Autumn 2004

Talking English

Is anybody listening?

Managerial reforms that narrow the accountability of English teachers to drilling students to do well in standardised literacy tests do young people a disservice, writes BRENTON DOECKE. He believes that English teachers have much to learn about their subject by observing the interactions of students.

A high school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The air is fresh, and I’m glad to snatch some warmth from the sun while standing in the school courtyard. The bell has gone, and the students are gathering together before the start of their first lesson. Their routine appears to involve assembling in the courtyard before being escorted to their classrooms by their teachers. I’m struck by the orderly manner in which these teenagers line up before class. Yet this isn’t dull compliance. There’s lots of excited chatter, a superabundance of energy. Two year 9 girls near me are wearing heavily soled boots, real clod hoppers—a sign of all the things that bind them. A third girl is standing with them, and like them she is laughing loudly, clutching her folder and stamping her feet, in an effort to shake off the morning cold. She has yet to buy a pair of boots to match those of her friends. They are talking about a Christina Aguilera video clip, letting their sentences tumble over one another, and sharing their enthusiasm for her music: ‘It’s so cool, so cool ...’, ‘I really like the part ...’, ‘Yeah, when she ...’

Journal entry, May 2003

My work as an English Method lecturer takes me to a variety of schools across the Melbourne metropolitan area. On my travels, I encounter remarkably different approaches to English teaching. I also gain insight into the diverse ways in which students from a range of communities experience schooling.

My journal entry describes a day when my student teacher had typically left me with her year 9 class while she went to find her supervising teacher. School is popularly conceived as a site of alienation and control—we need only think of The Simpsons’ Principal Skinner and Mrs Krabappel, and yet the teenagers standing near me were happy to be talking with one another. Whatever adults may intend by requiring young people to come to school each day, teenagers invest those routines with their own purposes.

The social world that teenagers inhabit forms a vital frame of reference for the reading, writing, speaking and listening that happen in English classrooms. English enables students to focus on how language shapes their lives, from the language of newspapers and television advertisements, to the imaginative worlds of novels, sitcoms and movies. Students also have an opportunity to explore their own language, including the way their social identities are constructed through their talk in the school yard and other social settings.

My student teachers are currently reporting back to me how students are creatively using the language of SMS-ing in role-plays and other classroom activities (including translating a scene from Macbeth into the conventions of SMS-speak). Unfortunately, such practices contrast with the dull comprehension exercises evident in other English classrooms, not to mention the ways in which State-wide examinations (such as the Victorian Certificate of Education) privilege the essay and other circumscribed forms of literacy at the expense of encouraging students to explore the multimodal forms of communication they use outside school.

My chief reason, however, for invoking the lively conversation of those teenagers is to note how English teachers learn by observing the social interactions of their students. The most reflective English teachers are supremely attentive to what their students reveal to them about their experiences of language and literacy both inside and outside school. I would even argue that much of the best research on language and literacy has arisen out of small qualitative studies in which researchers (very often practitioner researchers) have recorded what they learnt by watching and interacting with students. One of my favourite studies is Margaret Langdon’s Let the Children Write, written well before the fad of ‘process writing’, in which a teacher describes what she discovered when she encouraged her pupils to experiment with their writing. I am also thinking of Understanding Teenagers’ Reading, where Jack Thomson describes what he found out about adolescent reading habits by talking to school students. These researchers took the time to talk with students and to listen to what they had to say to them. Their work reflects a capacity to learn from the ways children and young people describe their experiences of writing, reading, speaking and listening. They assume that education is not something that should be done to students, but that learning occurs within the context of the social interactions in the classroom, when students jointly construct knowledge by talking and sharing their experiences with one another.

A readiness to learn from students is increasingly absent from research that underpins many large-scale reforms of the teaching of English in primary and secondary schools. Rather than attending to what practitioner researchers have to report about their learning from their continuing dialogue with students, systems place increasing reliance on the evidence of standardised tests as indicators of students’ literacy. No one interrogates the assumptions about literacy behind such tests, let alone whether they do justice to the meaning-making activities experienced by students in their daily lives.

The same managerial ideology that promotes these dubious forms of accountability also emphasises the crucial role that teachers play in the education of young people. How many times over the past few years have we heard it said that the teacher is the most significant factor in determining student achievement? Many teachers have welcomed such claims as a long overdue acknowledgement of their contribution to society. Problems arise, however, if this focus on teachers boils down to a narrow scrutiny of their performance as calculated by standardised literacy tests. Rather than enhancing their professional status, such an emphasis on performance undermines it. For teachers to affirm their professional status they need to argue the importance of their work as practitioner researchers who, as the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy (STELLA) state, ‘continue to learn ... pursuing new knowledge through professional renewal activities, such as classroom-based action research’. They can accept that they are professionally accountable, but their accountability should be judged by the extent to which they have enhanced their students’ involvement in a complex range of language activities, not whether they have drilled them to perform well on standardised tests.

Social relationships form the core of English curriculum and pedagogy, and those relationships are materially affected by the imposition of literacy tests. English teachers’ accountability is reflected by their ongoing commitment to learning about the complexities of language and literacy as they watch students interact in classrooms, and their refusal to treat literacy as something known or given.

My student teacher eventually returned with her supervisor, and then took me to class. There I observed her administering a comprehension exercise from a well-known textbook. The students whose conversation I had overhead in the courtyard settled down to this task in a good humoured way. Like many student teachers, Arlene was teaching in the way she had herself been taught—an attitude which was reinforced by her supervising teacher, who likewise preferred a traditional approach. It took another teaching round before she began to develop a learner-centred approach to teaching and to enjoy conversing with her students, although I have a nagging sense that her own preferred method might better suit the managerial climate enveloping us than my characteristic emphasis on dialogue and negotiation.

The fact is that by making a fetish of standardised literacy testing, and by failing to heed what English teachers learn through continually working with students, governments do an immense disservice to young people, denying their potential. Those students may eventually have pleasant memories of the conversat-ions they enjoyed in the school yard, but I expect that they will remember the official life of the school as a very dull affair, something that they were simply obliged to do.

Brenton Doecke is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. He is the former editor of English in Australia, the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au