakfast. These things apply to any text whatsoever, all the way from the word ‘Staff’ on a door in an airport, to the several thousand words of ‘Macbeth’. There are explicit and implicit questions in every text, including if, in the above sentence, we actually were talking about a hip young fellow from the fifties or sixties, who may well choose to sit on the mat, like a cat. And the difficulty of the questions is usually related to the complexity of the text.

A young lady once told me that she had no interest in books and poems which had implicit or hidden meanings. She did not think imagery, symbolism and so on should be necessary. Why can’t writers just come out and say what they mean?

At the time we were sailing along, and I was loving the imagery and marvelling at the cleverness of William Golding (we were reading Lord of the Flies at the time, so her comment brought me up sharp). Yes, I thought, why don’t writers just come on out and say what they mean? Why did William Golding take all those words to tell us that, er, what he tells us in that book? That would make a good essay question. Don’t forget to back up your answer by referring to the text.

Sometimes a teacher will lay out some ideas on a topic, with the express instruction to the pupils to rip these ideas to shreds, and in the process of so doing, discover their own

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ideas. It’s a variation of a tried and trusted essay task which I think is underrated today. The task that begins or ends with the word ‘Discuss’.

I’ll give you an example, concerning ‘Macbeth’.

This is a text I’ve studied with children every year for seventeen years, and it’s still fun to begin it again. Some teachers think that you must change books regularly, like underwear. But remember, as long as the material is suitable, and it leaves plenty to the imagination, it may seem old hat to you, but these particular individuals have never encountered that classic text. It was that hoary old chestnut: We were trying to establish the role of the witches in ‘Macbeth’. How would you portray them on stage? There I was, at the chalk face, talking and chalking away, chalk everywhere, making my hair go white, on my fingers, in my pockets, on the floor. I was there; I had the T-shirt, and was using it as a duster. Everybody look at the board while I go through it. Throwing ideas into the mix. Including two I saw on TV. One wrote the witches off as a device to get the ‘simpletons’ of Shakespeare’s time interested in the real story. Another thought that the witches were strong, sexy women. Great topics for discussion. I thought Macbeth was a professional killer, albeit ‘dignified’ by being employed by King Duncan, around 1000 A.D. I think Macbeth loved his job. He loved killing men. He liked to wade through dozens of them, chopping and slashing, with his blade smoking in the cold air. It made him a hero, gave him self esteem. This was fine. But the witches got hold of that impulse within him, and made him think about what might happen if he used that impulse for himself, rather than in service to the king. Evil!

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Just then, a quiet young lady called me over and said something like this: We know that the witches are very powerful. They can control the weather, they can see the future and they can take on different shapes; a rat, for instance. It’s all backed up by the text in Act 1 Scene 1, and Act 1 Scene 3. So, she continued, that means they could have looked really beautiful and sexy if they’d wanted to, instead of all raggedy and ugly. They chose to look horrible, so, if Macbeth hadn’t had some evil in himself, he’d have run away from such horrible looking creatures. He’d have known they were telling him evil things. They looked like the evil potential inside Macbeth, and gave him a chance to confront it, and he always meant to talk to his friend Banquo about it. So, she concluded, the witches gave Macbeth a chance to save himself, by looking evil. They didn’t try to deceive him by looking nice - by looking like the flower but being the serpent beneath it. They gave him an escape route. If he’d run away from them, they’d have stolen his evil ideas away from him, like a thief in the night. And, I’m going to say they are good and try to get that across. Once you can read and write in the elementary sense, discussed earlier, English is at least ninety five percent thinking. Reading with understanding is truly interactive. And any text you study in EN2, can lead to creating something similar of your own in EN3, and discussing it in many different ways in EN1, because they all interweave, and support each other. **

In Year Seven, we might go from a word on a door, to Wordsworth’s Daffodils in two terms, via two modules; one on the Media and one on Poetry. And the skills go as far as the pupils can take them.

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Media is a good place to start seriously analysing texts, because it is within the media that we will find the most basic adult texts. Advertisements are often a simple, hybrid form of poetry, or story, because the authors like to create images in our heads through using words and pictures together. Not unlike children’s books. And they teach us a lot about context, plot, theme and characterisation. Children generally find media imagery fascinating, because it quickly rewards thought, and they are quickly aware that we use imagery all the time in everyday life: Greedy Pig; Couch Potato; Absolute Angel. It’s the tip of the iceberg. And then writers use imagery all the time, to create a controlled environment, and context.

As a Secondary School English Teacher I’m happy if a child can read and write, and speak and listen in the elementary sense, when they come to me at age eleven. I know that’s not asking a lot, but it’s often more than you get, so I have had to respond to that, and I do. But, given the unofficial syllabus, and parents, teachers, and an army of teaching assistants with the time, authority and support to do what’s necessary, children have eleven years to master this elementary level. I think that can rasily happen for all of them, unless it’s made difficult, as we’ve discussed. I’ve met plenty of children who are well beyond the elementary level at age eleven, yet they are still interested to know that the word “Private” on an airport door is a text with a context. Pupils are pleased to realize that the same skills apply to being communicated with by one word on a door, by Anon, as to being communicated with by

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John Keats in The Eve of Saint Agnes; and they are eager to try those skills out, if you are the type of person who enjoys helping them, and know how to. However, start talking about the pseudo science of ‘grammar’, with its intransitive verbs, reflexive pronouns, not splitting infinitives, and the evils of the dangling preposition; and, although your pupils may have received the full unofficial syllabus in their mother tongue from minute one of their lives; and although they may be very well behaved, and wanting to please, and have a working relationship with their teachers, they eventually start saying things like: “When are we going to do something interesting again, like Dictionaries? Can we actually discuss that poem by John Keats you gave us the notes about? Robert Browning uses punctuation differently to Carol Ann Duffy, but I still don’t understand their poems! What can I say in the exam? Put some anagrams on the board! Can we work on a complete book in year nine, and make notes about the chapters, and the characters? How do you revise for English? Can we write our own stories?” You can refuse their requests, dodge their questions, and demonstrate your superb classroom control, and many of your pupils will obediently learn about, well, whatever it is you wish to tell them, Mr. Goebells, because they trust you, and respect the concept of education. We know that. And you can publish ecstatic statistics, and dine out on amusing anecdotes. Just keep on repeating that they may disappoint people with their exam results. And yet, there is a right and a proper place for grammar; it just doesn’t know it yet.

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Chapter Five:

The (Place) of Grammar Part One

My time at teachers’ college (1982 - 1986) coincided with the final years of an era during which the teaching of anything that was remotely associated with the very vague term ‘grammar’ was actually frowned upon and, believe it or not, was discouraged within the teaching establishment. By the latter half of the 1980’s the next stage of the very lucrative Grammar Wars was really heating up and I found I could agree with nobody. I was a conscientious objector. The trouble was that those against the teaching of grammar threw the babies out with the bathwater; while those in favour, tended to drown them in it. Such extremes of ideology operating within the education establishment were a spur to my developing an approach to language theory which I could actually explain and justify to children, and so, motivate them to express themselves coherently. The opposing forces in the grammar wars have kept me securely in the middle of the road ever since, a place I have come to appreciate for its peace and quiet. Even handwriting had, mistakenly, become associated with grammarians. Therefore many an anti grammarian said: why hamper a child’s writing style by forcing them to make conventional letter shapes? Don’t mark spelling, it’s so negative; and so called ‘grammar’ was dumped.

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Ironically, as a result of this, when individuality became the ‘god’, there was no discipline within which many children could express and develop a personal style. The really sad thing is that many of the people electing not to teach children writing or spelling in school, had received the true basics at home themselves, and assumed that all children had received the same. They hadn’t, and they don’t.

That such a thing as this could actually happen when I had done rows and rows of swirls and circles, ascenders and descenders as a child, to correct poor handwriting, and I had done my spelling corrections, further alerted me to the very flimsy nature of teaching fashions, and made me seek for something more lasting. There had to be a another way, something outside this narrow political arena, something which pupils from all walks of life and from all eras could benefit from, and, of course, there always has been. But you have to take off your political blinkers to see it.

In this chapter I will show why the illusion of ‘grammatical rules’, and its antithesis: “mere anarchy”; can only gain ascendancy when the reality of Conventions and Accurate Personal Style and their intended combination (the perfect synthesis which, ironically, predates either of those ridiculous stances) has been usurped, and then forgotten. In the course of doing this I will show you what I think grammar really is, and thereby answer the only relevant question about grammar: Armed with a knowledge of the durable conventions of English, plus the ability to read, write, speak, listen and to think; how much does a seventeen or eighteen year old need to know about ‘grammar’, in order to treat King Lear with the respect and care he deserves?

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Naturally, my first task was to arrive at a working definition for the key concept which underpins this chapter: Grammar. This was not as simple a task as I had naively hoped, and, in fact, this chapter is a reflection of my own journey to arriving at just that – an accurate definition of the word grammar. I was to discover that the whole subject of ‘grammar’ is a remarkable can of worms. However, I started simply, by looking the word up in dictionaries, including my Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1983). My eventual working definitions mainly use as a starting point the definitions given in this dictionary, which I have always found useful because it gives substantial clues as to the etymology of key terms.

To begin with, Grammar (from the Greek for ‘a letter’) is often thought to be the science of a language; or perhaps it is a branch of linguistics. Maybe it is a set of rules for, and is also the art of, the correct use of a language? Perhaps it is all of these things and more, or none of them.7 The one thing most definitions of grammar do have in common, though, is the graphic derivation of the word. Grammar would therefore perhaps more accurately have been defined as the science, or analysis, of written language only - if grammarians hadn’t already shot themselves in the foot by pretending to analyse written language in terms of their spurious ‘parts of speech’. When written language is studied in terms of the real parts of speech: Intention, vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, pronunciation, intonation, and context; then reading, which is what it is all about, becomes critical analysis and appreciation, which involves the understanding of all aspects of written communication. 7

To get a feeling for the varied concepts signified to different people by the word ‘grammar’ today: what it is, what it entails, you only have to consider a fraction of the 46,000,000 or so entries for the word, to be found on Google.

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To a nascent English teacher, there was very clearly no general agreement amongst academics, dictionaries, and educational policy makers about many aspects of language, which I could confidently take from them to pass on to school children. There have simply been, through history, a series of people who, at one time or another, have attempted to impose their own, probably quite legitimate, personal style with the conventions of language upon society as a whole. They called these personal styles, for want of a more accurate phrase: correct grammar, and they gained their own followers; a situation which remains largely unchanged to this day. Meanwhile, all sides in the grammar wars (and there are many) argue their points using the same few conventions, simply employing differing personal styles.

But consider this: Conversation and Literature, at every level, really are, each, at once, the living art and the science of a language. It is only the degree of personal effort put into individual examples of them which differs. Conversation and Literature are applied language, but, unlike with Maths or Physics, extensive participation is hardly an option. The very act of communicating through language is an act of creation which involves simultaneous study and art. Within the best of Literature and Conversation, Art and Science meet, and work upon each other. The word science comes from the Latin for knowing. This is why we love great authors; they have a knack for, as Herman Melville put it: ‘The great art of telling the truth.’ Nevertheless, some people have always sought to make their own personal style appear to be a convention, in various fields of endeavour, and therefore the agreed way for everyone to do things. And many, otherwise very alert people, regularly confuse the meanings of such words as convention, rule, and fashion. Certainly, these words may

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sit side by side; but not, please, in the same seat, for this can lead to some terrible battles. For example, everybody knows that it is a convention that, in our English climate, men and women wear clothing in winter, which protects them from the weather. (I mention only winter here, to avoid a long digression exploring the entire concept of clothing just now, interesting though that may be.) This winter clothing reflects the nature of our actual physical existence on this portion of the planet. But, it used to be an odd little rule that women should wear long dresses which came down to the ground, and which many people thought did not reflect the nature of our actual physical existence on this planet. Long dresses, with hoops and bustles and knickerbockers, that is, were a fashion. Nevertheless, some kind of warm clothing was and remains a convention.

And it is a convention that we begin written sentences with capital letters, and end them with full stops, question marks or exclamation marks. This reflects the way we speak and breathe, making reading more natural. But it used to be, and for some it still is, a grammatical rule that you can’t start sentences with the word ‘and’, or ‘but’, which does not reflect the way we speak and breathe; though anyone is free to adapt their own personal style, and breathing, so that it does.

Rules have much to do with fashion, and often mere personal whim. Conventions, on the other hand, are to do with civilisations, and ingeniously, one might even say democratically, they are intended to provide scope for many personal styles, tastes, fashions and whims all at the same time. So, where does this thing called ‘Grammar’ fit in?

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Well, for example, we don’t need to know the word syntax, in order to learn how to say, or write, the phrase ‘the red car’ correctly. Being talked with in an interested way from minute one of life by one’s parents, possessing a conventional vocabulary, a willingness to think, a desire to communicate, and a firm intention, are far more useful when it comes to using one’s family tongue. The word order, or syntax, of the phrase ‘the red car’ has almost become a convention of English, but not quite; however the word ‘syntax’ is merely the grammatical term for the order in which we choose to put those words. In France, they might say ‘la voiture rouge’ - ‘the car red’. That is an example of French syntax. What might be interesting is to consider the merits, or the derivation, of these two ways of describing a car. Should we put the colour before the car? Well, mostly we do, and we get along alright. And yet, I can think of instances (in a poem perhaps) where someone might be able to make that French syntax work well in English – as in ‘pastures green’ for example.

There are very few absolute conventions in English (let alone rules) but the true conventions we do have are rugged and durable, perhaps because of this willowy flexibility. Vocabulary, the alphabet and punctuation, spelling, pronunciation, the shapes of letters, and the parts of speech, are about the only relatively stable elements we have; but, employed by agile minds, they are considerable tools. Meanwhile, a ‘grammar text’ may well tell us that intelligible syntax, and the correct uses of punctuation, are the result of the formulation of grammatical rules. But that is little better than claiming a convention, already within the public domain, as

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one’s own invention. This may impress little children, but I really don’t think we should want to follow anyone down that road.

As I’ve discussed in Chapter Three: What exactly do you mean? There is almost unlimited scope for personal style in how one chooses to use the conventions of English, and one’s choices are directly related to the conscious level of one’s immediate desire to communicate. Therefore, if you wish to communicate, it is wise to use the conventions in ways which are intelligible to others. Even so, there are people who, sometimes with great obstinacy and truculence, regularly place personal style far above content, in various forms of self expression, including their use of language, clothing, and accessories.

While some have liked to aggrandize their personal style by calling it ‘correct grammar’, or ‘what we’ll all be wearing next year’, it is significant that one of the acknowledged experts in the use of written language, William Strunk, Jr. called his remarkably slim volume on this subject (published in 1918) The Elements of Style. I’m glad he called it that, instead of, perhaps “Style for Dummies”; and I respect him for his low key approach because, although I don’t agree with everything he says, at times his suggestions are extremely helpful to me. But, I mean, who really is going to say ‘red the car’? I doubt that a child, who has been communicated with properly from an early age, whether or not they’ve heard of the word syntax, would do so. Still, there are people who seem to feel that “car red the” is where we’d all be, but for the grace of ‘grammar’.

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It is precisely at this point that someone who likes the notion of correct grammar, as some kind of authoritative set of rules, might say something like this: “No, the point is that Grammar encompasses everything about language. Call it conventions, rules, style, grammar – it’s all the same thing, you’re just fussing about semantics.” As if the word semantic did not mean something along the lines of:

Relating to meaning, especially of words. The science of the meaning of words, and (loosely) the differences in, and shades of, meaning between words. (Chambers 1983)

To my mind, no individual use of vocabulary is ever ‘just semantics’. That is like saying: ‘Don’t bother about it, it’s only a specific idea that you are trying to express.” On the contrary, communication through language is precisely about shades of meaning between words – what you really mean by what you say, and it is self instructive. The lazy mind set indicated by, “That’s just semantics,” leads to many an unfulfilled conversation. It’s like saying, “Oh for God’s sake, don’t bother with roasting those potatoes, you should just be grateful that you’ve got some. Stick ‘em in a saucepan, and hurry up.” And I suppose that if people are starved of communication, then any slap dash dish will seem to do.

Nevertheless, the word ‘syntax’ is useful when discussing the use of language, and there’s no need to throw it out just because some inflexible soul has tried to carve themselves a memorial in stone to the effect that it is wrong ‘to quickly go to the loo’.

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Spurious rules are, naturally, annoying if they are imposed upon us, and I think that someone’s got to explain, once and for all, that to quickly go to the loo and split your infinitive is a very economical and sensible way to state it. To ‘go quickly to the loo’, just leaves you hurrying on the way there. Then you have to do your business, and come back. To ‘go to the loo quickly’ implies some kind of abdominal strain. Yet the whole thing is taken care of with: “I’m just going to quickly go to the loo.” In fact you’ll be back before a phony grammar freak has had the time to consider the merits of your syntax. But wait a minute, in these pursy times, there may well be someone who will find a reason to say, “I’m quickly going just to go to the loo.” I came across an article on syntax in the Daily Telegraph a while back, (28.9.04). Apparently, if you put these words: “lean minced meat”; into this order: “minced meat lean” and stick them on a packet of minced meat with more than seven per cent fat, you are within the law. You are not, that is, leading anyone astray. I would certainly explore this interesting arrangement of words in class. ****

Do you need to know what a noun is? Well, I think so. I want you to know what a noun is. It will be a regularly useful word, probably because there are thousands of nouns. It’s going to come up regularly in classroom conversations, like verb, adjective, adverb, simile, metaphor will. Supposing I didn’t want to use the word nice in a certain context because it just didn’t say enough. Instead of saying: “I think I’ll look for a more descriptive, word.” I might say, “I think I’ll try another adjective.” That’s a little more economical. There are alternatives to “nice” to suit all contexts. A cake is probably nice in a different way

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a day, or a person, or a goal is nice. And knowing about adjectives, and their function, leads by a direct route into the consideration of other, more powerful uses of descriptive language called similes and metaphors, which are literary terms. The consideration of the way the actual words of a text have been used, however, would be in the realm of critical analysis and appreciation, which is not intended to prescribe usage, but simply to demonstrate a personal understanding of it. I have never yet considered it necessary to try to use or explain the term ‘uncountable noun’. It’s just never come up. Are some things, perhaps, more important than others? I think so. The use of the apostrophe is important. As I said, when I started out no one was telling me what to teach. I worked out what was important by the children I found in my classroom. What they needed, in order to communicate through language, was important. It has been surprisingly consistent over the years, including having to regularly disabuse some of them of the idea that you can’t possibly write a one word paragraph. But we could also, I believe, get involved with possessive adjectives, demonstrative adjectives, reciprocal pronouns, or a gerund phrase acting as object. How long have we got? These are all nothing more, nor less, than names for certain kinds of words and combinations of words. We already know what the actual words and phrases they refer to are, and what we want them to do, and we may use them all the time, but we may not know what they are called. For example, we use myself, himself, and herself often. Do you need to know that these words are called ‘reflexive pronouns’? Perhaps you do. Would Thomas Hardy have been able to write his novels without knowing that the grammatical term for the word ‘myself’ is ‘reflexive pronoun’? It’s debatable. Interestingly, Thomas Hardy, largely self taught, was apparently a stickler for ‘correct’

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English’, and was looked down upon from a great height by some much lesser intellects, because of his rustic origins. There just is no pleasing some folks. The word ‘herself’ is the conventional English word for a mental concept. The grammatical term for this word (twice removed from the concept) is ‘reflexive pronoun’. To learn the word ‘herself’, and how to use it, what it means, however, is a matter of perception, and learning the conventional vocabulary of the English mother tongue. Supposing you did want to know what kind of word ‘herself’ is? The grammatical term will likely be mentioned in the dictionary, and there are sites, such as usingenglish.com on the web. *

Let’s look at the word orange, as in the colour. The word serves a very useful purpose in naming a colour. But, if you were to go just a little further, and say that the colour orange should never appear beside the colour purple, you’d be meddling and trying to impose your preference on other people. With enough influence you could make it a rule, and name the rule after yourself. That’s called micro-megalomania. With enough power, you might even make it a law. And, let’s face it, we do this jokingly all the time with the fashion police. But, in joking, we are recognizing it’s a bit of a twisted impulse within us that wants to make someone else look a certain way, which we find pleasing, but which may not be so pleasing to the person who is the object of our prejudice. By the same token, if you then start talking about: “Not ending a sentence with a preposition.” “Having a main verb.” “Adhering to one intelligible syntax rather than another.” Or simply “Never to quickly grab a bite.” Then I think you are meddling

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and imposing your own little prejudices. You are not recognizing that it’s a bit of a twisted impulse. You might want to make everybody sound one certain way because you can’t handle accurate diversity. These are examples of what are called ‘grammatical rules’, while they are nothing more than personal preferences in the use of conventions. These so called rules may even be to do with something as trivial as patterns entrenched in someone’s individual brain. But they may not be the preference of the person actually using the words at the time. Your preferred usage may not signify exactly what they wish to express, in clothing or in language. Perhaps citizens who have perfectly acceptable preferred ways of using conventions should simply insist on this kind of thing with their own children. Anyway, it’s called bringing them up.

As I’ve said: People, who try to impose their own personal style, rather than to communicate within the wider conventions of our language, usually call their rules ‘correct grammar’. And, not surprisingly, when they try to enforce these spurious ‘grammatical rules’ upon other people, they start getting the following reactions:

First Man: Say, buddy can you please tell me where the gent’s toilet is at? Second Man: I’m sorry; ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I refuse to put? First Man: Okay then, can you tell me where the gent’s toilet is at, you idiot! Now, I can understand why the first man might be moved to respond in this manner. But it’s nasty, isn’t it? It’s a shame and it is completely unnecessary to provoke this kind of reaction, just because of the perfectly intelligible, but differing,

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speech patterns the two men have imprinted on their own brains. It’s being a busybody, an ‘expert’.8 ****

Depending on where you look: In a school, grammar book, or on a website, you are likely to find sentences defined, in various ways: A sentence is a unit of language that makes sense on its own. Or perhaps: A simple sentence has a subject and a verb. or: A complex sentence is a simple sentence plus a subordinate clause. The writer may go on to add further conditions, according to their personal taste, such as: sentences must also have a main verb; may not begin with ‘and’ or ‘but’, and so on.

Or: A sentence is a unit of language which begins with a capital letter, and ends with a full stop, exclamation mark, or a question mark (when written, of course).

It’s worth asking: “Makes sense to whom?” And I’ll come back to that in a minute. The last full definition above is a convention. That is, in written language, we generally agree that sentences should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop, a question mark, or an exclamation mark, for clarity, and ease of communication. I discovered, in reading “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynn Truss, that the conventions of punctuation were developed over time in the printing trade, to help us communicate in writing. I don’t think there is any one person we can thank and praise for their invention; but if there was, he or she would surely be as famous as anyone else in the entire history of the world. But that seems to be the nature of conventions: if they 8

Lightnin’ Hopkins has a good cautionary tale about such linguistic inflexibility, which also carries a chocolate prize.

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didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them, but hardly anyone can do it all by themselves. Most other things are entirely optional. Someone, however, might feel the need to point out that newspaper headlines which do generally make sense on their own, and so could, by current fashion, be called sentences, often don’t include punctuation marks. As in: First Smoker Executed

But let’s not make problems for ourselves, or, if we must make them for ourselves, to pass the time, or to indulge our own neuroses, then let’s not make problems for our children. Perhaps newspapers don’t use full stops with headlines because there is no other sentence involved; though they may occasionally use other punctuation, such as an exclamation mark, for effect. Simple. Can we move on?

Thomas Carlyle said: Language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought. I think this is an excellent analogy because it conjures up the notion of making the spirit in our thoughts visible to others, even if they are orange and purple together. Whilst reading we might sometimes pause to think: “What a beautiful sentence.” But we shouldn’t forget that one of the main points of this beautiful arrangement of words is to conjure within the reader a fine idea. Perhaps we’d then say: “That thought is wonderfully expressed.” Would it be possible to fully appreciate a sentence or two without understanding the ideas contained within them? You tell me. For the moment, here is Emily Bronte introducing Heathcliffe, in Wuthering Heights:

‘The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce!” Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the

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words; and I think that circumstances determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.’

Bearing in mind the quote from Carlyle, I think it might be painful and pointless to dissect this living body of language into a mere grammatical naming of parts. It is perfectly easy to understand, analyse, appreciate, and learn from Emily Bronte’s use of language without substituting any grammatical terms for the actual words which are there before us on the page; and why would we attempt to talk in any meaningful way about a text which we do not have to hand, and can refer to? If someone were to see this text as a dead body, then, I suppose, by all means dissect it – one might even be able to construct a set of Frankenstinian rules out of this dissection. But please, in your own time. We shouldn’t forget that Emily Bronte’s wonderful arrangement of words and punctuation is meant to conjure within us a living scene; characters with ideas and feelings, awakening us to the spirit within the language. She’s a poet. However, prior lessons in conventions would certainly be necessary in order to communicate with Emily Bronte. It is necessary for us to know the alphabet and punctuation, their function, and how to use them. We must also have access to sufficient vocabulary to be able to enter completely into Emily’s poetically created world; and we must be able to concentrate and follow her meaning throughout the length of more complex sentences, such as the second one in this excerpt. Have you tried saying “walk in” through closed teeth yet? Do you watch Heathcliffe walk away from the gate without opening it? And, can you understand the narrator’s fascination with Heathcliffe’s manner? Emily Bronte knew how to use the alphabet and punctuation. Why she is a great writer has plenty to do with that, but more necessary, perhaps, were her fine mind, her

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own personal interests, and her wish to express and share these with others. It was her strong desire to communicate honestly, with herself and with others, which inspired her excellent, sustained, personal use of, let’s face it, relatively simple conventions, in complex and interesting ways. In the face of her talents, a lesson on grammar would seem an impertinence - to paraphrase Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) on Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Nevertheless, and somewhat alarmingly, ‘grammar’, these days, while remaining nothing more, nor less, than a useful collection of words with which to categorize other words, is now calling itself a ‘meta language’. Sounds impressive don’t it? The illusion that is ‘Correct Grammar’ seems to have assumed a phantom life of its own. A meta language is supposedly a language used to discuss language, but, since all discussion of English language usage must be done using the ordinary conventions of language, this aspiration of ‘grammar’ to the status of a meta language, seems rather pathetic: a rope ladder, perhaps, by which grammarians seek to escape from the corner into which they have painted themselves; taking them into a truly spooky world of their own, where they may then haul up the rope and end up hanging themselves. It is beyond the scope of this book, and the needs of children in schools, to completely deflate such (in the face of true literary excellence) pomposity. I recommend ‘The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory’ as a starting place for readers who wish to pursue this curious direction of ‘grammar’ further.

Coming back to the idea: ‘A sentence is a unit of language which makes sense on its own’ though. This notion has often been offered as a grammatical rule, in the guise of convention. However, it is not a convention. I’m afraid it is, once again, someone’s

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whim. For meaning, or sense, can be a matter of many individually variable and spontaneous factors. Opinions and preconceptions, for example, may play a major part in the perception or, indeed, the non-perception of sense and meaning. Intellect, experience, understanding, personal vocabulary, receptiveness, memory, ability to concentrate, the willingness to think, and context, are all elements which affect the perception of meaning; and they are constantly at work within and surrounding discrete units of language, be they one word or several thousand words, spoken or written; as we all have demonstrated throughout the ages. Indeed, where non-fiction writers may expand meaning through readily accessible contextual footnotes, references, and bibliographies; poets, dramatists, and novelists achieve the same thing within the very structure of their texts. One of the secrets of Shakespeare’s incredible economy with words, and why he rewards probably inexhaustible study, is because the eventual meaning of individual sentences is sometimes woven throughout his plays. A sentence in Act One may create a defining context for a sentence in Act Five, and vice versa, and give it meaning. For example, in Macbeth: In Act One, Lady Macbeth constantly seeks to deny the horrible reality of her own, and her husband’s, actions, in order to escape the feelings of remorse and guilt for their crime: “The sleeping, and dead are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil.” With this in mind, in Act Five, when Lady Macbeth is driven to suicide by the appearance of phantom blood on her hands, she reveals herself as, emotionally, a despairing child, in her fear and dread of the illusory blood: “Out damned spot!” It can then be interpreted that her earlier blind ambition was the result of a lack of self-knowledge, rather than a product of the abject evil of

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which she is often accused. This is perhaps more helpful in inspiring fear, pity, and understanding, in an audience, when considering human nature. This example is most appropriate, since I was delighted to discover that the word context is derived from the Latin for: to weave, and Shakespeare’s works can certainly be considered to be masterpieces of lexical tapestry. Speaking of tapestries, and related material, I was delighted again when I discovered that the word implicit comes from the Latin: to fold in. So, I could easily guess where explicit comes from. Bearing in mind all of what has gone before, the ‘grammatical’ rule that a sentence must make sense on its own is on very shaky ground. At best, it is the speaker who decides what makes sense – to thine own self be true, even if, to thine own self, black is white. But at its worst, such an idea presumes that it is the omnipotent reader or listener who imparts the meaning to the words they read and hear. And, strangely enough, grammarians, anti-grammarians, and deconstructionists are all united in this false concept: that it is they who impart the meaning to an utterance, rather than attempting to simply get at the meaning intended by the writer or the speaker of the words. This is no different from you and me sitting down to have a conversation, while making no attempt whatsoever to understand what the other is trying to say. Your words mean what I think they mean, and my words mean what you think they mean. In fact, if we changed seats we’d probably get along famously. But context and meaning have fascinated people for centuries: “It is said that an Eastern monarch charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words: ‘And this too shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” -

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Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. Milwaukee, [September 30, 1859]’

* Unfortunately though, the imposition of anonymous personal style, under the aegis of ‘correct grammar’ can reach into quite elementary areas of human life and development: “Are you going to school today?” “Yes!” But, according to some people, the word ‘Yes’, uttered on its own here, somehow does not make sense. There is no subject, predicate, or much else at all for the antique grammarian to grasp (though there is entirely sufficient intention, vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, pronunciation, intonation, and the all important context) so: “Yes, I am going to school today.” “Are you taking your lunch?” “Yes, sir, I am taking my lunch.” “Have you got your games kit?” “Yes, ma’am, I have got my games kit.” “Is English your mother tongue?” “No, ma’am, English is a faraway gentleman’s tongue. I, um, have no longer got my mother’s tongue, ma’am.” Perhaps to escape embarrassment, when challenged for having attempted to impose a personal stylistic preference upon society, a grammarian may explain that, you see, in order to make that one word response: “YES!”- make sense; we must “Take the rest of what would be the proper sentence as unspoken.”

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But again, I’m afraid, that just doesn’t wash. It is a proper sentence, because what we need, and, more to the point, we don’t need telling this, is quite the reverse; we simply need to take that one word response in context with the previous sentence. And we can do this, because we have an attention span longer than the average goldfish. Discussing many of these ideas recently with an ‘A’ level class, a very thoughtful and articulate fellow of around eighteen declared that I must be in fact a ‘postgrammarian’. I think he may be right, but if I am, it is a parallel universe which has always existed alongside the grammar wars, rather than a linear development from them. *

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The (Place) of Grammar

Part Two

Seasoning my reasoning with, admittedly, a certain feistiness, the above examples were my typical responses to the imperious dictates of, largely anonymous, grammarians over the last twenty years or so. Things have changed, somewhat, and in the interim I have welcomed such sensible and well balanced books as T.P. Waldron’s Principles of Language and Mind (1985) in which he illuminates the problem at the root of grammar as a pseudo science; and Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue (1991) in which he exposes the compounding of the error in so far as it concerns our appreciation of English.9 The arrival of these two books was very encouraging - I would go so far as to say that they were a blessing. Perhaps it’s all too easy to select a paragraph here or there from any book in order to press home one’s own point; however the intention behind both of those books is to promote accuracy in the use of language. Neither is merely a broadside against grammar. Nor, for that matter, is this present chapter; it’s just that in terms of people insisting how other people should use or teach language, the antigrammarians, due the ‘laissez faire’ attitude at the base of their ideas, have so far been much easier for me to ignore. Because the anti-grammarians were able to come up with little more than slogans such as: every child is an expert in language; and suggestions that handwriting doesn’t need to be taught, because it might cramp a child’s style and why not completely revise the way words are spelled while in power, the grammarians have enjoyed their predictable return to fashionable status. 9

I await clearance to include quotes from these books, in this electronic context.

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Therefore, plenty of books on ‘correct grammar’ have appeared in bookshops again and the media have highlighted all things ‘grammatical’ mainly filing them under ‘back to basics’, which I have already shown is a misleading concept. But it is important to remember that these swings in fashion are caused by desperation, rather than innovation, and, no other alternative being in sight, in 1999 a QCA publication entitled Not whether but how (subtitle: Teaching grammar in English at key stages 3 and 4) landed on my desk. The more enlightened grammarians (which is not quite an oxymoron) some of whom work with QCA, study written English - rather than, for example, written Latin. Nevertheless modern day grammarians still appear to make the fundamental mistake of forgetting that language use originates with speech. QCA stands for: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The implication of the title Not whether but how being that whether or not to teach ‘grammar’ in English lessons was, by 1999, no longer an issue, it should be done. But, perhaps in the light of such thoughtful books as Mother Tongue and Principles of Language and Mind both of which explore the question of ‘grammar’ with great clarity, there is an important difference between this QCA booklet and the many books on ‘grammar’ which merely try to pass off personal preferences (either the author’s or someone else’s) as conventions. The more enlightened authors who write about the subject of ‘grammar’ today generally realize that they must stand beside their suggestions and assertions, make them their own, and at least try to back their ideas up, or be laughed out of town. This is commendable and why discussion, rather than mere shouting, is now possible.

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In her chapter: What do pupils need to know about grammar? Debra Myhill of the University of Exeter, and one of the lead consultants for the Technical Accuracy project, discusses how to help children learn about ‘grammatical structures’ whilst analysing texts (in this case a short poem by Theodore Roethke). If the next few pages are to make sense, it will be necessary for you to read, and have to hand, Theodore Roethke’s poem and Debra’s comments. Having read the poem, and keeping it to hand, I hope the following discussion will be entertaining, and will encourage the reader to arrive at their own interpretation, backed up, of course, from the text. Copyright forbids reproducing the poem here. The poem can be found here: http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/8006-Theodore-Roethke-Child-on-Top-of-aGreenhouse though it would be best to print the poem out and have it beside you.

Debra’s analysis is included here in line with QCA’s permission for non-commercial use:

“Take, for example, Theodore Roethke’s poem: ‘Child on Top of a Greenhouse’.

It would be a missed opportunity to analyse this poem and not to refer to its grammatical structures. The poem is one long sentence, building up to the climax of the last line, but more fundamentally it is a sentence without a main verb. The effect of this is to still the poem; there is no movement forward, no narrative action, just a moment in time, captured almost photographically and frozen. The use of present participles is central to the impact of the poem. They provide the key descriptions of the boy’s moment of guilty triumph on top of the greenhouse: for one moment his senses are acutely aware of his environment,

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‘billowing, crackling, staring, flashing, rushing, plunging, tossing, pointing and shouting’. The punctuation, too, contributes to the poem’s impact. The sequence of lineend commas gives the poem pace and the final exclamation mark emphasises the drama of the child’s situation, from his perspective at least. The use of parenthetical commas in the fourth line breaks the subject-participle rhythm of all the other lines and draws attention to the image of ‘streaked glass’ catching the sun. These grammatical features are integral to the meaning and the effect of the poem and pupils can see how they are achieved.”

Browsing for a minute or two on the internet (July 2008) I found the following definition of the term ‘main verb’: “The main verb is the most important verb in a sentence; without it, the sentence would not be complete.” This is from: usingenglish.com – which advises on the teaching of English as a second language. But, Debra says, Roethke’s poem is a sentence. However, for her, it is very important that this is a sentence without a main verb – and this ‘fact’ is integral to Debra’s understanding of, and response to, the poem “….it is a sentence without a main verb. The effect of this is to still the poem; there is no movement forward, no narrative action, just a moment in time, captured almost photographically and frozen….These grammatical features are integral to the meaning and effect of the poem…” What we have here is a very clear example of how ‘grammar’, as distinct from Convention, is still, really, nothing more than a matter of personal opinion. There is no coming together here between people who are trying to tell us about ‘grammar’; no agreement about main verbs, or even what constitutes a sentence. Imagine the argument (and the digression) that might ensue if these two grammarians were to discuss this poem. Throw a deconstructionist into the mix and you’ve got all the

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ingredients of a fully fledged slanging match! And you can forget about Theodore Roethke.

Would their argument matter? Not to me, I’m sure it happens all the time. But that’s because I’m trying to understand Theodore Roethke, and allow him to communicate with me. As long as we’ve got our capital letter and appropriate punctuation, we’ve got a coherent sentence as far as I’m concerned. As we have seen, the kind of sense any sentence makes to a reader is going to depend upon many things. Nevertheless, looking at Debra’s personal response to Roethke’s poem, I was thinking: Ok, so far, so interesting...…

…..There is just one problem with the piece as a whole though, and that is Debra’s final sentence: “These grammatical features are integral to the meaning and the effect of the poem and pupils can see how they are achieved.” Debra clearly does not acknowledge that the ‘grammatical features’ she sees are integral to her own interpretation of the poem, and some pupils may get a different meaning and effect, nevertheless supportable by the text. I really don’t think, in any context, this goes without saying, and in this sentence it is not even implied. These grammatical features are integral to the meaning and the effect of the poem…And it is a problem because, reading precisely the same words and responding to the same punctuation, I’m not looking at a photograph of a child’s moment of guilty triumph. I’m watching a short movie about danger! Particularly those elms plunging and tossing like horses are in constant wild movement. Where the lack of a main verb stills the poem for Debra, the actual words of the poem

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which her ‘present participles’ refer to, plunging and tossing bring the poem alive in the present for me. But, according to Debra, my perceptions simply cannot be: This is a moment in time, captured almost photographically, and frozen, and that’s that. A teaching point emerging from Debra’s personal point of view might sound something like this: “When there is no main verb, the action is stilled.” This could then be committed to memory and written in an exam answer, without ever personally experiencing the poem. I think Roethke added the simile like horses to plunging and tossing precisely to make me see and feel wild movement, and once those elms have come alive, the wind starts seething through their leaves. Those clouds all rushing eastwards are no slouches either and I feel that these carefully noted details of the environment are there for a dual purpose: they bring us into the live moment, but equally importantly they reflect this child’s developing panic, as she tries to move, on top of the greenhouse. Even Debra, although she thinks the moment is frozen, later commenting on the use of punctuation says: the series of line end commas gives the poem pace. This too might sound impressive in an exam which gave marks for identifying ‘grammatical features’, but it seems to indicate that, while this candidate may be frozen, going nowhere, she’s going with quite a measured step. For me, however, the function of those commas is, as always, many sided. In one sense, this poem is a list. This may sound mundane, but the items on the list make it remarkable. Perhaps most basically, the commas logically, and simply, enable Roethke to get all of the separate elements of the ongoing moment into a single sentence, which expands the moment. I perceive this almost before I begin reading. Simply by using commas as they have been intended, Roethke is in fact preparing me for a big, fairly

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complex thought; and when I start to read, the commas then create a natural speech rhythm, and intonation, which, because of the nature of the actual words, builds to the feeling of panic which reaches its climax in that exclamation mark!

But, the word ‘pace’, like ‘robust’ and ‘rigorous’, was quite fashionable around the turn of the century. English departments were often told, perhaps by a member of SMT who might be a Science or a Latin teacher, to inject ‘pace’ into their lessons around that time. But, as in Roethke’s poem, I continue to find the concept of polyrhythm more helpful in lessons.

Because this is such an economical and densely packed poem, it demands a lot from us. There are only fifty seven words in the whole thing. I find that many poems are like rooms with secret passages, and the way into them is rarely found in the first line. But you knock upon each panel and, when you eventually tumble inside, the poem starts to become complete and make sense, and you’re ready to read it again from the first line with a whole new meaning. Sometimes, as here for me, the last line resonates back through the poem, and ever afterwards that first line will have far more impact.

For me, that last line: “And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!” flicked the switch on the movie projector, and started those horses racing. I think it is the pause, and repetition of everyone, everyone which gives the sense of continuous action. I tried taking out one everyone and the line lost its impact.

But it was the hard sound and texture of crackling splinters of glass that first drew me into the wide awake danger in this poem, and showed me the child’s movement, and

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increasingly brittle predicament. For me, by the time we come on the scene, this child has already been treading shakily on the thin, sloping, cracking panes of glass, and placing her feet warily on the old, thin, dried out, white painted, wooden window frames for some time; and at any second her foot might go through the glass, or snap a wooden frame, and the rest of her will surely follow, ripping her clothing, cutting and bruising her arms and legs, crushing those accusing chrysanthemums before she thumps onto the dirt floor. Her position is one of excruciating and increasing vulnerability, not triumph; reflected in the wild natural environment whirling around outside, and inside, her head.

But let’s rewind this movie a little. Ah yes, here is Debra’s single frame. Ten or twenty seconds earlier, this child may well have been stepping, albeit gingerly, sometimes nearly crouching, using her arms for balance, with controlled delight, picking her way carefully from frame to frame (you don’t climb and move on top of a greenhouse with anything other than your complete concentration); at last she is, as Debra finds her, triumphantly balancing on the narrow apex, thrilled with her achievement, wobbling, but nevertheless balancing, perhaps trying to stand upright for just a few important seconds, in a moment of (not quite yet, guilty!) triumph; no doubt she tries to clasp her hands bravely above her head like the heavyweight champion of the world. Then those horses and clouds would have been galloping and flying with exhilaration; not plunging and tossing in wild eyed stampede. But, at this precise moment, the very thing that must not happen does: the child becomes self conscious. It is everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting! which makes her so suddenly self-conscious, and thus makes her position vulnerable.

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(Just imagine if she was completely alone.)

It is not clear from the text whether it is only an unruly audience of children shouting, but the accusing sunflowers bring to mind some manifestation of adult presence. It is the word “guilty” which suggests the sudden self-consciousness, and which heightens the danger. The exclamation mark at the very end of the poem can represent the explicit clamour of voices and at the same time her implicit panic. It is now that we realize that everyone has been pointing up and shouting all the way through the poem! In fact, everything is happening all the way through the poem and it is those commas which suggest this. The treading, the accusing, the shouting, the billowing, the plunging, but not until we get to that last line does the entire moment (and how big is a moment?) come into focus. A few seconds earlier the wind billowing out the seat of her riding britches might have been simply another exhilarating facet of her total experience – which now is in the process of shattering into all these isolated pieces of reality, line by line. The instant she becomes self conscious, the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight catches her eye and radiates a dazzling, dizzying accusation of irresponsibility from the faces of the endangered (adult planted) chrysanthemums onto which she may well tumble, destroying them, several feet below; breaking an arm in the process. And in a flash, this child’s challenge has increased a hundred fold. It started out as a ‘known’ challenge, to climb on top of the greenhouse; but it was a journey into the unknown, and now she must struggle to control those wild horses in order to get herself down in one piece. In time honoured fashion, Roethke has brought us along to see what we might make of it all.

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As for the ‘grammatical structures’ which Debra mentions, I simply don’t see any. Roethke has expressed his vision, and communicated it to me, by matching his very sharp awareness and strong emotions with extremely well chosen, correctly spelled, conventional vocabulary and punctuation, all arranged in telling syntax. Just like Emily Bronte did in the earlier example. And I still think a lesson in ‘grammar’ seems an irrelevance. I think it might lead to children sounding like brass and tinkling cymbals. What is it then that has made Debra see this poem as a frozen photograph? I cannot answer that with any certainty. Perhaps it is precisely the act of stopping to change ‘billowing’ et al into ‘present participles’, and to make something of the ‘fact’ that there is no main verb, that render this poem frozen in her mind. Or perhaps we’re just different.

We are all pupils at the same time as we are teachers, and yet, as a pupil, knowing that there is no ‘main verb’ and that billowing is called a ‘present participle’ does not make me see Debra’s photograph rather than my film. Her ideas about grammatical structures seem a distraction to me. I might find that difficult if I was a twelve or thirteen year old, in her English class. *

I’d say children might study this poem from the age of eight or nine, as long as they have the necessary skills: (if they haven’t, please refer immediately to chapters one to four!). They will also need motivation, and organization, in order to use their skills effectively– but that’s why we read good authors, and need real teachers (see chapter four and then two!).

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For me, the inspiration comes from realising (and releasing) the power of Roethke’s words, which will connect children with their own inner worlds, and return them, inspired, to produce something of their own (writing an essay can be a creative act, given the right questions). I would explore this poem as I would any poem, by looking closely at Roethke’s choice of words and getting as close as we can to what they mean in context. Perhaps I would start with something like: “Well, what is it that is so good about that word billowing in the first line? What else might it have been, and why would it not work so well?” The term ‘present participle’ would not be necessary on the list of attributes concerning that word. It would be interesting to try to gauge the strength and the effect of that wind, throughout the poem, through Roethke’s imagery. That is, to imagine it, and to draw pictures of it. The sounds in the poem are also very interesting: what kind of sound is the crackling of splinters of glass against glass, under foot? Under shoe? Under sneaker? The distant seething of leaves. I’m sure you can hear them now. Every one of Roethke’s carefully chosen verbs deserves the status of ‘main verb’ as far as I’m concerned; they are all so absolutely appropriate to their context. Yet those same words – label them how you will – have told me something quite different from what they told Debra. You are an English teacher, what would you do now?

In her conclusion Debra reminds us that within the education establishment, if nowhere else, the grammar wars still rage: These are areas where debate remains polemical rather than substantive; but she still suggests that perhaps her own methods, which include taking note of, and applying, ‘grammatical knowledge’, really are the answer to the problems she perceives:

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“At the present time, we have insufficient information about how pupils transfer conceptual knowledge into their own writing and little evidence about how pupils learn grammar. These are areas where debate remains polemical rather than substantive: greater emphasis on integrating grammar into the English curriculum may well develop these debates more productively. Nonetheless, the aim of current developments must surely be to establish a classroom practice which routinely helps pupils to develop and apply their grammatical knowledge in all aspects of their language work.”

Frankly, from the slightly tentative tone, I feel that Debra is tantalisingly close to finally escaping the phantom grip of ‘grammar’ and falling into the welcoming arms of convention and accurate personal style. If we were to replace the word grammar with conventions of English and grammatical with conventional in the above paragraph, we’d be well on the way to solving the ‘mystery’ which her conclusion, in its present form, encapsulates; for, if we do not know how pupils learn grammar, we certainly do know how children learn the conventions of a language: (all together now) “by routinely being with caring adults, usually their parents and wider family, over several years of naturally developing, day to day interaction, establishing deep foundations and familiarity in the use of language”.

Needless to say I would be all for integrating the Conventions of English [rather than mere ‘grammar’] into the English curriculum.

As I’ve probably already mentioned: if the true basics are taken care of at the appropriate time, then children will have little trouble developing and applying their

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knowledge of these conventions in all aspects of their language work, by the time they reach the age of eleven. If the true basics have not been taken care of at the appropriate time in a child’s life, then we must simply do what Tim Robbins does with Gil Bellows in The Shawshank Redemption. Teach them.

It only remains to be said that, were it not for Debra’s revelation of her thinking, in the time honoured manner of teachers who are confident and open minded enough to put their ideas up on the blackboard for others to test (for this is one of the key elements of teaching) I know that I would not have enjoyed Roethke’s poem in quite the same way. Nor, perhaps, would I have articulated my own views quite as I have here. Having Debra’s analysis to respond to has probably helped me to articulate my own analysis – and has expanded my vision. Opposition which can remain as discussion is very healthy indeed. And of course, having now revealed my own thoughts on this poem of Roethke’s, I too may provoke others to do the same as I have here.

As to how children may transfer their conceptual knowledge into their own writing, I’ll be looking at that in Chapter Seven.

In the meantime, what it all boils down to is this: As far as English goes, nobody alive on the Earth today has had anything whatsoever to do with the creation of the Alphabet or Punctuation. Yet, all our written Plays, Poems, Prose, Shopping Lists, Letters, New Words, Texts, E Mails, and most Non-Fiction are accounted for within these conventional Twenty Six Letters, a dozen or so Punctuation Marks, and the occasional number.

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Similarly, nobody alive today has had very much, proportionately, to do with bringing the conventions of spoken English into being. Language is a deep ocean, and yes, the surface is constantly rippling: we have inherited the conventions, and each of us may discover, at any time, possibilities within them which have always been there. Hence Ted Hughes’ use of the word ‘tigering’ in his poem, Pike, and Shakespeare’s probable creation of nearly two thousand words which, yes, are now conventions! Not forgetting his many wonderful examples of effective syntax, the employment of which, in our own speech and writing, seems still to elude us - so bound up is syntax with intensity and clarity of thought. The actual Conventions of English have developed and endured across the borders of time, space, politics, gender, race, colour, creed and so called ‘grammatical fashion’, and will probably outlive all opinionated battling. Aren’t all children, almost by decree of nature, supposed to start learning these conventions from minute one of their lives? When this happens children can begin to develop an effective personal style based on informed choice. Literature and conversation become each, at once, the art and the study of a language. Linguistics is the science of languages. And the place of grammar remains to classify the words of a language, no more, no less, to your heart’s content.

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Chapter Six:

Tell Grandma What You Did Today!

An important theme in this book is that what schools call ‘English’ is different from most other subjects, because it must be taught, and learned to a considerable degree whether or not a child goes to school. This applies most strongly to the speaking and listening part. Yet, without it, the other aspects of Communication through Language can hardly flourish. I don’t have a better way to introduce this aspect of communication through language, as it applies to equipping a new born baby with the skills to tackle Shakespeare, than to repeat something I have mentioned earlier. Communication through Language probably begins around minute one of a human being’s life perhaps even earlier. The very first of the skills of En1, 2 and 3 to be approached would seem to be the Listening part of En1.

It is said that some people fear public speaking more than they fear death. In this area of ‘English’, perhaps even more than in the others, children are a bit like the kind of workers who don’t trust a boss unless they see that the boss can do what they are asking the children to do, and why not? We’ve all probably had painful, as well as good experiences, in the more public aspects of speaking. It’s the unpredictable nature of the activity. There truly is no success like failure, and learning is pretty well instant, I have found.

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Our own experiences are excellent material for introducing the topic of public speaking into the classroom; they are similar, in humanising you in the eyes of pupils, to being seen by them downtown.

‘Show and Tell’ has been a primary school activity for decades. Primary school teachers know it makes sense. I believe that the name itself suggests a very strong link with what needs to be happening in the first four or five years of a child’s life, if they are to build a strong foundation for the skills of Speaking and Listening. And show and tell is what leads to the art of conversation - going further into what is shown and told. Discussing, asking questions about it. Isn’t it the family who are constantly pointing to, naming, and explaining things to a child? Showing and telling and asking. And after that, the child starts doing the same thing. Try and stop yourself, or them, doing it. So where’s the problem? Only when it doesn’t happen.

Certainly, the progression from family to the outside world may have been more easily structured, and gentler, in less fragmented times: with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, close neighbours on hand. This is why, in the present climate, a whole army of skilled learning support assistants should be ready and waiting for children at age four or five, when they first arrive at school; not when they are twelve or thirteen years old. If the foundation is already in place, when a child reaches school age, then probably little more than an invitation to show and tell, and to discuss, is needed to continue this in early school years. After all, it’s a nice egocentric kind of sharing. And isn’t ‘show and tell’ what most public speaking is about, from year seven PowerPoint presentations to party political broadcasts?

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As for continuing this, with regard to the more formal aspects of speaking and listening: a good part of what needs to be done will be automatically exemplified by the teacher. Preparing lessons, giving instructions clearly, guiding thoughts, encouraging personal expression, summing up, reading stories, all require skill and organization, plus the ability to be spontaneous. The same kinds of skills are required for presenting a talk. English teachers used to have the opportunity to provide a working example of all of these skills daily. A large part of speaking and listening in classrooms has to do with preparing the environment. You need to have the room the way you want it - windows open or closed; lights on or off? That’s what teachers do, and can encourage pupils to do. Children’s presentations, however small, are like a lesson. You give them the responsibility, and you ride shotgun for them. What needs to be said about the more formal aspects of En1 is that you must know what you’re talking about, feel comfortable with the material, and prepare it properly. Then it becomes an opportunity, rather than a dread. I have certainly learned this from experience, both in and out of school. You should simply never use material you are not comfortable with, and neither should children have to.

Aspects of drama and role play enter and leave the ‘English’ syllabus as regularly as Ministers of Education enter and leave office. But again, role play reaches right back into a child’s early days - if they’ve had the unofficial English syllabus. “We’re going to do a play! Watch!” Wherever such an activity as ‘role play’ is meant to fit into the constantly changing definitive and statutory versions of the ‘curriculum’, role play remains an excellent way

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for children to work within a group, collaborate, support each other, solve problems, use their imaginations, be entertaining, and have a good deal of healthy fun all at the same time. Drama certainly plays a useful part in learning how to communicate through language, and English teachers generally use role play, whether or not the curriculum demands it.

*******

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Chapter Seven: She can make a pen speak!

Sooner or later, our seventeen and a half year old English pupil is going to have to sit down and respond to William Shakespeare at ‘A’ Level; and probably answer one or two exam questions on novels and poetry also.

Exams are another constant political argument, and, once again, I’m in the middle of the road. I don’t mind exams, but there is something I would change. I think exams should be open ended. This way, everyone gets the chance to realize their full potential, and, if quickness is an issue, you can measure that too. Next.

Our ‘A’ level student knows the plot of ‘King Lear’ and she knows the themes; or, as we might put it nowadays: What’s the story? and what’s that about? I like how the concepts of Plot and Theme, in relation to our everyday lives, have entered our vocabulary in the following manner: “Terry’s dad got him a £900 bike, and he left it outside a shop, not locked. So of course it was nicked, right? And his dad only went out and bought him another one straight away! I mean, what’s that about?”

She’s read and discussed the play with the class. And she’s presented a fifteen minute Show and Tell about the treatment of old people in different countries around the world, and throughout history, as her related topic. She actually started her talk with “When I’m 64” by The Beatles, as a nod in my direction. So, naturally, I brought in “My Back Pages” by Bob Dylan for her. *

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As with reading (chapter four) I think there are two kinds of writing: first there is knowing that things called pens, pencils, rubbers, crayons and so on exist, to let you make your mark. So, she’ll scribble away on books, atlases and any paper she can get hold of; she’ll draw, and practice writing the letters of the alphabet. Initially, children call this ‘writing’, and they are not wrong at that age. Then there’s finding out what the Alphabet and Punctuation are for. Again, although the degree to which the learning of these true basics occurs does vary within families, for a variety of reasons, I am sure that simply mentioning these essentials obviates the need for a six hundred page syllabus to conjure up what needs to be done in the early stages of a person’s life, and how to prepare for it.

And there is the second meaning of writing: using what you’ve been shown how to do, to go on and express your own ideas, and communicate with yourself and with others. Put these two elements together with a fair amount of independent reading and thinking and, if your nature ‘becomes vocal at tragedy’, you might well sit down and eventually come up with Jude the Obscure. Let’s put it this way, it’s a much safer bet, and probably more in tune with nature, than sitting a chimpanzee in front of a computer and waiting for Lucky Jim to arrive. *

In a book of this nature, it was inevitable that we’d need to look at The National Literacy Strategy at some stage, but not to overdo it. The strategy is freely available for serious analysis, and again it’s to everyone’s credit that this is so.

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The authors have done what some English teachers still do each day: they’ve stood up at the front of the class, covered in white dust, and laid out a variety of ideas which we are invited to analyse, and perhaps come up with something even closer to the truth. They interact with their pupils. That’s very healthy, and my hand is up. Here is an excerpt from the strategy’s Introduction and Rationale concerning Key Stage 1 Writing: “When children begin to write, they tend to write as they speak. Spoken language, however, is different from written language in a number of ways. These differences are related to the permanence of the written word, the need to be concise and explicit, and the fact that the reader is often separated from the writer in time and space. Speakers can rely on context, intonation, facial expressions, pauses, etc. to convey meaning and create effect. Writers often use more explicit grammatical structures, as well as organizational features such as punctuation, paragraphs, headings, illustrations, and diagrams to communicate ideas.” (From: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/publications/text/63337/dew_part1.pdf)

I see two closely related points being made here:

•

we can, but we should not, write as we speak, because-

•

written language is necessarily different from spoken language.

These points from the strategy are valuable because they are clearly and confidently expressed, and they reflect a great many people’s opinions over the last twenty years or so. They open up a discussion.

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Certainly, there are inarguable physical differences which do exist between speaking and writing:

•

speech relies on sound: the mouth, vocal chords, lungs, and ears are all involved;

whereas writing relies on hands, eyes, pens, ink, paper, keyboards

•

speech is generally immediate, and often face to face, whereas writing generally

means communicating with someone somewhat distant in time and space, even if it’s just notes slipped across the classroom

My own approach to teaching writing, which, again, due to circumstances beyond my control, simply had to be in place and effective well before the adoption of the National Literacy Strategy, has always been to consider trying to get as close as I can to speech, when writing. This simply reflects the way I continue to perceive the function of the alphabet, and punctuation. Therefore I not only searched for ways, which had already been invented by writers, for overcoming the differences mentioned in the National Literacy Strategy; but for similarities which already exist, between speech and writing. My approach was based on the notion that, perhaps, we should encourage and help children to develop strength in speaking, before asking for too much in the way of writing. This follows the evolutionary development of writing, and there is logic to this development, since language use begins with speech. Written and spoken words can both be analysed within sentences, in terms of: Intention, vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation, intonation, phrasing, and context. As mentioned earlier, these terms became my parts of speech, when I realized I needed

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analytical terms which could be used when considering both spoken and written language; and, especially, the links between them.

The following is a list of factors which I think can contribute in helping us to write as we might speak, should we want to do so:

•

The words we use for either will come from our personal, developing, vocabulary.

•

Our intention can be the same in speech as in writing.

•

Of the parts of speech: intention, vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation, phrasing,

intonation, and context; all but pronunciation are transferable between speech and writing either completely, or to considerable degree; and many people do try to convey pronunciation in writing as well.

•

The alphabet and punctuation were invented to enable us to communicate with

people distant in space and time. When the telephone and the tape recorder were invented, people tried to speak over space and time instead of writing. Then, when e mail and texting were invented, people were happy to revert to writing instead of speaking in many circumstances, merely because it’s cheaper. I think this shows that, for many people, speaking and writing are, in some circumstances, almost interchangeable.

To sum up these general pros and cons: It is certainly not the same physical act to type ‘How R U’, as it is to say it; but the fact of using ‘R U’ clearly indicates that people do

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see writing as a medium for getting speech, that is, the sound of words, into a visible form via symbols, so that another person can change these symbols back into speech. I don’t think anyone went to school to learn ‘texting’, and yet it is now a convention based skill in the public domain. All people need is their vocabulary, a prior knowledge of the alphabet, an instrument, a firm intention, and the essential strong desire to communicate. This is not to say, however, that I advocate the use of texting methods as an eventual alternative to conventional writing. But that is personal taste. This is not to say, however, that I advocate the use of texting methods as an eventual alternative to conventional writing. But that is personal taste. By all means transcribe The Mayor of Casterbridge into ‘text language’ if you’ve got a market for it, but I would find it more difficult to read, and understand, that’s all, and that is because the actual look of the word ‘You’ means something other than the look of the letter ‘U’, to me. The letters of the alphabet are for spelling and meaning, not just for sounds. It is depressing, because inaccurate, to read “all u can eat”. “U” is not the written representation of the spoken word ‘You’ and its meaning, it is the representation of a sound. The actual spelling of the word ‘You’ is based on the etymology of the word, and therefore the meaning of the spoken word before the sound of it; otherwise we could use the letter ’U’ for the word ‘ewe’ and ‘yew’ – but the actual spelling, and look of these written words, by definition, goes far beyond their similar sounds. For these reasons it is essentially mistaken to describe, and teach, the use of the alphabet as ‘phonics’.

The literacy strategist says: writing is permanent and speech is temporary, and I know what she means, but the obvious question here seems to be: Isn’t anyone as good as

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their word anymore? While some contracts are not worth the paper they are written on. I’m not convinced that writing and speaking, aside from the obvious physical differences already mentioned, need to be further divorced from each other on the basis of their relative palpable, material, permanence. Permanence often depends upon what is said, and what is written down, doesn’t it? Supposing someone said, “I really loved your dancing!” or, in a letter, wrote, “I really loved your dancing!” I’m thinking that the potential permanence of these expressions is all a question of how they are received. Do you think someone might remember hearing, or reading, those words for the rest of their life? You may well keep the letter folded in a drawer; you may keep the memory of those words being spoken folded even closer. Another variable, of course, is who is saying what. Some vapid social climber might write, “I really loved your dancing!” and you’ve forgotten it before the paper hits the waste bin. While a dear friend might gently confide, “I loved the author of that book you lent me.” And you make a very definite mental note, and remember it at Christmas. So I had to ask myself, how important is the permanence of writing, as distinct from speech? Is it really something I should make an issue of with children? I remember things children have asked, or told me, for years. But yesterday’s printed newspaper? Largely gone. I think there are too many variables to assert that writing is necessarily more permanent than speech. *

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Of course, I had to consider very early on that we say ‘er’ and ‘um’ a lot in speech - and we certainly don’t in writing. This point has cropped up regularly since about 1983. It was one of the first differences between speech and writing that I was told, as a student, to consider. And I did, together with another very popular idea at the time, which was that story telling was originally an oral tradition. I thought for a moment about those great oral storytellers. You wouldn’t sit still for a stream of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’, and ‘you know what I means’ from an ancient story teller, would you? So, imagine what great and fluent speakers those ancient storytellers must have been. There’s something to aim for when we write, I thought. But, when writing, we can pause, and think about our intent. We include only necessary utterances. Yes, we probably do, or we certainly should, and we definitely redraft. But imagine how it would be to pause, and think, when we speak. Consider the silences. Imagine thinking, and then speaking as lucidly and as fluently as you would wish to write. It’s also something to aim for, isn’t it? In any serious conversation we refine our ideas continuously, as we might with writing.

Watching ‘Life on Earth’ years ago, I couldn’t help wondering: “Is David Attenborough’s absolutely brilliant narration spontaneously created, or is this the written word, beautifully polished by several drafts, and then read as it is intended to be heard – that is, as if it was being spoken spontaneously, to accompany the pictures?” My mind said it must be written down, but my ear said it was the spoken word. And it’s the same today, watching “The Blue Planet”.

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The brilliant commentaries on his programmes flow like an almost impossibly well informed, spontaneous commentary. David Attenborough sounds like the epitome of an ancient storyteller. The upshot is: if these commentaries were spontaneous, I don’t think they could have been bettered by being written out beforehand; but if they are in fact (as I think they must be) written out beforehand, I don’t think they could sound any more natural than if they had been spontaneously produced. I think there is a special reason for this – because I listen to narration on lots of things very carefully, and even Sir Laurence Olivier on ‘The World at War’, though excellent as a narrator, and also commenting on picture material, doesn’t quite make the narration sound his own. I think David Attenborough takes narration to another level, because he is so personally involved and loves it so much! In Attenborough’s case, there seems to be little difference between the epitomes of written and spoken expression. There seems to be nothing to change in terms of the intention, vocabulary, syntax, intonation, phrasing, pronunciation, or context. The important thing, it would seem, is to really know, and care for, what you are talking about, as David Attenborough clearly does. That’s worth aiming for, no matter how you slice it.10

Speakers can rely on context, intonation, facial expressions, pauses, etc. to convey meaning and create effect.

This is all absolutely true, but the key word here is can. Clearly, body language and facial expressions may enhance the physical context of the spoken word, and at least one of these is indispensable between a mother and a very young child. 10

There is an interesting article about this in The Radio Times, 26 January – 1 February 2008.

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But think of the long distance telephone call; think of whispers in the dark; or angry voices through a bedroom wall: In these examples of the spoken word, facial expressions and body language as primary keys to conveying meaning, and creating effect, pale to insignificance, vocabulary and tone are all. Quite soon it becomes an indispensable part of the writer’s art to render superfluous the differences in physical context between themselves and their readers, which may be measured in centuries as well as in miles. Writers do this precisely by creating their own ‘physical’ contexts on the page within which the reader may participate. Think, perhaps, of the eerie scene at the end of “Of Mice and Men” – where Steinbeck creates four worlds in one: Lennie’s imaginary paradise; George’s own happy past, and miserable future; all converging in the anguished present. Or think of Lord Capulet throwing his daughter Juliet out of the house, initially perceived through the medium of written language, which brings to mind all manner of angry and emotional violence, simply because of the startling vocabulary, context, and a couple of exclamation marks. And readers flock to Wessex in order to tread Thomas Hardy’s superbly evocative literary stage, first conjured within their minds through the medium of written language. In asking a child to write a letter (once they have unequivocally been shown, and allowed to master, the mechanics of writing) the natural impulse would be to guide them into conveying – however simply – their inner (and immediate) world, in order to include and stimulate the person they are addressing. I don’t think any author is doing more than that, and some do it magnificently. But yes, as the literacy strategist says, ‘intonation’ is another very important factor in communication through language. It’s not what you say; it’s the way that you say it.

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“How would you get intonation into writing?” I wondered… “Was not punctuation invented so that we could strive for the ideal…to write what we would say?” Of course, punctuation is precisely to do with intonation. When you read, you must hear in your head, and feel in your heart, what is written. And therefore, when you write, you must do the same thing. As a teacher, I have seen how children regularly and naturally use colours and font variations to emphasise key words, especially in their non - fiction writing. This is in line with what they are hearing and intending in their minds. This type of presentation is taken to great lengths, often to useful effect, in some professional publications. Eventually I came to realize that, really, if both parties are paying attention, expression is latent within all of the parts of speech which can be approached in writing: Intention, vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, pronunciation, intonation, and context. They all play their part, and intonation can be present in writing, to a sometimes astonishing degree. “There would be no reading aloud, if intonation was not possible in writing, my dear.” Much poetry is created precisely by the use of writing in order to arrive at the perfect oral expression of a poet’s thoughts; whence a poet will search for days, or years, for the correct words which he may later declaim passionately, with his arm around a statue in the park. And how about dictation in an office, where one person strides about the room enunciating, with the occasional ‘no, scratch that’ while another person takes down the words? Or perhaps the spoken words are recorded on a Dictaphone for later transcribing…and more recently words may be spoken directly into a computer to emerge as printed words on paper.

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Surely, context is the greatest difference between writing and conversation; for, simply, in conversation, our own use of words is probably in response to words used by someone else, whereas in writing, the continuous flow is in response to what we ourselves are thinking, and expressing. Would it not be marvellous if our contributions to any conversation could have the self-discipline of the eighth draft of a manuscript, married to the spontaneity of speech? Imagine the silences. Really all forms of language influence each other, so that we might first strive to write down what we want to say (speech writing, for example) and this in turn can improve what we eventually say when we speak, by refining our thoughts. This fact is very useful to me when I meet children who are having trouble expressing their ideas in writing. Now that I do supply teaching, it happens nearly every week. A child might say, with regard to personal writing for example, that she wants to write about her dog, but is finding it difficult to put words on paper. She’ll tell me she has lots of ideas in her head, but when she picks up her pen, and stares at that blank piece of paper, the ideas, she says, just go. There is no connection, that is, between her voice and her pen, probably because someone has told her that “it’s different when you write it!” So I might say to this child: “Pretend that you’ve just come into class and you want to tell me something about your dog. What are the words you would you say to me?” “My dog is getting old, sir.” “Okay, write that down, but you can leave out the ‘sir’ because this particular piece of writing is for many different people to read.” My dog is getting old.

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Now her dog is not only in her mind, it’s also there on the page, because the words came from a thought and feeling in her mind, via her voice. Someone else might have used different words. “Language is the flesh garment, the body, of thought”. “Tell me something else about your dog.” “My dad says she won’t live much longer.” “Hmmm, write that down.” My dog’s getting old. My dad says she won’t live much longer. “Try a semi-colon after ‘old’.” My dog’s getting old; my dad says she won’t live much longer. “Which do you like better?” “I like it better as two sentences.” “Mmm, so do I.”

There’s a lot more there than just twelve words. They are the tip of an iceberg aren’t they? I’d probably want to know the dog’s name at this point. If she has already been shown how to write, and to spell, then five minutes into this type of conversation, this responsible pupil (as opposed to ‘independent learner’) will be starting to write from the heart, enjoying the success of connecting her voice to her pen and paper, and creating something she cares about, like David Attenborough. Working with a child in this way, and getting them to write what they would say, shows you the ancient wisdom behind a teacher dictating to a larger class. Watch: the main reason why this is not done so much in schools today is because of the odd thought that teachers really should not put ideas into a child’s mind. “Children should be inde……” well, you know how it goes. So we now call setting an example, ‘modelling’;

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while bringing someone up is ‘being a role model’. (See Chapter One: The True Basics).

When a teacher is dictating to a class, looked at from the perspective of children learning how to get thoughts down on paper, what a teacher is doing is simply taking the responsibility for thinking up the ideas, which children then proceed to reproduce in written form. This is not an end in itself: the hearing of the teacher’s words, and then the children writing them down, is clearly an intermediate step towards doing the whole thing themselves, which children appreciate. All sorts of spelling and punctuation lessons can be reinforced as you go along. Again, there is an indispensable element of trust and respect needed here, which is helped if the teacher is acknowledged as having authority in the classroom, and has been selected with this in mind in the first place. (See Chapters Two and Three). Dictation is similar to many other ways adults have of helping children at first; for example pushing them on a swing, or holding the seat of a bicycle. Once they get the hang of it (on a swing it used to be called ‘working’) they will very quickly tell you to let them get on with it themselves. As for the bike, well, I never knew the exact moment when my father let go, and I took off on my own. Pupils themselves might eventually be happy to dictate to the rest of the class, giving the other pupils helpful pointers, such as spellings, punctuation, and new sentences, and so on, from their own prepared text. Just like the teacher. Dictation has many elements built into it which would encourage teachers of various subjects to include language skills in their lessons. The marking of a creatively conceived dictation passage could provide interest, and development. Of course, you wouldn’t ask a child to take down dictation if you weren’t absolutely sure that they knew how to use a pen,

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and how to form letters, now would you? Would you? Therefore, we should make dictation an important part of primary school, and Year Seven lessons. It wouldn’t be the first time. As I mentioned in Chapter Four: Writing is one side of the Spelling coin (Reading being the other side); so, spelling lessons are an excellent time to practice writing – both the actual handwriting and the creative, mental, and technical sides of writing. It might go something like this:

“I want you all to write me a sentence, from your own mind, for each of the words I’ve put on the board. It’s only one sentence per word, so punctuation should be very little problem. This is an opportunity to develop your: •

handwriting

•

spelling

•

vocabulary

•

punctuation

•

creativity

Here are the words: (Roll down the blackboard with the words ready and written; or place the transparency on the overhead projector you’ve had to wheel out, or switch on the interactive white board, making sure you’ve drawn the blinds, if they’ve been put up in your teaching room yet.) Syllabus Laugh Articulate Heaven

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Raindrop Incredible Sewing Gargantuan

Check and correct the sentences with each individual, and then:

“Now, do your corrections, and then choose your favourite sentence from the ones you’ve shown me, and add three more on the same subject, to make a paragraph.”

(A child and a parent could probably do this at home; but after a certain age it’s a lot more fun at school.)

“Who’s ready to read theirs? Jamie!”

“My Gran is really good at sewing. She mends all of our clothes at home. Most of the time she uses a needle and thread, but for making clothes longer or shorter she’ll use her new sewing machine. She used to make dresses for my mum when she was younger.”

“Thanks, Jamie; well done. Everyone give Jamie a mark out of ten for content, and a mark out of ten for his reading, in your exercise books. Does anyone know how you make a dress longer or shorter?”

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“A hem.” “I beg your pardon, Kirsty?” “It has to have a hem; you turn the material up at the bottom and sew it.” “Thanks, Kirsty. Now, by the end of the lesson I want you all to have written three paragraphs on the subject you’ve chosen from your own sentences. You can use the dictionaries for help. At the end of the lesson I’ll give you each a sheet of lined A4 paper, so, you can proof read your work at home, and re-draft it onto the A4 to bring in tomorrow. And don’t skip the proof reading, because I’d much rather use my red ink for writing helpful comments about your work than for underlining mistakes you actually know how to correct. Also we’ll be having a test on the spellings, and a spelling bee.” “What do we do if we finish the paragraphs before the bell, sir?” “You pick the word from the list which appeals to you the most, use it as a title, and write a poem from what that word suggests to you today. I’m going to do one on the board now, watch.”

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Raindrop Staggering drunkenly, down the window pane, Picking up friends along the way, To collect And huddle In a cold little puddle.

Now remember get your mum or dad to proof read your work with you, before you redraft it onto the A4 paper. And it’s due in tomorrow!” *******

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William Blake said: If others had not been foolish, we should be so. I think that’s a pretty good definition of progress. When the feeling that something was wrong, not with children but with the school system itself, stirred once more within the country about twenty years ago, because businesses and universities were complaining that children were leaving school unable to spell, write essays, needed ‘the basics’ and so on; a popular question with regard to English was: “How much should we teach children about language?” This always sounded strangely proprietorial to me, as if the people who were saying it thought they actually owned language. Anyway, it merely signalled the next bitter battle in the political wars which are fought on the battleground of education. But, for reasons I hope I’ve made clear, my answer then, as now, is this: What we really know about language is surprisingly little, but of excellent quality. Our real, shared, knowledge of language, amounts to the true conventions of English and the many ways people have used them effectively down through the years. I think we should teach children all that we really know about language, and study lots of famous writers and speakers. The earlier we provide an environment which allows them to use and develop these conventions within their own psyches, the better. There can be no doubt that families are intended to be a child’s first language teachers.

All things considered, I think we have at last arrived at a point where it is certainly cost effective to create the intellectual conditions necessary for all parents to educate their young children naturally, in the true basics of language. Although this book has been written from the point of view of the English classroom, the rewards for children, and therefore schools and society, when they are taught the unofficial syllabus at home, can be enormous.

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Whether this will actually be done or not, in the future, remains to be seen; but the fact is that, only when the early teaching of language is acknowledged and practiced as the simple human activity it really is, can the teaching of English (and other subjects in schools) be properly addressed for all.

In the meantime, though, individuals have the opportunity to improve matters for themselves and for their children right away. If we are to avoid the mere repetition of the past fifty years or so, we must look for something beyond the old arguments between grammarians and their anti antagonists; which is what I have done here. And there is nothing at all to stop us from teaching communication through language intensively to deprived children, in schools, right now.

When I started planning this book, I was determined that it should be a very slim volume, easy on the eye, and yet it should be an adequate alternative to the growing mountain of, for me, unreadable academic publications. But this book is also intended to serve, in future times, as an alternative to the gross irresponsibility which will surely follow when the fashion pendulum swings back again. But, ideally, the reader may simply look at children and see that the teaching of a language is an activity which is more important, and a lot less complicated, than any particular political ideology. Nevertheless, ‘developments’ in education during the twenty years of my career have seemed to be attempts to make my classroom feel less a lively and welcoming place for learning, than a sanctuary threatened by the hostile encroachment of a nearby factory. For all the money spent, the shouting, the initiatives, and the targets, I go into schools while I write this book and things look much the same in the teaching and learning of English. There has always been

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brilliance, and there has always been deprivation, but now there is a lot more stress and bother. Some children do as well as the current system allows them to in English. But there are many others in mainstream classes who still cannot read or write properly. Yet they are set tasks which require them to do just that, and when this happens they are frustrated and badly behaved, as you might expect. At the beginning of this book I suggested that we need to work towards a definitive and durable syllabus for the teaching of the subject we all know and love as ‘English’? Do I think there really could be such a thing? There always has been.

Well, we appear to have finished a few minutes early, so, talk amongst yourselves - and don’t forget about that Hank Williams song. ****

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Acknowledgements 1. The two excerpts referred to in chapter five from Mother Tongue (1990) by Bill Bryson, published by Penguin, are used with kind permission of the publisher. (Not reproduced in this version)

2. The lines in chapter three from “T.V. Talking Song” on the album “Under The Red Sky” by Bob Dylan are reproduced by kind permission of Special Rider Music.

3. The quote attributed to David Crystal in Literacy Progress Unit (DFES 0066/2003) is reproduced by kind permission of David Crystal.

4. The analysis of the poem “Child on Top of a Greenhouse” by Theodore Roethke, in chapter five is taken from the QCA booklet “Not Whether But How” (1999, ISBN 1 85838 376 5) pp 10 & 13, reproduced with permission of QCA for noncommercial use.

5. Two excerpts from “Principles of Language and Mind” (1985) by T.P. Waldron, referred to in chapter five, were originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, used with kind permission of [email protected]. (Not reproduced in this version)

6. The definition of a ‘Main Verb’ in chapter five is reproduced by kind permission of usingenglish.com.

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7. The excerpt from The National Literacy Strategy, Introduction and Rationale: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/publications/text/63337/dew_part1.pdf in chapter seven is freely available for serious discussion, and it is to everyone’s credit that this is so.

Note: Where appropriate, the pages referred to in the above works are given as the quotations occur in the main text.

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Index to Authors, Works, and Organizations Mentioned

Beatles 112 Blake, William 64, 129 Bronte, Emily 84, 85, 86,101 Bryson, Bill 91, 92, 93, 103, 104 Carlyle, Thomas 84 Chambers Dictionary (1983) 52, 56, 73, 78 Cohen, Leonard 19 Crystal, David 58 Dylan, Bob 40, 112 Hardy, Thomas 63, 64, 81, 121 Kilmer, Joyce Lincoln, Abraham 89 Melville, Herman 74 Myhill, Debra 93 National Literacy Strategy 114, 115 The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory 113 QCA 93 Roethke, Theodore 94 Rosten, Leo 16 Shakespeare, William 13, 48, 61, 62, 63, 67, 87, 88, 106 Steinbeck, John 121 Truss, Lynn 83 Waldron, TP 91, 92, 93, 103, 104

132

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Williams, Hank 30 (Footnote), 131

133

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Thank you to my mother and father, and my immediate family, for teaching me the true basics. Thank you to my wife Sheila for reminding me, through her own example, how all of that is done. Thank you to my daughter, Ruby, for inspiring me to tell and read her stories, and for being a stimulating conversationalist from the very beginning.

Thank you to my extended family: a great many people who are friends, relatives, and chance meetings; many of them are pupils who I have met only once or twice, and known for less than an hour. Some are colleagues with whom I worked for several years. True communication is such that they all will know who they are.

Thank you to the people who have allowed me to quote their words and thereby helped me to articulate my own ideas more clearly.

All of these people, and more, have helped me in various ways to get this discussion out, and to make it as good as I can make it. It’s probably not finished, and any mistakes are mine, but: “Not having a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.” (Matthew Arnold 1822-1888)

And, Thank You.