You Are An English Teacher!

By Mark Wilson

A Guide To The True Basics - for Parents, Pupils, Pedagogues, Politicians...Presidents and probably even Prime Ministers. A trip through the learning of English as a mother tongue from minute one onwards. The resurrection of common sense, intuition, and the syllabus that’s always been here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Wilson
• Release date: Jan 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301192335

Book preview

You Are An English Teacher!

A Guide To The True Basics

for Parents, Pupils, Pedagogues, Politicians...

and probably even Prime Ministers.

By

Mark Wilson

Copyright 2013 Mark Wilson

Smashwords Edition

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Contents

Preface

1. The True Basics

2. Who's Responsible For This!

3. What, exactly, do you mean?

4. Read me a Story?

5. The (Place) of Grammar

The (Place) of Grammar - Part Two

6. Tell Grandma what you did today!

7. She can make a pen speak!

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Index

To return to Contents from the end of any chapter, please click <><>

For My Family

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."

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 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 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 Che Guevara. 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 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’ 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.

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