Abstract: In this paper, I narrate highlights of my long process of learning and teaching English as a foreign language in mainland China and Australia, presenting a picture of the practices of learning and teaching English in mainland China from the bottom up. Over the past 50 years, English learners in mainland China, as Gao Yihong has written, have demonstrated four different identity prototypes – faithful imitator, legitimate speaker, playful creator and dialogical communicator. Framed by Gao’s classification, this autoethnographic narrative responds to these identity prototypes and reflects on how the process of learning and teaching English interacts with the identity of a Chinese learner of English. I then propose a pedagogy for teaching English effectively and invite university teachers of English in mainland China to consider whether and how this could be applied in their future practice.

Abstract: The oral re-telling of traditional tales, modelled by a storyteller and taught to children in school, can be understood as ‘non-instrumental’ practice in speaking and listening that emphasises oral language over the reading and writing of stories. While oral storytelling has significant benefits to children’s education and development, it is under-utilised within Primary Education in the UK. This interview and library-based study explores participant perceptions of oral storytelling and the barriers to the utilisation of such non-instrumental practice in school. In addition, observation of an oral storytelling initiative provides a research context through which such perceptions are understood. The findings suggest that speaking and listening is implicitly devalued as a result of the elevation of instrumental literacy-based practice in the primary curriculum. In addition, enquiry into the specific effects of engaging with orality as a precursor to literacy development is lacking. It is suggested t...

Abstract: My argument is that a literary education should build on a primary level of responsivity towards literature, involving empathy and immersion in the world of the text. To engage with literary works from the past involves a play between familiarity and strangeness, and this play should be located as part of a reader’s response to texts, rather than expecting students to imbibe the ‘dead knowledge’ about literary periods and authors in which textbooks and literary guides traffic. Literary responsiveness involves sensitivity towards the specific character of the text, which means locating it in relation to other texts belonging to that genre without reducing it to being merely illustrative of a genre’s so-called characteristics. In all these respects, contemporary educational standards reflect questionable assumptions about the development of a capacity to respond to literary texts, especially the supposition that a ‘mature’ response to literature somehow involves moving beyond personal response to mo...

Abstract: This essay challenges assumptions that those labelled as ‘high achievers’ are in some way ‘held back’ by those perceived as having lower initial capability. By exploring collaborative pedagogical approaches and focussing on my experiences with two students, with widely differing initial capabilities, and exploring how they have influenced each other’s learning, I argue that organisational models that separate students based on perceived ability can be damaging. Allowing time and space for students to collaborate on a range of tasks and creating a classroom atmosphere which values the contributions of all can enable those students deemed of lower ability to become useful learning tools for their ‘more capable peers’ as well as vice versa. Against those versions of the Vygotskian zone of proximal development that privilege the role of the ‘more capable peer’, I argue that collaborative forms of learning can be mutually beneficial.

Abstract: This article explores how circumstances in different conjunctures influence the types of narrative, working practice and ‘Professional Memory’(PM) that English teachers construct. It is argued that the circumstances in which teachers begin their careers help to formulate attitudes, values and missions that remain potent over long periods. Examining these phenomena from a collectivist perspective makes it possible to uncover the valued ways of working and conceptions of ‘English’ that different generations hold through PM. These memories can provide much needed, alternative accounts of the subject that are both informative and instructive. Here, I concentrate on the PM of one generation of English teachers who began in a distinctive conjuncture – 1965-1975.

Abstract: Underlying the generally oblivious attitude of teachers and learners towards the past is insufficient respect for the role of memory in giving meaning to experience and access to knowledge We shape our identity by making sense of our past and its relationship to present and future selves, a process that should be intensively cultivated when we are young It is vital for English teaching to put collective memory to work in two ways: to recall salient features of the historical development of our field of study, and to revive the memory of certain historical realities that contemporary culture prefers to repress The study of historical fiction can help to retain the kind of cultural memory that testifies to what humanity has suffered, and this essay concludes with personal reflections on the writing of novels set in times past

Abstract: The last chapter of Vygotsky’s last book, Thinking and Speech, is a compressed argument about the construction of consciousness through the internalisation of language. This article comments on Vygotsky’s analysis of the ‘voyage into the interior’ undertaken by oral speech as it is internalised and abbreviated into ‘inner speech’, and then further concentrated as non-verbal thought. The article focuses on the part that literature and especially poetry play in Vygotsky’s argument in this chapter, and suggests that in exploring the condensed semantics of inner speech Vygotsky is implicitly describing how poets turn private thoughts into ‘symbols for others’. It concludes with a commentary on Vygotsky’s use of Mandelshtam’s poem ‘The Swallow’, from which he draws his epigraph.

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

Abstract: This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students’ reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of affective and imaginative engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading. Until now, few empirical studies have been conducted to investigate the actual interaction between the text and student readers, especially in situations that go beyond the usual classroom contexts. This student-centred narrative inquiry, which is grounded in literary and language research, demonstrates that while the notion of relevance, in terms of students’ socio-cultural background and their own life experiences, has long been considered as a key factor in the choice of texts used in a literature classroom, it is important to recognize the creativity that is embedded in students’ reading processes.

Abstract: Jerome Bruner’s experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one’s experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article.

Abstract: This essay focuses on two sites of memory in my professional life. One is from my very early years of teaching, the second from about 10 years later. Each is centred on a moment of controversy in English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia, and each is to do with the teaching of writing and the supposed neglect of language study, including grammar. In each case, the ‘Growth’ model or its manifestation in a particular Syllabus developed and implemented in New South Wales came under attack. I ask in hindsight whether these attacks stand up to the scrutiny of a reading of that Syllabus and argue that there was no conflict between, at least, this particular version of the ‘Growth’ model and the close study of language.

Abstract: In my contribution I give an account of my teaching based on my own memories and those of former students. I rely on reports from my present students, remarks by colleagues and my own reflections. My memories as well as my present reflections are doubtlessly coloured by my growing awareness of the relationships between micro and macro levels of education and educational policy. So I try to illuminate my teaching as well as the topics I taught and teach against the background of the schools and the schools’ cultures, the paradigmatic debate on the school subject Dutch, changes in Dutch teacher education and the arena of ‘rationalities’: meta-discourses on education and society. In short, I started in the context of a rising communicative-emancipatory paradigm, in the societal context of a developing social rationality, striving for ‘empowerment’. I now am more or less forced to teach topics that fit in a communicative-utilitarian paradigm, in the context of a technocratic-economic rationality chara...

Abstract: This paper explores a teacher’s furore− my own − by asking how such furores might be considered ‘in quest of narrative’. If so, which one? The answer, I suggest, lies in revisiting the source texts for such a furore, allowing the texts to illuminate the curricula and teaching, rather than the reverse. In so doing, the ethical claim of the texts in which such a furore originates might be recovered, in order to clarify one’s implication in webs of violence. Interspersed with an exploration of Katabatic narratives and curricula − the vehicle for my furore to teach about violence − are three narrative vignettes that emerged from revisiting the texts that inspired my teaching.

Abstract: In this paper I introduce some concepts from psychoanalysis, a poem, a clinical vignette and a personal anecdote. I am asking what light the knowledge of unconscious processes can throw on the memorisation of poems and therefore what use to the individual can be derived from learning poems by heart. A version of the paper was first given at the Poetry, Memory and Performance conference at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, in March 2015.

Abstract: This essay introduces two presentations (or Vortrage) by Ulf Abraham and Thomas Zabka that were originally published in the German journal, Didaktik Deutsch. I reflect on the complexities of translation and intercultural communication, and ask how we might meaningfully compare the policy environment of one country with that of another. In this era of globalisation and standards-based reforms it is easy to suppose that those reforms are the same everywhere. The essays by Abraham and Zabka, however, provide insights into a policy environment where debates about the importance of language and literature are being played out differently vis-a-vis standards-based reforms than is the case in the Anglophone world. I ask what we can learn from these essays, and how the insights they provide might be applied in an Anglophone context.

Abstract: My starting point is Staying Power, an exhibition that aimed to increase the number of photographs representing Black British experience in the UK. The exhibition was recommended by a former pre-service/PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student who had grown curious about the language and culture of her students. One photograph of London’s Black music scene evoked powerful memories of the year I started teaching. I recall Harold Rosen’s insistence on making the students’ social realities – ‘the dramas themselves’ – the starting point for work in English, broadening out into systematic ‘school’ knowledge from there. I bring out something of what the photograph can tell us about the place of reggae, sound systems and sound contests in the life of the Black community, and I give an instance of writing in the vernacular by a Black student that arose from classroom talk about ‘sound contests’. Implicitly, I raise questions about how much a new teacher might be expected to know about their st...

Abstract: Though there is little in the literature on the teaching of the history of English, criticism of textbooks which over-simplify the story as the rise of the standard variety has been more vocal of late. Meanwhile, some academics have argued for focusing teaching on the analysis of texts. This article reports on a unit/module taught at a British university that makes the analysis of texts central to teaching and assessment. It sets out to demonstrate what can be learned from approaching the subject in this way by presenting composite textual analyses created by the first-named author drawing on the work of his co-authors (five of his final-year undergraduate students). This was for two assignments, one focusing on an Early Modern English text and the other a more contemporary piece. A discussion highlights the benefits of making the analysis of texts central to the unit, and considers practical applications for teachers of the subject in other parts of the world.

Abstract: Evidence suggests that some cognitive processes are based on sensorimotor systems in the brain (embodied cognition). The premise of this is that ‘Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies’. It has therefore been suggested that both online cognition (processing as we move through the world) and offline cognition (processing through reflection) might be body-based. We tested whether acting out or thinking movements relevant to a poem would therefore improve memory for the poem. Here, we discuss the results of this study in relation to embodied cognition.

Abstract: In this teaching memoir, time with a group of Ugandan teachers becomes the ‘awakening’ or spur to leaf through memories of more than 40 years of life in the classroom. The moments chosen to relive afresh tell of practices which have largely been erased in curriculum discussion in Australia. Together they add up to an argument, more implicit than explicit, about the narrowing of school curriculum, the sidelining of teacher voice, student voice, community voice, and the resultant loss of creativity in our schools – all in the name of national standards, accountability and professionalism. The wary conclusion is that if we are not more thoughtful in our preparation of young people for adulthood, our democracy may well be at risk.

Abstract: This essay explores Donald Graves’ groundbreaking research of the 1980s. We show how Graves’ approach to the teaching of writing built on his sensitive appreciation of the ways children actually engage in the composing process when they are given the opportunity to produce writing that is meaningful to them. However, the issue for us is not simply the quality of Graves’ research, but how his work slipped from our memories, to be replaced by the dull drills in writing skills that now dominate US classrooms. To try to engage with this second issue, it has seemed best to disrupt the flow of our account of Graves’ work with representations of personal moments in teaching writing that we have each experienced, which we include as interpolations in the text. Only in this way do we feel that we can somehow get close to the nub of the issue with respect to the collective amnesia surrounding Graves’ achievement, in an attempt to bring back – both individually and collectively – his key insights and our stu...

Abstract: This is a different essay from the one I set out to write. When I began, I had in mind a picture of my development as a teacher that was linear. I saw myself as a committed and enthusiastic teacher whose understanding about the nature of learning had developed over time. I had a theory that as a young teacher I was focused on content, on the idea that there were things about the world that I wanted students to learn, and that later I had come to understand the importance of the process of learning, that knowledge is constructed right there in the classroom with an input from all of us. It was a neat story with a beginning and an end. When I started to research the past, however, and found articles and essays I had written over the years, I discovered that the reality was much messier. My understanding had indeed developed and is still growing, but I was surprised at what I knew and was aware of as a young teacher. Moreover, my view about some of the aspects of my teaching that I had shelved in the...

Abstract: Fox argues that the poetic function of language fulfils the human need to symbolise. Metaphor, simile and analogy provide examples of the ways in which symbolic language can be used creatively. The neural representations of these processes therefore provide a means to determine the neurological basis of creative language. Neuro-imaging has demonstrated that while metaphor, simile and analogy activate some areas of the brain in common, they also each activate different areas. This suggests that creative language has had sufficient evolutionary importance to be processed within more than one neural system. Additionally, the neuro-imaging data suggest that symbolic language activates areas beyond the language centres and therefore is encoded using sensorimotor representations. Here we will discuss the neural representations of metaphor, simile and analogy, and will reflect on the neural systems which have evolved to support symbolic language and how this understanding might be used to help develop sk...

Abstract: What is the value of poetry for learning and development and what are its uses in education today? What role can the poem play not only in formal education, but also in personal development and wel...

Abstract: The poet, Seamus Heaney, argues that transformations for both teachers and students may be engendered through recognising the connections and distinctions between the language of poetry and the language of everyday life. This article explores some of the ways in which choral reading of poetry, using multiple voices like musical instruments, may change student teachers’ perceptions of poetry. Five small groups of Secondary English student teachers on an initial teacher education Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course constructed choral readings, each group working with a different poem. During the session, they wrote journal entries about how creating the readings and listening to other people led them to think differently about studying poetry with students in the classroom as future secondary English teachers. Several months later, a small voluntary group met to recollect the session and consider more critically the potential of choral reading as one possible approach to teaching poetry.

Abstract: For centuries, memorisation was the vital mode through which the ‘uses of poetry’ were realised. Mixed reactions to its reinstatement on the primary curriculum indicate how much has changed. But does memorisation afford a type of understanding not available through reading or critical analysis? This article draws on the initial findings of the Cambridge Poetry and Memory Project, which sought to identify what is distinctive about this mode of engagement. At the time of writing, we are still analysing our findings. Here we explore three emerging themes through which we are starting to make sense of these: the memorised poem experienced as a living entity; as indwelling and indwelt; and within a relationship of love. We suggest that memorisation and literary analysis may become mutually enhancing, and conclude that the memorised poem is a largely unrecognised resource with the potential to enrich people’s lives in multiple ways over many years.

Abstract: In universities, as in mainstream education more widely, cognitive approaches to poetry are often dominant. Far from being irrelevant to the serious study of literature, we argue that eliciting students’ affective responses to poetry can deepen their cognitive understanding and analytical skills. Drawing on recent research in psychology on the relationship between cognition and affect, we show that poetry has particular potential to make us aware of the crucial interrelation of our cognitive and affective processes; and that bringing those responses into balance can deepen our understanding of poetry. Building on recent educational studies of typical student (and teacher) anxieties and assumptions about working with poetry, and on our observations from our own initial, exploratory seminars, we explore some of the obstacles to rebalancing the cognitive and affective dimensions of poetry in higher education, and point to the potential value of such an approach if such obstacles are overcome.

Abstract: This article uses Elizabethan poetics and the Renaissance sonnet as a template for understanding the power of reading as it is exhibited in modern-day mental health contexts, specifically in the work of national charity The Reader. Our concern is with the medicine of verbal beauty, representative expression and formal ordering towards perfection – in particular, the relation of ‘erected wit’ and ‘infected will’ in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. We examine reading group transcripts produced as part of research projects on reading and mental health conducted by the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool (where the authors are based). We demonstrate how Elizabethan poetry, precisely by not offering a form of directive or targeted therapy, has the potential to help ease the suffering of those whose personal and existential problems are too often ignored by conventional therapies because ‘incurable’ as such.

Abstract: The research examined the impact on teachers of the grammar element of a new statutory test in Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) in primary schools in England. The research aimed to evaluate the nature and the extent of changes to the teaching of grammar and to wider literacy teaching since the introduction of the test in 2013. The research explored teachers’ responses to teaching grammar to a statutory test format, and how teachers implemented rapid curriculum change in their classrooms. The research sought to learn the perspectives of teachers as they adjusted to new English assessments and new expectations for children’s language in the primary school. This paper draws on teacher interviews (n = 16) and an online survey of teaching staff (n = 170). Teachers discuss their knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of grammar at their own level, and their skills for teaching pupils; they also discuss their observations of how pupils have responded to explicit grammar teaching and the grammar t...

Abstract: Among educators in the field of language and literature, in the German-speaking world and beyond, the concept of ‘competence’ has been gaining ground for three decades. This article questions the validity of prevalent competence definitions, which by focusing on the proficiency of an individual student ignore the fact that in understanding literature, as well as in composition, communal achievement is essential. By drawing on evolutionary anthropology and by collecting evidence from studies in literary and composition learning, the author draws on his own teaching experience to show that students’ competence develops by interaction. Educational research, however, widely fails to take this into account.