Showing papers in "Changing English in 2008"

Writing, Power and Voice: Access to and Participation in Higher Education

Abstract: Institute of Education, University of London, UKOnline Publication Date: 01 June 2008To cite this Article: Burke, Penny Jane (2008) 'Writing, Power and Voice: Access toand Participation in Higher Education', Changing English, 15:2, 199 — 210To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13586840802052419URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13586840802052419PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLEFull terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdfThis article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will becomplete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with orarising out of the use of this material.

‘That's why I was crying on this book’: Trauma as Testimony in Responses to Literature

Abstract: Auto Wreck (first stanza) Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating, And down the dark one ruby flare Pulsing out red light like an artery, The ambulance at top speed floating down Past beacons a...

Screen Pedagogy: Challenging Perceptions of Digital Reading Practice

Abstract: Zines, blogs and memes represent just a sample of text genres that are a part of students' literacy landscapes. Many teens, adolescents and tweens feel quite at ease within diverse, intertextual, m...

The Culture Shock that Asian Students Experience in Immersion Education

Abstract: Economic globalisation has given rise to global English and English, as a lingua franca, is spreading at an ever‐increasing rate. This world language has become the focus of many people's attention...

Using Film to Teach EFL Students English Language Skills

Abstract: Language teachers readily acknowledge the importance of learners' motivation, not infrequently explaining their own sense of failure with reference to their students' lack of motivation. Second Lan...

English and its Others: Towards an Ethics of Transculturation

Abstract: Recently English teachers in Australia have been subjected to a barrage of media coverage, becoming the brunt of a string of attacks about supposedly declining literacy standards. This has prompted...

Exploring Multicultural Literature: The Text, the Classroom and the World Outside

Abstract: In this essay I want to do three things. First, to explore the notion of multicultural literature. What do we mean by the term? What is it? And where did it come from? Second, I want to look at the relations between texts, teachers and school students. And third, I want to glance at the world beyond the classroom, and suggest ways in which the literature read and written in the classroom can contribute towards students’ understanding of and engagement with the wider world. In today’s parlance this last focus might count as something to do with citizenship. So what is multicultural literature? It certainly didn’t exist when I was at Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s – by which I mean that I spent seven years within the English Language and Literature faculty without ever being troubled by any awareness that there was such an animal as multicultural literature. In 1985, I started work as a schoolteacher, in a boys’ comprehensive in Tower Hamlets. One of the first texts that I chose to read with my Year 8 group was Young Warriors (1967). The novel, by Jamaican author, V.S. Reid, tells a coming-of-age story of five Maroon warriors who help their people to outwit and ambush the occupying Redcoat army. At this distance, I do not know why I chose it – whether it was to do with the boys’ adventure story format of the novel, with its anti-imperialist narrative and positioning, whether it seemed to be accessible enough, to my highly inexpert eyes, for my students to be able to cope with it (whatever coping with it might mean). I asked my students to look at the front cover, to describe what they could see and then to predict as much as they could about the novel they were about to read. It’s an interesting exercise, both as a way of activating students’ prior knowledge and as an opportunity to render explicit some aspects of the conditions of literary production. The content of the image – the foregrounding of the Maroon boys, the adoption of their perspective on the advancing Redcoats, the extent to which the image represents a particular moment in the novel – all provide useful ways into the written text, productive foci for the students’ conversation. But there are also issues about the style of the illustration – the use of primary colours, the lack of individuation in the four Maroon figures in the foreground (and maybe even the problematic, racialised stereotype of the Maroons in the treetops). When students returned to the front cover after reading the novel, many felt that the illustration marked a dumbing down of the content, a means to market the text as ‘safe’, unthreatening, childish. What immediately attracted the attention and interest of my first Year 8 group, however, was not the front cover but the back, and more particularly the photo of V.S. Reid in the centre of it. ‘Who is this?’ they asked. I explained that this was the

English in a Surveillance Regime: Tightening the Noose in New Zealand

Abstract: It is a contemporary commonplace that we live in a ‘text‐saturated’ environment – a semiosphere that complements those biologically rooted spheres our bodies inhabit. The neon cityscape of Tokyo in...

Paradoxes of Autonomy in Professional Life: a Research Problem

Abstract: Stories of origin are notoriously incomplete, inaccurate or beside the point, often all three. One event stands out for us, however, as a point of reference for our thoughts on what it means to ent...

Exploring the Contradictions in Learning to Teach: The Potential of Developmental Work Research

Abstract: This article discusses aspects of a programme intervention (the DETAIL project) in the learning processes of beginning English teachers, teacher mentors and a university‐based teacher educator. The...

Tracking Local Curriculum Histories: The Plural Forms of Subject English

Abstract: What is English as a school subject? What is its story? Where did it come from? These are all questions that have long exercised curriculum scholars and historians without general resolution. Perha...

Teaching Literature in Australia: Examining and Reviewing Senior English

Abstract: There seem strong grounds for arguing that secondary English has undergone a significant shift over the past four decades, from a ‘study of Culture’ in the Arnoldian–Leavisite tradition to ‘cultura...

Straddling the Cultural Divide: Second‐Generation South Asian Identity and The Namesake

Abstract: Canada is in the process of another major shift to its ever-changing multicultural image. According to the 2006 Statistics Canada census data, one-in-five people in Canada is foreign-born, an increase of 13.9% between 2001 and 2006 (Statistics Canada 2007). Such an immigration surge is unprecedented in a quarter of a century. This increase is four times higher than that of the Canadian-born population. This surge also comes at a time when the country grapples with acts of overt racism that fly in the face of Canada’s reputation for tolerance (Grant 2007). 1 This shift is likely to have profound consequences for Canada’s educational, cultural and economic future. For the first time, the proportion of the foreign-born population born in Asia and the Middle East surpasses the proportion born in Europe. As of last year, more than half of immigrants continued to come from Asia and the Middle East, but a growing number also came from the Americas and Africa. If the trends continue, by 2030 Canada’s population growth will stem solely from immigration (Grant 2007). Because of the recent influx of immigration in Canada, it is crucial that educators pay closer attention to questions of cultural identity among second-generation Canadian students. 2 Especially within this ever-changing demographic of Canadian culture, South Asians have become a visible and integral part of Canada. 3 I use the term ‘South Asian’ realising that its construction as an identity, rather than geographical description, is in many ways relevant only to the Canadian context. For example, in Canada one would call someone from India, a South Asian, but in Britain that person would be called Black or Asian, in Trinidad, Indian, and in the United States, Asian. The process of migration has important implications for a redefinition of what it means to be Canadian as well as South Asian. The changing racial and ethnic composition within Canada’s borders has led to much angst and controversy over the definition of ‘Canadian’. In a discussion of Canadian and South Asian discourses of cultural protectionism, Amita Handa (2003, 5) suggests, Second-generation youth in Canada are particularly troubling to these discourses because their presence points to the ruptures and contradictions between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. Young South Asians struggle to fashion an identity that speaks to their experience of being South Asian in Canada. In doing so, they often unsettle and resist certain mainstream definitions of both South Asian and Canadian. The children of the post-1965 wave of immigrants are less visible in the media, and in academic literature. Although this group of second-generation Canadians have moved into adulthood and created their own social, personal, professional and familial spaces, their ethnic and national identity development has not been adequately researched. Exploration of second-generation Canadian identity is timely

True Soundings: the findings of the 2007 OFSTED report ‘Poetry in Schools’ and pupils responses to poetry they hear

Abstract: The recent OFSTED report (December 2007) on poetry in schools is welcome because there has been no similar account of the state of poetry at all stages in the curriculum for over twenty years. The ...

English Teaching in New South Wales since 1971: Versions of Growth?

Abstract: This article presents the case of the state of New South Wales (NSW) since the 1970s, as a particular account of English in Australia. I set out to address the question, ‘How has English, in partic...

Gathering in the Dusk: Circling Back to Literacy Formations as Teachers ‘Learn with Laptops’

Abstract: When Giambattista Bodini wakes up, he can’t remember his name or who he is. He wakens into a ‘milky gray’ that is like sleep and ‘void of images, crowded with sounds’. Some of the sounds are voices outside of him – the doctors, his family – telling him what he ‘should have been seeing’ (Eco 2005, 3). Because he was an antiquarian bookseller, the voices also come from inside as echoes he cannot place. Strings of words are put over on to his new reality (‘A-tisket, a-tasket, a green and yellow basket’ – 21) but they don’t make sense because they are not yet strung together into a story; his story. As texts increasingly move from print to electronic, teachers find themselves in a ‘dusk’ between modalities (Innis 1951/2003, 3), with increasing pressure to incorporate electronic texts into their classrooms (Statistics Canada 2004), but without adequate time or opportunity to think about what kinds of literacies are being constructed. A related source of pressure comes from their students, who are no longer necessarily bringing to school the same experiences, texts or stories. Children and youth are increasingly reading multiple texts (print, popular, digital, electronic) on their own as well as having experiences with those texts that differ from the ones their teachers had with print, as Margaret Mackey (1999, 2003) has documented in her reader response studies with young people. While teachers coming to new technologies are not in Giambattista’s situation, because of what Ursula Kelly (2007, 11) calls ‘the demands for literacy’, in this case, technoliteracy, it is as if they are being asked to forget what and who they are, and begin life with new eyes untainted by ‘outmoded’ ways of being and knowing. This article is based on a teacher action research study with seven elementary and secondary teachers who are incorporating class sets of laptops into their practice as part of their school board’s ‘Learning with Laptops’ literacy initiative. The study consists of multiple case studies with the teachers, in which the ‘case’ is not their classrooms. According to Stake (2000), a ‘case’ can be an individual, a place or a phenomenon. Here, the case focuses on the phenomenon of the teachers’ learning as they incorporate new technologies within their daily practice. In this article, I consider how teachers are circling back to their literacy formations even as those formations are moving in the ‘milky gray’ between modalities (Eco 2005, 3). The goal of the ‘Learning with Laptops’ (hereafter, ‘LWL’) initiative was to improve the literacy outcomes of their ‘rurban’ student population, who come from rural and suburban locales: a suburban development, nearby farms, a First Nations community. The board decided to concentrate their efforts on technology, but with a focus on building teacher capacity, and they approached the university looking for

Ten Years of Strategies

Abstract: The publication of The Literacy Game (Stannard and Huxford 2007) provides an opportunity for reflection on the wider context of literacy development in England, plus a celebration and critique of t...

‘Forget Chinese – let's think only in English!’ Chinese Netizens Debating the Best Ways to Learn English in China

Abstract: When I was an English teacher on the Chinese mainland, I was always being asked by enthusiastic learners to teach them the best way(s) to learn English. As China has become increasingly connected to the world in the last two decades, more and more people are seeking to acquire a solid grasp of English, the language of the world (Bolton 2002; Chen and Hu 2006; Lai 2003; Qu 2007). However, learning English constitutes a huge challenge for most learners in China since there are many constraints, such as the lack of real-life opportunities to interact with English speakers and the scarcity of proficient and native English speakers with whom to practice. Consequently, these learners have to adopt a variety of strategies to bypass these constraints in their pursuit of English competence. Language learning research has consistently demonstrated that learners’ learning beliefs are crucial, if not, decisive, in their adoption and adaptation of strategic behaviour to enhance their learning (Horwitz 1988, 1999; Wenden 1986, 1998; White 1999; Yang 1999). So far, most research on language learners’ beliefs has been conducted in institutional settings, where learners receive formal language instruction or undertake self-directed learning in a distance education mode. In contrast, an increasing number of learners also study English by themselves outside institutional settings, in particular, those on the Chinese mainland. While their learning experiences and emerging beliefs about learning languages are of interest to both researchers and teachers in the wake of the call for more research on autonomous study among language learners (White 1999), such data are difficult to obtain as they are normally not associated with particular institutions. The problem, however, could be at least partially solved due to the dramatic spread of Internet in China (Gao 2006, 2007; Yang 2004). China has witnessed an explosion of online activities as millions of Internet users join forces to create and sustain thousands of websites and web forums for entertainment as well as learning. Many English learners on the Chinese mainland have become netizens (Internet citizens, wang min in Chinese pinyin) and interact with each other in their learning of English (Gao 2006). This has made Internet-based research a methodological alternative, promising insights into English language learning in China (see Gao 2007 for an example of an Internet-based inquiry on Chinese learners). This study, reporting on one series of exchanges concerning the learning of English among Chinese netizens in a popular web forum, aims to answer two questions: What beliefs about learning English emerged from the online discussion? How did the discussion inform us of the development of the netizens’ learning beliefs? To answer these

Four photographs in an English course book : a study in the visual archaeology of urban schooling

Abstract: I am a Girl Guide dressed in blue These are the actions I must do Salute to the Captain Bow to the Queen Turn my back on the LCC (Skipping Rhyme, North London, 1956–58) Reflections: An English Cour...

Entrenched Pedagogy: A History of Stasis in the English Language Arts Curriculum in United States Secondary Schools

Abstract: When critiquing the development of the English language arts curriculum in United States secondary schools, Hartwell (1985, 127) is correct in arguing that ‘much current research is not informed by...

Refugee Boy: The Social and Emotional Impact of the Shared Experience of a Contemporary Class Novel

Abstract: My name is Alem Kelo and I really can't understand why I am here. You see, in my homeland they are fighting over a border, a border that is mainly dust and rocks. I really cannot understand why the...

‘The right book to the right child at the right time’: Primary Teacher Knowledge of Children's Literature

Abstract: Choosing texts and using them to develop children's literacy skills have long been held as key strands of primary teacher knowledge – even if this is only alluded to in children's learning outcomes...

Everybody Loves Raymond Williams: Critical Literacy, Cultural Studies and the New International

Abstract: The standard complaint against literary theory at university used to be that it destroys the pleasure of reading. So often was this said, that it feels now like some of us must have been spending m...

On Responsible Uses of English: English for Emancipation, Correction and Academic Purposes

Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to show how some non-Anglophone communities use English to resist the injustices they endure inside their countries, contribute to universal knowledge and correct a stereotypical image of their culture in the West. These ‘responsible’ uses of English depart from the imperialistic, hegemonic view of English depicted by some Critical Linguists (Canagarajah 1999; Pennycook 1994; Philipson 1992; Holliday 1994). This paper defends the position that English has become one of the essential tools for a better future in some developing countries. After the failed political, economic and linguistic policies of postcolonial regimes, particularly in some Francophone regions, English has become an instrument for an unavoidable confrontation with oppressive rulers. English is the language with which intellectuals speak to the world to communicate their anger, fears and hopes, as well as their attempts to participate in current academic, scientific and political debates. Some intellectuals in non-Anglophone regions of the world, such as North Africa, find it hard to defend the view that breaking the walls of intolerance has to go through the medium of English, given that this language is now considered by many, including some Critical Linguists in the West, an additional threat. Taking the particular case of Tunisia, an Arab, African and Muslim country, I shall argue that English serves as an emancipatory tool. In some underprivileged environments, English may be used to overcome obstacles to emancipation and handicaps to progress. The national language – Standard Arabic and its vernacular versions – has been subordinated because political, cultural and even scientific spaces, where it is used, are occupied by ruling minorities. English has become, de facto, one, if not the only instrument which may help to break the walls and to foster talk with the world. Successive politics of Arabisation have created subdued generations; the only discourse that appeals to most of them is that of fundamentalists whose utter adversaries are leftists and those who do not consider that the West is evil. Reversing the trend requires courage, determination and appeal to those who share the hope for justice and peace. In this respect, English can serve as the vehicle of a healthy interaction amongst members of the international community. Yet English has been viewed by poststructuralists, postcolonial writers and leftists in the West as another imperialistic weapon that serves the interests of the United States of America at the expense of local identities (Bolton 2005; Pennycook 1994; Philipson 1992). A stance against the English language often accompanies anti-Americanism. Observing authentic uses of English, and talking from personal experience, I argue that English has become life-saving for some activists, who are trapped

Listening to difference in the teaching of “English”: Insights from internationally educated teachers.

Abstract: More than 25 years ago, Ferguson first wrote about ‘one of the most significant linguistic phenomena of our time, the incredible spread of English as a global language’ (1992, xiii) – an historically unprecedented phenomenon in terms of its scale (see also Fishman 1998). English has the second largest number of mother tongue speakers worldwide; there are also large numbers of people around the globe who speak localised forms of English, speak English as a lingua franca and also learn English as a foreign or additional language. Jenkins (2006) notes that English speakers in the latter three categories ‘vastly outnumber’ those for whom English is a first language (158–159). In the Canadian context, distinctions among different forms of English are becoming increasingly important. A recent report from Statistics Canada notes that one in five members of the population are now allophones – people who speak neither English nor French as their first language – an increase directly attributable to high numbers of immigrants (Corbeil and Blaser 2007). Of interest to those educators is the fact that only 46% of allophones in the overall population speak English or French at home. Further, the languages listed as mother tongues in Canada (other than English or French) number 200. Thus, more and more people in Canada speak English only in particular contexts and for particular purposes. Clearly, Canadian demographics are changing – and with them, the composition of the student population in our classrooms. The overall purpose of this paper is to consider what the teaching of English as a subject in Canadian schools might entail in the context of changing demographics and the various forms of English currently spoken in the country. How do we as teachers and teacher educators in the twenty-first century question what ‘English’ means, even as we teach (in/through) it? How do we realise the political work we do with language and listen to difference? As a distinct subject in schools, English has a relatively short history – and one in which particular (so-called standard) forms of the language have been crucial in positioning people in relation to one another in terms of power and privilege. In the nineteenth century, the study of English literature emerged in the British colonial education system of India – a context that says much about how it was intended to ‘civilise’ people though language and culture – and an educational initiative that was later applied to the working classes of Britain (Willinsky 2000). English as a single unified subject (i.e. one that brought together the previously separate strands of literature, composition and language) emerged in the 1920s along with the view that English was intended to do more than ensure that the language remained ‘healthy’; it was also a means through which the moral and

Depoliticising Politics: Readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée

Abstract: A pressing issue of our time is thus how to overcome the social movements' self‐imposed depoliticisation. (Hui 2006, 44) All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her. (C...

Making a Difference: Early Career English Teachers Research Their Practice

Abstract: However battered the professional ego may get, however cynical the old hand in the staffroom may profess to be, it still remains true that most teachers went into teaching not because of the chance...

English in the Antipodes: An Editorial Introduction

Abstract: English teaching in state-sponsored school education has a relatively brief formal history: little more than a century, on most accounts, at least with regard to subject English, as a distinctive feature of the school curriculum. Yet it is now firmly – if rather ambivalently – located at, or near, the centre of curriculum and schooling in anglophone countries around the world today, something that seems likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Over two decades ago, it was possible to speak with some confidence about teaching and learning English worldwide (Britton, Shafer, and Watson 1990), and to assume that there was indeed a common object. Whether or not that is still the case is debatable. More so than ever before, English as a historically specific form of mother-tongue education, and as a contemporary manifestation of Empire, now needs to be viewed in relation to, and alongside, burgeoning fields such as English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), largely because of the global reach of the English language in the new economic and technocultural conditions of what has been called the ‘network society’. Equally important, however, is the phenomenon of diasporic and global population movements, as well as various shifts and tensions in the geopolitical order of things, and new struggles over language and identity, allegiance and security. This Special Issue of Changing English is addressed to the theory and practice of English teaching in the southern hemisphere, with specific reference to Australia and New Zealand. It stems partly from a symposium presented five years ago, in 2003, at the joint conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE), held in Auckland. Entitled ‘English in the Antipodes: English Teaching, National Schooling and Post-Imperial History’, the symposium brought together work in English curriculum history focused on schooling in Australia and New Zealand – the Antipodes – in the first half of the twentieth century. That was a time when (post-) colonial school systems were being formed in accordance with a general nationbuilding project on the margins of the British Empire. Both southern nations drew heavily on British models as they formalised their school systems in the context of a new century, seeking to construct a ‘New Education’ in and for new political and geographical circumstances.

Teaching Creative Writing

Abstract: This article investigates the teaching of Creative Writing in Universities against the backdrop of their increasing popularity around the country. It asks the question, ‘Are Creative Writing courses a worthwhile activity to be involved in, both for teachers and for students?’ The writer describes his own journey from teaching English in London Comprehensives to becoming a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University, both at BA and MA level. He makes clear the day to day working practices of Creative Writing courses and gives examples from his own experiences of teaching students. The progress of one MA student is looked at in detail, from the start to the end of a one year degree. With the help of some inspirational advice from practicing writers and theorists, this essay seeks to make a case for more Creative Writing teaching in schools and highlights its importance in Higher Education as a source of imaginative play and development.

Boff the Hamster: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract: A tired‐looking man appears out of a corridor of scuffed linoleum and steps tentatively on to the sombre carpet of a waiting room. He has entered the antechamber to a headteacher's office. Framed m...