Teaching and Learning English Worldwide

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Teaching and Learning English Worldwide Multilingual Matters (Series) Britton, James N. Multilingual Matters 1853590649 9781853590641 9780585225876 English English philology--Study and teaching--History--20th century, English philology--Study and teaching. 1990 PE65.T38 1990eb 428/.007 English philology--Study and teaching--History--20th century, English philology--Study and teaching.

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Teaching and Learning English Worldwide

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Multilingual Matters Age in Second Language Acquisition BIRGIT HARLEY Bicultural and Trilingual Education MICHAEL BYRAM and JOHAN LEMAN (eds) Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education MICHAEL BYRAM Current Trends in European Second Language Acquisition Research HANS W. DECHERT (ed.) Dialect and Education: Some European Perspectives J. CHESHIRE, V. EDWARDS, H. MÜNSTERMANN and B. WELTENS (eds) English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict and Change N. COUPLAND and A. THOMAS (ed.) Introspection in Second Language Research C.FÆRCH and G. KASPER (eds) Key Issues in Bilingualism and Bilingual Education COLIN BAKER Language Acquisition: The Age Factor D.M. SINGLETON Language Distribution Issues in Bilingual Schooling R. JACOBSON and C. FALTIS (eds) Language in Education in Africa CASMIR M. RUBAGUMYA (ed.) Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific R.B. BALDAUF and A. LUKE (eds) Learner Language and Language Learning C. FÆRCH, K. HAASTRUP and R. PHILLIPSON Marriage Across Frontiers A. BARBARA Methods in Dialectology ALAN R. THOMAS (ed.) The Moving Experience: A Practical Guide to Psychological Survival GAIL MELTZER and ELAINE GRAND JEAN Raising Children Bilingually: The Pre-School Years LENORE ARNBERG The Role of the First Language in Second Language Learning HÅKAN RINGBOM Schooling in a Plural Canada JOHN R. MALLEA Second Language Acquisition/Foreign Language Learning B. VanPATTEN and J.F. LEE (eds) Story as Vehicle EDIE GARVIE Please contact us for the latest book information: Multilingual Matters, Bank House, 8a Hill Road, Clevedon, Avon BS21 7HH, England.

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Teaching and Learning English Worldwide Edited by James Britton, Robert E. Shafer and Ken Watson

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon · Philadelphia

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MORLEY B5355-IV 1.05.90 K02 MultilingualMatters [00.0] L01 15:03 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Teaching and Learning English Worldwide/Edited by James Britton, Robert E. Shafer and Ken Watson on behalf of the International Federation for the Teaching of English. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references. 1. English philology Study and teaching History 20th century. 2. English philology Study and teaching. I. Britton, James N. II. Shafer, Robert Eugene, 1925-, III. Watson, Ken. IV. International Federation for the Teaching of English. PE65.T38 1989 428'.007 dc20 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Teaching and Learning English Worldwide. 1. Schools. Curriculum subjects: English language. Teaching. Sociopolitical aspects. I. Britton, James, 1908 May 18-. II Shafer, Robert E. III. Watson, Ken. 420'.7'1 ISBN 1-85359-065-7 ISBN 1-85359-064-9 (pbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd Bank House, 8a Hill Road, Clevedon, Avon BS21 7HH, England & 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101 Bristol, PA 19007 USA Copyright © 1990 James Britton, Robert E. Shafer, Ken Watson and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Index compiled by Meg Davies (Society of Indexers). Typeset by Morley Harris Typesetting, Bristol. Printed and bound in Great Britain by WBC Print Ltd, Bristol.

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Page v Contents Foreword The Editors

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Introduction James Britton

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1 The Teaching of English in England, 1945-1986: Politics and Practice Tony Burgess and Nancy Martin

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2 The Growth of Accountability and the Accountability of Growth: Secondary School English Teaching in Post-War Scotland David Northcroft

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3 The Teaching of English in Ireland John Killeen and Tom Mullins

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4 The Swinging Pendulum: Teaching English in the USA, 19451987 John S. Simmons, Robert E. Sharer and Linda K. Shadiow

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5 Teaching English Language Arts in Canada: 1965-1985 Sam Robinson, Laurence Walker, Nan Johnson and Trevor Gambell

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6 Teaching English in Australia: A Personal View Diana Davis and Ken Watson

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7 The Teaching of English in New Zealand Schools Vince Catherwood, Elody Rathgen and Russell Aitken

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8 'The most important agent of civilisation': Teaching English in the West Indies, 1838-1986 200 Kathleen Drayton 9 English and the Teaching of English Literature in South Africa Hilary Janks and Jonathan Paton

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10 A Language for the People: A History of English Language Teaching in Singapore Chua Seok Hong

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Page vi 11 English Language Teaching in the Philippines: A Succession of Movements Bonifacio P. Sibayan and Andrew B. Gonzalez

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12 The Teaching of English in India, 1945-1985S. K. Das

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13 The Teaching of English in Indonesia S. Takdir Alisjahbana

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Comparative Data on the Thirteen Countries

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Foreword There are few international studies of English teaching although the place of the English language as an international lingua franca is well established. There are even fewer historical studies of English teaching and none that we know of in international or comparative settings which is what this volume purports to be. What we have done under the aegis of the International Federation for the Teaching of English is to find authors or author teams in various countries where English is a mother tongue language or a significant second, or in some cases, third language. We asked these authors to write a history of the teaching of English in their respective countries between 1945 and the present. In several instances they began their accounts considerably earlier than 1945 to provide necessary background. Unfortunately, we were not able to be inclusive in this effort because of the limitations of time, space and energy and also because the social and political events of the last several centuries have resulted in the spread of English into so many different countries that several volumes would be required to tell the complete story. Essentially, the authors of the various chapters have concentrated on the place of English in a particular society and have attempted to describe how English exists in the social and political context of that society and how it has been shaped as a school subject and/or the language of instruction within that context. We were fortunate to be able to find authors in thirteen countries who are familiar with the recent history of English teaching in their respective countries and who, in all cases, are themselves significant contributors to that history. Being so, they write with a strongly held point-of-view about the significance of English as a school subject and its place in the social milieu. The editors acknowledge their debt to Professor Ian Pringle of Carton University in Ottawa, Canada, who led the Fourth International Conference on the Teaching of English in May of 1986 and who placed us in contact with many of our authors at that conference. A word of thanks is also due to the members of the Executive Committee of the International Federation for the Teaching of English who have encouraged us and supported our work. We are pleased to note that all royalties from the sale of this volume will help to support future AFT projects. Lastly, we thank

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our authors who have cheerfully put up with our occasional misunderstandings of the dynamics of English teaching in their complex societies and who have been both gracious and understanding about delays in publication brought about by the various commitments of their editors. THE EDITORS

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Introduction James Briton I think the experience of reading the chapters in this book might be described as kaleidoscopic. There are many common themes, topics that recur chapter after chapter; the effect of examinations; the problem of set-books for reading; censorship; the literary canon and innovations that depart from it; nationality as a criterion for choosing authors; meeting multicultural needs and demands; dialects are they a problem? 'new grammars' what do they offer us? and so on. The kaleidoscope suggests itself because in any chapter a number of these items is likely to enter into varying relationships, constitute fresh configurations. A twist to the instrument and a fresh pattern appears. I find it fascinating to read for indications of the wider context social, political, historical, ideological that promises to explain why the items take up that particular configuration. One factor explicit in some chapters, disguised in others is the economic recession that made the 1970s in many parts of the world an 'age of anxiety'. An open mind is the first casualty when anxiety threatens us, and for some reason educational provision what goes on in schools seems to come early under scrutiny when anxiety attacks a nation's public opinion. Of course, national policies will reflect a range of differing reactions to crisis conditions national policies at least broadly representing the political parties in power. Cuts in educational spending may, for example, have reduced the resources for teaching in USA, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom but by no means equally; the severity of the cuts and the resulting disablement would vary enormously. Anxiety has other even more damaging effects a loss of confidence in the educational service and a lowering of morale in the teaching profession. Many of the chapters refer to contrasting states of affairs in this respect; generally speaking 'professionalism' and high morale and efficient operating are seen as representing existing gains and pointing the way ahead; authoritarian control, top-down administration central control of the

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curriculum in particular are seen as reactionary, a brake on progress and a state of affairs we have worked to leave behind. Essentially, the contrast is between an educational regime of trust and one of surveillance. To claim this is to recognise that the chapters of this book cannot be taken as reflecting all that goes on in the English classes of the nations represented. The average classroom, the average school in the average school district or local authority would no doubt be less affected by change in current directions, nearer to yesterday's norms, less conscious of its own direction, the rationale underlying its practices. What these chapters represent, we believe, is a distillation of the best practices a substantial consensus, a caucus, perhaps, that marks the way ahead. After all, the initiative came from people already associated, already committed to a general philosophical position one that owes its survival to the impetus provided by the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 and the years of international co-operation that have resulted, and the one that is today embodied in the voluntary associations of the English teachers that constitute the International Federation for the Teaching of English. I have referred to the 'survival' of this conception because the enlightened (or 'progressive' where that is not a dirty word) view of education had its origins long before Dartmouth. I do not believe it is part of any bandwagon or fashion cycle or pendulum swing, but a slowly growing movement with philosophical roots way back in the past and pragmatic roots deep in the intuitive wisdom of generations of successful teachers. I think we need to make it clear that a commitment to the classroom teacher's power of decision in curriculum and associated matters is not the outcome of a bogus professionalism a policy of 'teacher knows best' but derives from an increasingly accurate analysis of the processes of teaching and learning. When it is recognised that effective teaching is not a unidirectional activity but the outcome of teacher/student interaction and, even more importantly, that learning is an effect of community rather than a mere reciprocal response to instruction; then it is manifest that the course of classroom events cannot be laid down by any external agency. Students, parents, society in general, must rely upon a classroom teacher's theoretical sophistication, the adequacy of the rationale by which he functions and his ability to put that theory into practice. It is a sad part of the story this book has to tell that alongside historical reviews reflecting earlier failures to recognize the truth of this analysis, we have to report a number of recent attacks on teacher professionalism and the dismantling of some of the institutions that had served to support and develop it.

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A major source of variation in the teaching of English from country to country is, of course, the context of other languages in which it operates. Early attempts to extend the use of Irish Celtic as a mother tongue in the Irish Republic confronting a more recent recognition of the educational importance of a mother tongue, whether English or Irish, present, for example, a fascinating story, and one that is reflected to some extent in many other chapters. When we turn to the South African chapter, we have to abandon the kaleidoscope notion with which I began this introduction: the problems in South Africa are by no means a recombining of elements familiar in other configurations in other countries. I read that chapter with a growing sense of the courage required to pursue our common notions in so hostile an environment, and a growing sense that their account runs the risk of trivializing the problems and concerns that feature in our other countries, our other chapters. We can only hope that international concern and a degree of international consensus on English teaching may in some way, at some stage, provide support for their cause. It is interesting to notice where efforts have been and are being made to recognize and exploit the richness that linguistic and cultural variation can bring to an educational setting. It would be difficult to find a more dramatic example than the educational campaigns that formed a part of the Civil Rights Movement under Kennedy and Johnson in the United States. More recent activity is described in the Canadian chapter with its accounts of French immersion programmes and programmes for Indian and Mete education; and today in New Zealand determined efforts are being made to include Maori elements in the national image and resulting educational provision. Racial and regional differences provide a complex picture of West Indian education, but perhaps the dominant feature there might be called the 'birth of a language' the emergence of the novel in West Indian English and the effect of that phenomenon on the status of creole dialect its growing acceptance as a language in its own right. It is not in the least surprising that leaders of black opinion in South Africa are foreseeing a similar development for the English dialects of the black townships. Questions of national identity enter also into the field of literature teaching. The conception of 'literature in the English language' as a viable category seems to operate principally in the United Kingdom at the pre-college level; the United States has a long-established pattern that distinguishes between English and American authors and allots a place for both in the high school curriculum; and the chapters describing literature courses in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean all these make reference to a growing concern to establish studies in national and

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sometimes regional literature. The demand is most insistent, I believe, where the effects of British imperialism have not been forgotten where the language of the colonists operated as a form of oppression. ('There are many reasons', writes Kneehole, the black South African, 'why English cannot be considered an innocent language.') I believe the material that is collected in this volume could best be regarded as documentation of the processes of change in English teaching. Fascinating questions are raised from its pages: what factors, for example are favorable to change and what factors defend the status quo? Are there watersheds and if there are, how do they come about? Do we progress by creating and resolving polar oppositions either at the classroom level or by scholarly analysis and research? Does 'outrageous fortune' play a part positively sometimes as well as negatively? Does the ebb and flow of bandwagon ideas leave any long-term effects or merely serve to distort the progress of orderly advance? Binary oppositions certainly abound in these accounts usually, though not always, clearly marked for value in accordance with the writer's opinion. Vocational education is seen as opposing sometimes 'liberal' and sometimes 'academic' educational ideals; response to literary works is seen as competing with biographical, historical and critical approaches; new grammars compete for time on the agenda that others would give to experience in writingand-reading. In Canada and the United States a 'whole language' movement confronts teachers who believe education focuses upon knowledge about cultural matters. The author of the Scottish chapter, David Northernmost, poses an opposition between growth, as a broad and optimistic educational analogy, and accountability, 'the external consideration that has increasingly come to haunt' its practitioners and there are echoes of this confrontation in various forms in other chapters. We set out, in fact, to document the teaching of English, but inevitably a good deal of time is spent in describing modes of assessment or evaluation and it must be admitted that no account would have been responsibly complete without information on this aspect. The trend, where circumstances are most favorable, is to move away from traditional modes of assessment written papers externally set and marked in the direction of internal assessment of course work; a procedure that would reflect and support the teaching programme rather than dictate its terms. Modes of assessment have certainly operated in the past as change agents, but they are an unacceptable channel in so far as they represent 'remote control' of curriculum matters and in that their specifications will tend to undervalue aspects of learning that are more difficult or more expensive to measure. Although there are fairly frequent brief references to educational

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research in these chapters, it certainly cannot be said to play a major role ideas deriving from it, for example, are not developed in any detail. Perhaps the most interesting tendency is a recent move in the direction of classroom observation the 'teacher as researcher' a move that should have the effect of enhancing or enriching a teacher's role, provided research is conceived as a mode of discovery (with widely varying applications, or 'ranges of convenience') rather than as an instrument of proof. Certainly, the point has been forcibly made more than once in this book that it is only where teachers themselves are involved in research design and execution that the insights generated are likely to be carried effectively into practice. Doubtless the most startling omission in this account of English teaching, world-wide, is reflected in the extreme paucity of references to dramatic improvisation. It is my own opinion that despite excellent work often achieved by drama specialists, the limitations usually imposed by the timetable assigned to a 'specialist' (whether art teacher, drama teacher, music teacher or anyone else) does mean that improvisation can rarely be more than icing on the cake and meanwhile dramatic methods in the English lesson, a rich potential during the years when I was a teacher, seem to have been largely eclipsed. <><><><><><><><><><><><> It is, I believe, a notorious fact that an English teacher's resources are spread very thin and, while much the same is true for the teacher of a large class in an elementary school, that teacher is spared the multiple class-load of a rotary teacher. For rotary teachers, I believe it becomes necessary to establish routines and a saving of energy to stick to them; with a good teacher they will be useful routines, but none the less resistant to spontaneous modification. In my early years as a teacher, I certainly found that, while I recognized the need to re-plan, to make changes, I could not expect to change every programme each year; what I had to do was to carry on as usual in most classes while initiating a new programme in one or two selected classes. Which programmes to revise? clearly that was a matter of paying attention to pupil responses listening to pupil comments and 'reading' their behavior. With experience I think we become more open to change, less dependent on established classroom patterns. But there is no doubt that the climate of opinion in the school is a major factor; in a school where shop talk in the staff room is frowned on, where theories are despised and serious reading is a thing of the past the solitary teacher-asresearcher can hardly

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expect to survive. A school that regards professional development for its teachers as a key part of its responsibilities, and where consultation time forms part of the school day, providing a forum for the discussion of new ideas and the joint planning of new procedures all that, rare though it may be 'on the ground' constitutes the way forward for English teaching. But that is not all; it would be inappropriate to introduce this history without referring finally to the kind of support for teachers afforded by the Associations for the Teaching of English. In countries like Australia and Canada, covering vast areas and scattered centares of activity, the need is paramount and the chapters that follow will tell of the gains and the difficulties to be surmounted. Other chapters report an urgent need for a national voice for English teachers perhaps even a need to keep alive whatever remnants of professionalism survive. And everywhere, regardless of local circumstances, the importance of a framework of support for English teachers in search of a more adequate conception and more efficient means of carrying out their role in tomorrow's world.

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1 The Teaching Of English In England, 1945-1986: Politics And Practice Tony Burgess and Nancy Martin Introduction If developments in English are to be seen within their context, it is necessary to appreciate something of the administrative framework of education in the United Kingdom which has been in place for most of the post-war period but which is currently undergoing major change. Under this, national direction for the system has been derived from a department of state (the Department of Education and Science the DES formerly the Ministry of Education). But responsibility for provision and for day to day administration has been through elected local government authorities, who have education as one among a number of local government functions, including, for example, housing, social services and recreation. There are currently 109 of these local authorities and their educational (and other) arrangements have been financed partly through local taxes (rates) and partly through the centrally allocated rate support grant, which is annually set by government. The schools thus locally provided have been directed by Head Teachers, who are responsible to the Education Committee of their Local Education Authority (LEA), to a governing body and less directly to parents. The system, then, has been one with three tiers and with much devolution of responsibility. While a framework of national education acts guarantees provision between the ages of 5 and 16, the DES, in framing more immediate educational policy, has had necessarily to work through LEAs; and these LEAs have had in practice fairly considerable powers. Curriculum, to come to a matter more directly relevant to English, has been technically in the charge of governors, implying responsibility at school

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level. However, in such a system teachers also can have considerable influence over what is taught, though such influence has been subject to strong checks and balances, especially those of national and local inspectorates and of a public examination system providing qualifications at the ages of 16 and 18. With powers thus separated, with considerable autonomy at different levels, the system has been one in which, for much of the post-war period, local initiatives have been possible; and grass root movements at school or professional level have come to have wider influence. English during these years undoubtedly owes something to this separation of powers. The new traditions of the subject have grown hand in hand with a developing sense of professional competence and responsibility. The account anticipates sharp changes, some introduced and some contemplated in the immediate future, which have emerged in more recent times. As public spending has come to be seen on the political right as the enemy of economic growth rather than its infrastructure, political pressures have multiplied against egalitarian directions in public education and against the relative autonomy of teachers and the education service. For much of the period the educational system in the UK would by comparison with other systems be classified as decentralized. By the late 1980s, a new education act introduced by the current secretary of state has made it clear that the future will lie with far greater centralization. This history of initial teacher autonomy and mounting political pressure for greater centralization is one to which we shall need to return. Forty years is not far from the working life of a teacher. We hope that it may be of interest if we pause for one more moment, on the threshold of the more specific story which we have to tell, to ask how it would have looked to him or her, a young entrant to the profession, in 1945? She would have set out on the crest of hopes for change. In schools, a major re-ordering was in hand, as the Butler Act abolished the old, all-through elementary schools and instituted universal secondary schooling. Major boundaries were being freshly drawn, even if much remained. Today, approaching retirement, she would be hard put to avoid noting the emergence of a very different climate. Teachers' unions, in the last few years, have been involved in a protracted struggle over conditions of service. Since the late 1960s there has been a continuous stream of pamphleteering from the political and educational right criticizing public education. Even before the present bill, central government direction of curriculum had been increasing rapidly and whole areas of educational provision are now funded, with direct control, from the department of employment rather than through educational expenditure.

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We think that the story goes like this. Through to the beginnings of the 1960s, a new progressive framework was being constructed in which the central elements were comprehensive schooling, an altered examination system, the emergence of new subject teaching associations and the steady accumulation of agreed lines of a common English teaching practice. How deeply this was founded is hard to tell. It is possible to overestimate the depth and the degree of agreement but also to underestimate the durability. The 1960s and early 1970s look like years of consolidation of this framework as well as of development and innovation. A central element in this was the emergence of the Schools Council with something like general acceptance of a role for professional, teacher responsibility in curriculum and examinations reform. A decisive break in this period is marked by a speech given by Cablegram in 1976, at Ruin College, which initiated the so-called 'Great Debate' in British education. The present act, however, envisages a degree of centralized direction of curriculum and assessment which goes well beyond the themes of that debate and indeed beyond any recent policy statements. The ground for this change of direction was prepared by a hard-hitting attack on the educational changes of the 1950s and 1960s. It was mounted when a Labor Government was in power by a small but influential group of University teachers, writers, heads of grammar schools and a leading Conservative Member of Parliament. This attack foreshadowed most of the directions which have dominated the educational climate of the 1980s. It was published in a series of pamphlets (1969-71) self-named 'The Black Papers'. These set out to show that the egalitarian aims of the post-war Education Acts and Government Reports had ruined the schools and destroyed the existing high standards set by the selective grammar schools. Comprehensive schools had failed, they claimed, and the opening up of the curricula of schools and universities would lead to lower standards. Titles of some of the articles reveal both their own standpoint and that which they were attacking: for instance, 'The Egalitarian Threat', 'Pernicious Participation', 'Comprehensive Disaster', 'In Praise of Examinations'. They concluded by reasserting the importance of competition, as an educational aim, and of selection for schools for the ablest pupils. The Black Papers were at the time a unique phenomenon in the history of education. They were in no way a contribution to theoretical debate; they were a direct attack on the educational policies of post-war Governments in their attempts to develop equal opportunities for all, and were organized as a political campaign. Copies were sent to all Members of Parliament and buyers were urged to purchase ten extra copies and distribute them. When a Conservative Government was elected in 1970 they ceased publication, but

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have had their successors in pamphlets published by the Centare for Policy Studies, a right wing think tank formed by Margaret Thatcher and Ketch Joseph in 1974. It is illuminating to see what has happened to the charges made by these papers and to the directions they advocated and to the tradition of influence from the right which they initiated. While the growing pains of the new comprehensive schools were manifold, an alternative view held that time was needed for teachers who had been socialized in selective schools to accommodate to the very different professional needs of common schools; these problems were regarded by the contributors to 'The Black Papers' not as growing pains but as outright failure and a strong case for putting the clock back. One has to ask how it was possible for the charges to be made to stick and for the winds of change to blow in a contrary direction. How much is it possible to see behind the facade of public clamor about the 'ills' of education? Why did a Labor leader give the coup de grace to a gradually emerging professional influence in education and to the egalitarian consensus in favour of a strong public education system which has emerged in postwar years? With hindsight, much may be attributed to political expediency a diversionary tactic to distract attention from the gathering economic recession and an attempt to draw the sting from a more fundamental attack on the whole British welfare state. Be that as it may, with the coming to power of the Thatcher Government in 1979, the stage had been set for an all-out attempt to take control of education from the local authorities and to curb, beyond recovery, the influence of teachers. It is within this broader history, then, that English has developed in post-war years; and to this, our more specific story, we turn. 1945-1960 It now seems extraordinary that English teachers had no common voice until the National Association for the Teaching of English was founded in the early 1960s. Science and Mathematics had had powerful associations for some years whereas only small associations with limited objectives and influence existed for English teachers in the 1940s. In 1947 the London Association for the Teaching of English, led by James Britton and Nancy Martin, was founded to provide a forum for London teachers, and between that date and the 1960s it steadily grew in influence. Its mode of working through study groups which reported to the Association as a whole (or were published) created a working democratic model which was influential when the National Association was founded in 1963. The London Association's first debates were concerned with aspects of

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assessment where they touched classroom practice, in particular the influx of comprehension tests. Intelligence testing was on the way out as a means of sorting pupils into categories of ability administratively necessary within a system of selective schools. It disappeared with the coming of the common school, yet within these new large comprehensive schools some way of organising students which met their differing capacities and needs had to be found. It began to look as if comprehension tests (as indicators of reading ability) were all set to replace intelligence tests as a sorting agency which would recreate the selective system within the comprehensive schools and, in doing so, would set up 'Comprehension' as a new subject in the curriculum. The new Association challenged this trend (blown large by text book writers and publishers) by its first venture into the professional arena. This was a three-year comparison of the effects of class time spent doing comprehension versus straight reading of whole books. The findings, clearly in favour of books in all seven experimental schools, were influential in keeping comprehension as part of the ordinary process of reading. This was a micro-operation within a single subject field, but it was significant both in its own right, and as a first excursion into professional work bringing individual English teachers into a wider arena. As the 1950s wore on the pace of change accelerated. After free secondary education for all and the development of common schools, arguments came to centre on raising the school leaving age to 16. This put issues of assessment in the forefront of debate. Now the two thirds of the school population which had hitherto left without qualifying by an examination had to be catered for. The Secondary Schools Examinations Council was charged with establishing an examination available for all before this the public examination system had only catered for the one third of the school population which was in Grammar schools. What was now planned was an examination which would record students' achievements however meagre rather than put them above or below a pass line. The then Secretary of State for Education and the Secondary Schools Examinations Council were quite clear that the new examination should be the servant not the master of the schools and to this end 'effective teacher control of syllabus content, examination papers and examining techniques is the rock on which the CSE system will stand' (HMSO, 1963), and, indeed, the teachers' influence was clear in the liberalising directions of the new Certificate of Secondary Education when it came (1966). For English teachers it meant papers which did not separate language and literature as examination subjects; it meant a focus on reading and on continuous writing; it meant a choice of type of examination which could include coursework. For the first time examinations could be an aid to teaching

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rather than a dead hand. Opposition came from some of the older examination boards because the new Certificate remained a poor relation of the established GCE (General Certificate of Education). Most schools opted for the old examination because it was deemed to carry more weight as a qualification: educational arguments about the relative effects of the two examinations proved of little account. Debate about modes of assessment went hand in hand with discussion about the content of the curriculum. Here various influences had been at work for some years. A progressive movement coming from private schools and the education of younger children argued for the importance of creative activities art, writing, drama, stories. What had been a matter of speculation, experiment and debate in the private sector gradually seeped into public education. One result of this growing focus on the general value of creative work was a profound change of attitude towards children's writing. It was now beginning to be seen as an expression of real experience, not merely an exercise of a skill. Dora Pym and Marjorie Hourd in their writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s were influential in changing people's notions about writing; writings which were expressions of real experience needed to be valued differently from mere exercises (Pym, 1956; Hourd, 1949). The gradual effect of this change of concept is, perhaps, only now in the 1980s coming to fruition in changes in students' views of their own capacities. The dominant figure in the late 1940s and early 1950s was F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. Denys Thompson at Yeovil school, supported by Leavis, founded The Use of English journal, and he and Leavis were extremely influential in developing a movement of devoted teachers of English whose beliefs lay in the regenerating power of good literature. Leavis and his associates were unusual in that they analysed the social contexts of education and pressed the role of literature by contrasting the culture of a mass civilisation with a minority culture which they saw as a defence against a corrupt society. But they valued it as a minority culture for a select minority for only those who could read and appreciate the best that had been written. One of Leavis's associates, David Holbrook, took their views more widely to include pupils in secondary modern schools and based his literary canon on ballads and popular literature of the past (of quality); in effect, just another form of elitism with a different kind of school population (Holbrook, 1961). It was this deep-rooted elitism which caused many good teachers to move away from the narrow canon of literature which Leavis propounded. This revolt of many English teachers against this elitist view was the beginning of the opposition to the dominance of literary criticism in school literature teaching, and of the 'Great Tradition' as the only source of

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books to read in the new common schools. Here, with reading levels ranging from illiterate to University entrance, there had to be debate about what texts should and could be read; and arising from this came questions about what should count as literature. This was not just a matter of finding alternative texts, though this is how it appeared to many teachers faced with how to get their wide-ranging classes reading. In the past, what counted as literature had been in practice determined by the books chosen by the examiners, and the examinees were the students who would become future teachers and administrators. Now the teachers themselves had become to a large extent the examiners, and their constituency was the total population with all its immense variations. In this context of confusion, it seems relevant to recall some of those questions and discussions which sank away out of thought did not find a place on the agenda for action. The Crowther and Newsome Reports raised questions about the need for new forms of education for the new masses for whom education was now being provided (15-18 years and subsequently) (HMSO, 1959; HMSO, 1963). General issues were discussed about what account was being taken of working class culture. Might working class children have modes of perception and capacities that were not being met by educational procedures that were dominantly middle class? In the field of English, questions were asked about what literature should be chosen, and was literature itself a middle class product? Were teachers themselves socialised into the middle class with its distinctive values and therefore at odds with the majority of their pupils? To what extent could a national culture be said to exist, and to be part of the school horizon? These debates have disappeared, or gone underground. They may have touched too closely on social values in an upwardly mobile society, but, in any case, most discussions of a theoretical or speculative nature have gone to ground under the myopic influence of a focus on what is directly practical and supposedly basic. In the matter of what books to read, pragmatic solutions were found in books by contemporary writers with a focus on working class lives. Grammar teaching came under review from two aspects. First, studies were published which showed (once again) that knowledge of school grammar (parts of speech and clause analysis) could not be shown to have any effect on writing. As an emphasis developed on giving priority to experience of writing rather than study of language, so grammar teaching began to fade away in all but a few schools. Second, the growth of 'new grammars' coming chiefly from the USA seemed to open doors to a proper understanding of the functions of language in society, and to provide a tool for opposing the deadening effect of the weekly grammar lesson based on

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archaic notions of grammar and rhetoric. A further result of the work on new grammars and linguistics was a move in favour of including linguistics in courses for teachers. This direction has steadily gained momentum, though it did not halt the decline of grammar teaching in schools. In matters of curriculum, the struggle between State and teachers for control was not at this time openly joined. Decisions rested largely with the Examination Boards and the teachers, with some advisory interventions from Her Majesty's Inspectors. The changes noted above have been selected for the way they touched the lives of teachers in the 1950s as classroom issues, but behind the practical debates was developing a sense of theoretical rationale derived chiefly from humanist philosophy with some input from psychology. Current discussion couched these ideas in such terms as 'language and inner representation', 'language and thought', 'language and discovery'. These phrases pinpoint the notion that language has a wider dimension than the mastery of correct forms and had implications that extended to other subjects and to learning in its most general sense. This change in the concept of language in its social and intellectual functions is, we suggest, the most significant change in the post-war years, and it is not yet adequately understood. Mastery of skill is still seen by many as the aim of language work. Even the Bullock Report (apart from James Britton's contributions, and in spite of the title 'A Language for Life') saw the purpose of English as being the acquisition of language. Full stop. It puts little explicit focus on language to do things with. This is implied, of course, but it does not raise any kind of flag to announce the implications and potential contained in the central concepts. Given these, the purposes of English teaching can now be not just the achievement of good writing, or good reading or good spelling but the mastery of an intellectual tool which may enable its users to reflect upon them, and also to investigate and reflect upon the outer social world. These ideas could not be assimilated quickly, and in any case, all the traditional practices of English teaching operated against them. Teachers had to move from teaching subject English with its focus on literature to consider all the uses of language which school students engage in and how to develop these for real purposes. Proficiency is no longer an adequate aim. Thus for English teachers the move was a double one: out of subject English and over to language in all subjects, and, second, from acquiring an abstract competence towards continually purposive language activity. There are, of course, many other kinds of change needed before the possibilities of this changed concept of language can be implemented in its full power. In 1954 appeared a booklet from the Ministry of Education called Language: Some Suggestions for Teachers of English and Others (HMSO,

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1954). This was the first official post-war document about English teaching. No other of comparable range appeared until the Bullock Report, 20 years later. What is interesting about the 1954 booklet is that it provides a theoretical rationale based on current knowledge about language and its place in the world. Moreover, it concerns itself with the importance of the mother tongue in all learning. In this it breaks entirely new ground both in its official policy and in general understanding about language. With its powerful theoretical base, the document could have been the starting point for advice to teachers which would have opened up possibilities for quite different kinds of work in English and given rise to new forms of writing, and offered new opportunities for students to understand and use the power of language as a tool of all learning; but the authors did nothing of this. In their advice to English teachers they failed to explore the implications of the rationale they had articulated. Instead they presented traditional approaches as before. The booklet, Language, epitomised the way in which forces for change arising from new knowledge conflict with the conservatism of traditional practice. Moreover, institutions themselves are by nature conservative, and the pressures of school management systems cause all routines from timetables to hierarchies of command to operate against change. The resolution of this conflict can only be through the growth of teacher professionalism and the active participation of teachers in decisions of all sorts. This began to happen in the 1960s but it had not developed strongly enough as the history of the last of our three periods will show. 1960-1970 Uniquely, research became in the 1960s a first and even a predominant concern. Less than a year after the formation of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) in 1963, the Schools Council was set up to 'carry out research and development work on curricula, teaching methods and examinations in primary and secondary schools'. This sometimes underestimated and now disbanded body was unusual in many ways. It brought under one roof responsibility for examinations and for curriculum, replacing the former Secondary Schools Examinations Committee. It was an independent body. All sectors of the educational field were represented on it, with school teachers forming a majority of its members. It had a brief, not just for co-ordination, but for research and development for change. The new Certificate of Secondary Education, which it was one of the

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Council's earliest responsibilities to introduce, in due course bore witness to the wisdom of co-ordinating examinations with curriculum. As we noted above, the certificate was innovative and has been decisively preferred to 'O' levels, in professional opinion. Also without earlier parallel was the brief for development of curriculum. With the exception of this period in the 1960s the history of national attention to the curriculum has been substantially one of limitation and control. Initiating through the Council a period of curriculum development marked a decisive shift in attitude both to curriculum and to professional responsibility in curriculum matters. Above all, the commitment of funding for research in curriculum was a major and quite new step. Educational research in the UK has had different sources of development. Sponsored by the Department of Education and Science, it has tended to be policy orientated. In universities, it may have addressed more fundamental questions, but its history has reflected the low status attaching to the study of education. By the 1960s, there were distinguished bodies of work in child psychology and in the history of education. But some newer academic disciplines, sociology and linguistics especially, were still struggling to find a place in universities and were no more than on the threshold of making a contribution to education. English teaching, as we have seen, drew its theorisation principally from extensions of critical work and of literary study and from its own professional debates, while keeping in touch with thinking in linguistics and psychology. There had been at this stage mere glimmerings of possibilities for curriculum orientated research; work in Science education which had been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, talk of a new Mathematics. Against such a background, the Schools Council offered new opportunities. By 1965, the Council had recognised the need for 'a major initiative in the field of English teaching' and had produced its working paper 3: 'English a programme for research and development in English teaching' (HMSO, 1965). Following this, in 1966, several new researches were initiated. Some others were taken over from other funding bodies. This list marks out, in effect, a new field of language and literature in education. There was to be an investigation of relations between linguistics and English teaching, work which had already been begun by the linguist, Michael Halliday, and which was transferred from Nuffield to Schools Council funding. Oracy was to be studied by Andrew Wilkinson, in Birmingham, also continuing work originally funded by Gulbenkian. A project On writing, 'The Development of Writing Abilities, 11-18', was set up by James Britton, in London, with his associates, Harold Rosen, Bernard Newsome, Denis Griffiths, Alex McLeod and (the present writers) Nancy Martin and Tony Burgess. A survey of approaches to English was to be

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undertaken by Bill Mittins, in Newcastle. Meanwhile, themes in teaching literature were taken up by Frank Whitehead, in Sheffield, who was to pay special attention to patterns of reading, and by Douglas Barnes, at Leeds, who, in a project to be developed in conjunction with NATE, set out to look at 'Children as Readers'. (Publishing details of these projects are given in the bibliography at the end of the chapter.) The Council also took some steps towards developing the teaching of English as a second language. June Derrick was invited to enquire into the 'Teaching of English to Immigrants', an enquiry whose title is indicative of the ways in which questions of English second language teaching and of minority languages were first perceived. In due course, a full project, SCOPE, was initiated. This was directed by June Derrick, with colleagues Josie Levine and Hilary Hester. It was to play an important role in disseminating information about UK's new populations and in developing a distinctive practice in the teaching of English as a Second (rather than Foreign) language. There was relatively little co-ordination at this stage between the English (mother tongue) projects just described and the work of the SCOPE team. Greater co-ordination in the teaching of English as a first and a second language has developed later (Derrick, 1966). Some aims in the original Schools Council Working Paper 3 were never fulfilled. There was the intention, for example, of a major, unifying investigation into development in communications which never materialised. The Council's research review, which identifies where work is needed, makes no reference to American work in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, a substantial omission, even at this early stage. Aside from references to the work of Basil Bernstein, then just beginning to make a considerable impact, there was little evidence of sociological (or social) awareness of language and literature. Such choices have been important. The influence of these years has been decisive for later generations and at no other time in the history of English teaching has such a range of fundamental research been so actively prosecuted. The movement towards a common schooling which had arisen in the 1950s was adopted as national policy during the Wilson administrations of the 1960s. Thereafter, schooling was remade from within. The few, pioneering and contested experiments of the early 1950s were successively joined by new schools, later constructions built to accommodate the rising post-war birth rate, and by amalgamations between former grammar and secondary modern schools resulting in fully comprehensive institutions. Coupled with these changes at secondary level, widespread experimentation took place with different patterns of schooling at local level and there

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were developments in primary and further education of an equally radical and pioneering kind. For English teachers, one consequence was that the emerging directions of English practice were rarely seen just as a matter of new initiatives in the subject. They formed part of the experience of wider social change. Supported by a climate of opinion in favour of educational change, teachers sought in all parts of the system to create different institutions, to find routes beyond the continuities of class which had still been inscribed in the Butler Act. Correspondingly, the practical concerns of English teaching which became current in this context English content, language, literature, materials, de-streaming, mixed ability teaching, integrated studies, thematic organisation represented much more than a search for 'new methods in the subject', more than a mere 'technology'. Within a commitment to public education and to comprehensive schooling, they were concerns which were made urgent by the need to shape institutions afresh and to make an impact on different local settings. The Walworth school fourth year English course, published by John Dixon, Leslie Stratta and Simon Clements as Reflections in 1963, exemplifies such processes. Walworth was one of the earliest comprehensive schools, with a celebrated, battling, first head teacher, serving a white, working class community in South East London. Finding existing text books inappropriate, the English department invented their own new course, seeking to give currency to pupils' experience and including in this experience of the world, of political, social and humanitarian issues. Reflections ' success changed educational publishing. The course books which followed in its trail, together with the changed anthologies of poetry and prose, all owed to Reflections their publishers' sense of a new and different market. Reflections was a first breakthrough for the new English, but in its specific origins it also bears witness to those lived processes of local change which were, differently, the experience of all teachers at this time (Clements, Dixon & Stratta, 1963). Alongside Reflections, other work in English continued themes which had been begun in the 1950s, stimulated freshly by a climate supportive of curriculum development and research. The work of Dora Pym and Marjorie Hourd in writing was continued in books such as Robert Druce's Eye of Innocence or Alec Clegg's The Excitement of Writing (Druce, 1965; Clegg, 1964). Accompanying Andrew Wilkinson's work on oracy, an influential set of essays on Talking and Writing was edited by James Britton, in which a number of accounts of new practice were included (Britton, 1967). Among a number of works on the teaching of literature, Bolt and Gard's Teaching Fiction in Schools argued strongly for continuity with the traditions of

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Leavis and Richards (Bolt & Gard, 1970). Two more general books about English teaching were widely influential: J. Patrick Creber's Sense and Sensitivity (Creber, 1965) and Frank Whitehead's The Disappearing Dais (Whitehead, 1966). Both caught in different ways significant truths about the English teaching which was replacing the practices of the former grammar schools. The new National Association for the Teaching of English had played its part in these events. The Association had had an active role in forming the Schools Council research agenda. The negotiations were conducted by Frank Whitehead, NATE's second chairperson. The style of the association's way of working was established from the first: a journal, a pattern of annual conferences, working groups and an officer of studies, subcommittees to coordinate work at different age levels, an emphasis on the contribution of local branches. In more than 20 years of its existence, NATE has had very little by way of full-time or seconded secretariat. At its best, NATE has stood for a commitment to a rationale in English teaching, explored, constructed and led by teachers in study groups, meetings of local associations, conferences and in the pages of the journal. If it has been able to maintain this emphasis, much is due to the work of these years in forming the association and in developing its distinctive style of operating. The 1960s saw the beginning of funding for experimental work in curriculum, and of the conferences and publishing that this led to. They also saw the beginning of Anglo-American co-operation in the field of English. The month-long Dartmouth seminar, sponsored by both countries, was reported in two books: in the US, H.J. Muller's (1967) The Uses of English aimed at a public readership, and John Dixon's (1967) Growth Through English addressed to the teaching profession. In the UK, the rationale made available through the latter has been widely influential though it has not gone unchallenged. The Dartmouth seminar was not directly responsible for establishing a body of ideas: its importance lies in its being the first step towards a continuing international dialogue through conferences and a small permanent organisation the International Federation for the Teaching of English and more directly, in the fact that many influential thinkers attended the conference and subsequently contributed to the very varied re-thinking of 'subject English' which was current at the time. So far, we have stressed the wide range of political and educational energies drawn together in the early 1960s. Teachers were allocated a role in developing curriculum and examinations. In the new comprehensive schools, it seemed that there might be support for seeking to reconcile egalitarian commitments with a positive role for education in contributing to economic growth. The formation of NATE gave to English teachers a

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national forum. The new Schools Council offered opportunities for research and for developing new work. We want now to give more detailed attention to two of the lines of work developed at this time: those of James Britton and Michael Halliday. In selecting these for emphasis, we hope that we will not be thought to be undervaluing others. Our purpose is to illustrate characteristic and different tendencies in the theoretical work deriving from this period. Britton asked philosophical and developmental rather than critical questions about literature and his central questions are those within an epistemological orientation to be found also in Cassirer and Langer. These ask what is distinctive about the nature of art and literature within the kinds of knowledge open to human beings, hence (also) how are human beings able to know things and what is distinctive about literature as a form of human knowing. The ancestry of such questions is in Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition. Posed freshly by Britton, they challenged many assumptions about the teaching of both language and literature which were current and provided the shape of a rationale for English which has been powerfully influential. One effect of such questions is to interrupt versions of literary study in which an equation is made between reading literature and critical reading and therefore to question the version of this in the Richards/Leavis tradition. Another is to locate the rationale for language work, not in language development as such, but in language's contribution to the formation of mind. Britton made salient for the conceptualisation of English teaching and the theoretical orchestration of different kinds of English work a discussion of human mind. The notion of Spectator role (originating earlier and developed differently by D.W. Harding), gave to the English teacher one half of the work in the development of mind and by extension sees the rest of human knowledge as but collectively and correspondingly equal in importance knowing in the participant role. If there is a problem in such an account of the mind and its different realms of knowledge it is not that of underestimating the importance of literature. Far from being merely idiosyncratic, some such emphasis on the 'spectator' nature of art and literature is, on the contrary, within a mainstream of aesthetic tradition and is paralleled by similar accounts by D.W. Harding and Louise Rosenblatt in literary criticism and by Oakeshott and Langer among contemporary philosophers. In Britton's work the notion is given a specifically educational emphasis. It serves to foreground a distinctive set of questions which are important both for teaching and for explanatory theory. For example: what is distinctive about literature, what is characteristic of our manner of reading literary works, what is common to the processes of reading and writing

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literature, how is reading related to evaluation and criticism. Also, because literature is explained within an account of thinking and knowing, within a 'role' taken up by mind, product is not separated from process, indeed the relation between them is offered as the central matter to understand. The creation of a literary work was seen by Britton as on a continuum with other reflective activities (gossip, going over experience) which are 'like literature' in nature but which do not necessarily issue in public and created form. It is this aspect of the way in which Britton has employed the notion of Spectator role which has seemed to some most questionable, as if he were regarding gossip and art as equivalent or seeking to undermine claims for the value to be gained from reading literature. However, to seek to establish a connection between art and other manifestations of mind is certainly not without precedent within the tradition of this form of explanation. Even more to the point, perhaps, an explanation of this sort seems a productive first step for thinking educationally about literature. The link which was made by Britton between language and literature should be understood against the background of this concern for the bases for human mind and for human knowledge. Literature is considered in Britton's theoretical work as part of what human beings have derived from the capacities which they have been afforded through language. It is not represented just as one particular language use. We stress the generality of the account, because terms like 'language' and 'use' are difficult and ambiguous and because the general position needs to be grasped if the subordinate concepts are to be understood. Britton does not mean just that (e.g.) poets use language, trivially true though that may be. Nor does he mean just that literature represents a use of language developed in our culture, which is only half a truth and is certainly reductive. Such versions of the connection between language and literature miss the orientation of the theoretical problem which Britton was confronting. Rather, the problem of the connection is posed by Britton at an epistemological level, and, following Cassirer and Langer, he finds the key to its solution in the human capacity for symbol. Symbol, in Britton's thought, forms the basis for human knowing and the capacity for symbolising is especially characteristic of the human mind. Language is the most developed form of symbolising. Participant and Spectator are differentiated roles which may be taken toward experience. Thus, language and literature are both connected and differentiated within a more fundamental theory of human development. But it might be best to understand Britton's theory of language as one version of an account which has been deeply influenced by an understanding of the power of literature. In the theorisation of English work in post-war years, a crucial division

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seems to us to lie between an approach to language from linguistics, in which system is stressed and in which literature is regarded as a special form of language use, and an approach to language which arises from a recognition of language's role in construing experience, and which leads to an account of both language and literature in which it is role, rather than system, which is made central. Britton's work gave an impetus to the definition of English as a subject which sought to heal existing divisions and also allowed connections to be made with the new work in psychology and linguistics. English was established by it as anti-behavioural in its psychology, concerned with the role of language and literature in children's development and seeking to harmonise in practice the potential divisions in the subject between language use and language study. Above all, for us, the developmental emphasis has been crucial. Through it, generations of teachers have approached English not just as a subject but as a set of processes in children's learning, focusing less on the abstract questions of what is to be taught than on the capacities which children have and on how teachers can help these to be realised. Britton helped English teachers to be advocates rather than authorities and the cast of mind has been distinctive. An alternative project to Britton's was that of Michael Halliday. Concerned equally with linguistics and with English teaching, Halliday's work is comparable to Britton's in scale, though different in direction. There are some moves in common (for example, an emphasis on functional variety in language). However, their projects are essentially different, emerging at different, even rival, points on the compass of different moves open to those seeking to develop work in English in the early 1960s. Halliday's work arises from a history which is as much within linguistics as within English teaching. His work may be seen as part of the movement to establish contemporary studies of language in the universities during the 1950s and 1960s as a discipline, sometimes uneasily accommodated within English departments, sometimes in a separate department of Linguistics, to accompany literature in English studies. In acknowledged orientation and in occupying the post of Professor of General Linguistics at University College, London, Halliday continued and developed an established Firthian tradition of thought about language. He was also among the leaders of a new concern for applied linguistics and for the involvement of linguistics in education. For the decade between 1961 and 1971, Halliday's interests in linguistics and the teaching of English were closely intertwined through the Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, sponsored at different

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times by the Schools Council and by the Nuffield Foundation. Subsequently, this work has been continued in successive volumes written for teachers, some by Halliday himself, published in the Explorations in Language series (Arnold) and edited by his former collaborators, Peter Doughty and Geoffrey Thornton. Halliday's theoretical interests in language have been concerned equally with phonology and with more general linguistics and it is the latter which have been especially influential both in the intellectual climate surrounding English teaching and specifically in the perspectives made available to teachers through Schools Council and Nuffield programmes. Here we stress points which have been distinctive in Halliday's general linguistics since it is his influence at this theoretical, rather than applied, level of understanding which, despite the development of language study materials for schools, has been most important for the development of English teaching practice. As it has developed, Halliday's work has sought to link structural choices within grammar to function and to an underlying account of language as a social semiotic. The systemic grammar, developed by Halliday, rests on a social theory of language. As a commentator from within language teaching, William Currie, writes in the early 1970s: 'Fundamentally, a systemic grammar is concerned with the networks of systems, or choice options, which could be said to underlie an utterance. On the one hand we have an observed text (or a text which could have been spoken appropriately by a native speaker) and on the other we have a rationalisation of what might be said to be its underlying grammar in terms of the path through grammar systems such as transitivity, mood or theme by which the utterance is realised. When we look at a written text, or listen to a spoken one examining its surface structure as it were, (which is one stratum of text) we have observable series of elements. We could bracket these elements, label them at will. For example we could note ''noun + verb + noun" in a clause. But at a deeper level we could discover relationships, dependencies and the functionally important bonds between elements which encode speaker meaning and attitude. All of these relationships, deep down in the grammar, are in systems of choices available to the user. Taken far enough, this can become a sociolinguistic operation. Under an observed utterance lie networks of choices the grammar systems of the language; behind or prior to these we might describe the network of relationships which exist in society which in turn give rise to the need to steer an utterance through appropriate channels of dependencies to

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be realised at the surface as a meaningful, effective sentence, clause, phrase, etc. . . .' (Currie, 1973) Whatever the technicalities of the grammar (and it has since been developed into a fully articulated apparatus by Halliday himself and by other linguists in this tradition: Hudson, 1971; Berry, 1975), the importance of this position must be seen against the background of the post-Bloomfieldian developments in theoretical linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s. Halliday's retention of the Firthian stress on language-in-context and on the relevance to analysis of non-language features of the context of situation was anti-behaviourist in its resistance to reducing language to discrete elements, abstracted from situation and from use an emphasis which was shared, as we have seen, by Britton and his collaborators. Distinctively, the stress on the social nature of language served also as a check on the idealism of Chomskyan emphases, in which competence had been separated from performance and the structures underlying language located not in society but in mind, an idealism which was powerfully influential in the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, the stress on 'Language as a Social Semiotic ',the title of a volume of essays collected by Halliday in the mid 1970s, was present in the first outlines of systemic grammar and it has been a stress which has grown more pronounced, with the emergence of other sociolinguistic critiques of Chomskyan versions of competence and perhaps also in connection with the (mutual) influence of Basil Bernstein's work on language and cultural codes. Without following Halliday's writings in anything like their entirety, it is enough to note here the social orientation of the theory but also the relatively formal and schematic way in which society is introduced as a level in analysis. This formality at the sociological and historical level, though we cannot here develop the point, also underlies the account of functions and, further, of registers, two of the analyses contributed by Halliday which have been most influential in educational thinking. While we have emphasised so far Halliday's contributions to the general theory of language and hence, indirectly, to the emergence in the 1960s of functional approaches to language and to English teaching, we must note also the more specific contributions which have been made by the project in Linguistics and English Teaching and by Halliday's collaborators in this. A list will have to suffice. Within this project an innovatory approach to initial teaching of reading was developed (Breakthrough to Literacy) and also materials directed towards language study in school and college (Language in Use). (See MacKay et al., 1970; Doughty et al., 1972b.) Subsequently, as noted, Peter Doughty and Geoffrey Thornton have continued to make available to teachers linguistic perspectives on language

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in education and in this they have been joined by further generations of linguists, among whom might be included David Crystal, Pam Czierniewska and Michael Stubbs (see Doughty et al., 1972a; Crystal, 1976; Gannon & Czierniewska, 1980; Stubbs, 1987). In our view, the development of these theoretical projects in the 1960s was of crucial importance for English teaching. Of course, they did not settle matters for ever and left questions for the future. But the effect of this sustained period of thinking about issues in language in education theorised the work of teachers in the only sense which matters. Teachers' practice became a theoretical practice for a significant number, and classrooms the site for critical questions of value and theory. It was a development which was supported by the relations between teachers which were established through NATE, through Schools Council curriculum projects and through the traditions already established among English teachers by the pioneering work of the Use of English groups. Perhaps, also, language as a centre of attention, rather than a particular curriculum content, entailed a wide ranging and distinctive theoretical orientation. Whatever the reasons, and with all allowances made for over-emphasis and doubts about the extent of permeation, it is right to look back on the 1960s as a period of rich development for English teaching in which the work of a post-war generation of teachers and educators came properly of age. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the wider political context of education changed. Poverty had been 'rediscovered', as Coates and Silburn put it, writing of the Forgotten Englishmen in 1968 (Coates & Silburn, 1968). They had in mind their own study of a Nottingham housing estate, together with the reports of Peter Townsend's Child Poverty Action Group, the Plowden Report's arguments about social deprivation and educational priority and the critical commentary by sociologists on the actual achievements in ending inequality of the welfare state. As well as social criticism, which now emerged more publicly, two other considerations made an impact in the closing years of the decade. There were already signs of economic recession. And, in 1968, many western countries experienced movements which made a revolutionary challenge to existing governments. Balanced against the action and arguments developing on the left there seemed new urgencies for retrenchment, reduction of public expenditure and social control. A new Conservative government was returned in 1970. NATE held its conference on the 'Language of Failure' against this background. At the same time, a critique developed of deprivationist versions of the culture of poverty on both sides of the Atlantic. Theories of language deprivation, 'blaming the victim', had been central in the compensatory programmes of both the US and the UK. These were identified for

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criticism by the sociolinguists William Labov and Roger Shuy in the US and by Harold Rosen, a colleague of James Britton's and Nancy Martin's at the London Institute of Education, in UK (Labov, 1972; Rosen, 1972). These critiques helped to dismantle the optimism of the earlier, gradualist consensus of the 1960s. They also contributed to a new appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity in both countries, which was to emerge more fully in the 1970s. The consensus was being dismantled, anyway, not from a sharper sense of inequality but from a different pressure from the right to abandon commitment to a comprehensive system. More fundamentally still, the whole set of post-war assumptions and policies about the welfare state was being rethought. The publication of one more important collection of ideas fittingly spans the 1960s and the 1970s. Language, the Learner and the School (Barnes et al., 1969) reflected much that had been achieved and at the same time indicated directions in which the new perspectives in English teaching might develop. The book arose from a conference of the local London Association for the Teaching of English. Included in it were analyses of classroom talk by Douglas Barnes and James Britton. In a final section, Harold Rosen, reporting the ideas which had inspired the conference, puts the case for language as an aspect of learning across the curriculum as a whole. This powerful idea was to become a key conception for the future and reflects the confidence which had been established among English teachers in the 1960s (Barnes et al., 1969). But by then battle of a different kind was being joined. The new Conservative government included in its political composition strands of opinion very different from the earlier consensual politics of Edward Boyle, strands which had already been made apparent by the Black Papers. An international conference of English teachers in 1971 questioned the political commitment of its leadership but in this the questions which were raised were only half the matter. English teaching had grown within a commitment to comprehensive education and at a time of expansionist policies for education. What was needed now was analysis of the new urgencies which were emerging on the educational and political right and nobody foresaw the strength of the reaction. The 1970s And Beyond The 1950s and 1960s may have belonged to the educators, but in the 1970s the initiative passed decisively to the politicians. Increasingly, the legacy of hope in the new, comprehensive education service of post-war

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years has been remade from the political and educational right. Behind such remaking has lain the impact of economic recession and fears of a longer term decline in Britain's economy. One response has been a concern for vocational and technical education but, also, influencing the form taken by such response, there have re-emerged interests in re-introducing tripartitism and dividedness. Attention to curriculum, to examinations and to vocational training have been used as means of increasing control and direction from central government while at the same time bringing education into line with a market economic strategy. In the achievement of these wider objectives it has been necessary to curb the powers of teachers and to dismantle the professional consensus committed to comprehensive schooling and to educational expansion. Despite the achievement of a major statement about English teaching in the Bullock Report, much effort has had to be expended in defending, not developing, the principles established in earlier years and, in general, teachers have been on the defensive. In English teaching, the substantial achievement was the Bullock Report (1975), which, in its central positions, embodied much of the work of Britton, of linguists such as Halliday, and of the confidence won in everyday classroom teaching. Whatever the strengths of this Report, the circumstances of its commissioning and the fate of its actual outcomes illustrate the conflicts and impossibilities which have surrounded educational work throughout the period. Initiated amidst a concern about standards of literacy which had been orchestrated by the Black Papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the generous and balanced positions taken towards a 'Language for Life' represented a substantial reversal for opinion on the right. The ministerial expectations about the report's outcomes had undoubtedly been for a sharply critical mandate. Instead, reading was related in the Report to the total view about language development which was widely current among English teachers and the fears for falling standards were shown to have no basis in evidence. Equally, the wider vision of language in education which had issued in the publication of Language, the Learner and the School and in attention to language across the curriculum was made central and given firm backing. Following publication of the Bullock Report, an agenda might have been set for a generation of English teaching. This is not to imply that the Report was without weaknesses or inconsistencies or compromises on matters of importance. There were plenty. But there was also a central vision of the role of language and literature in education which commanded wide assent among opinion committed to an undivided, common system of education for the majority. With its acceptance of cultural and linguistic variety, the Report had the potential to inform public opinion and to make

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current a practice in schools capable of transcending the disabling prestige attaching to narrow and class based versions of Standard English. But in fact the political and financial support were not forthcoming. The Report shared the same fate as other liberal reports in the period; the most recent example would be the Swarm Report on multicultural Britain (HMSO, 1984). No action was taken on its principal recommendations and its central themes were simply ignored. In the silence, memories faded and time made possible a return to the same strategies of engineering a crisis of confidence in educational standards with the same intentions of consolidating a mandate for stronger centralised intervention. Such intervention has been most explicit and most sharp recently, in the Thatcher years, but the dismantling of the educational consensus of the 1950s and 1960s had been begun long before. We have mentioned the Black Papers at the end of the 1960s as the most obvious markers of the growth of a new Tory populism. They advanced no new arguments. Their significance is in their illustration of the ease with which it has proved possible to create a climate from outside education in order that measures can be introduced which would otherwise be perceived as sectional and divisive. It was the move towards comprehensive education which was the principal target of the Black Paper writers. Other targets have followed progressivism, the teaching of grammar, standard English, Humanities, anti-racist education until, in more recent publications, not just a section of teachers (teachers of English, mainly) but a whole educational establishment including inner city local authorities, teacher trainers and the national inspectorate are presented as subverted by a common consensus (Marenbon, 1987). Such ideological warfare has not been trivial, since it has created a climate in which a national consolidation of the achievements of the 1960s has been ruled out and an alternative and in our view divisive framework substituted for the future. Despite such unhelpful movements at policy levels, there has continued to be work in English which has attended to fundamental understandings and principles in the subject. Britton's work was most widely disseminated in the 1970s with the publication of Language and Learning (1970) and the completion of the research into the development of writing abilities. This work was then developed by the project 'Writing across the Curriculum', directed by Nancy Martin, with colleagues Pat D'Arcy, Peter Medway, Brian Newton and Harold Smith (Martin et al., 1976). Halliday's work has been extended by the course Language in Use and by his further writing on language functions and on language development. Subsequently, his work has taken him away from the UK. However, the influence from linguistics has continued and increased, following his early lead.

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More generally, themes which were initiated in the 1960s reached fruition later. Principal focuses have been on different uses of language, on process in talking, listening, comprehension, reading and writing and on teaching literature. Some major contributions have been made here. As well, the whole field of language and literature in education has been elaborated under the influence of international developments in linguistics, anthropology, sociology and in cultural and linguistic theory. While we cannot review here this whole field, we give some necessarily selective indications. A number of enquiries have been linked by the aim of identifying a coherent and conceptually powerful scheme of language uses. One hope in this has been to provide a co-ordinating rationale for English work, based on an understanding of the range of different kinds of discourse. Another has been for a tool in describing and promoting language development. These were concerns which were central to the research programme announced by the Schools Council in its early years and to the Dartmouth Seminar. The influence of Growth through English, a first attempt, has already been mentioned (Dixon, 1967). Further attempts at describing language uses were made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. James Britton's account of the expressive function and of its relation to the transactional and poetic was influenced by Roman Jakobson but was distinctively reformulated in terms of the participant and spectator roles (Britton et al., 1975). The account has been widely taken up in considering writing and language more generally and was a powerful influence on the Bullock Committee. Michael Halliday's parallel account of functions has especially influenced work on children's early language (Halliday, 1973, 1975). In particular, it was applied by Joan Tough in a scheme for promoting language development (Tough, 1977). More recently, a further set of categories has been proposed by Andrew Wilkinson, arising from his more recent work and concerned with the reflection in writing of children's cognitive, affective, moral and stylistic development (Wilkinson, 1987 a + b). Sociolinguistic interest in (diatypic) language variety has supported the intentions in these accounts. As will be clear, progress has been in the development of a number of alternatives rather than in the consolidation of any one scheme or approach. But the accounts have helped to generate practice of different kinds and they have served different purposes. While their future articulation is important, there is no doubt that the field is one in which major gains have been made since the 1950s. Some sense of range and connection in use has been a necessary complement to the accompanying interest in language processes. Awareness of the role of talk in learning has been a key understanding

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in more recent English practice in post-war years. It has led to changes of emphasis in classrooms and has united work at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. It is an awareness which has reflected in part new concentrations in linguistics on spoken before written language. But there have also been educationally oriented formulations. Andrew Wilkinson's work on oracy, begun in the early 1960s, introduced to a wider audience a number of new understandings in linguistics and in the 1970s moved into an applied phase (Wilkinson, 1971). Douglas Barnes's delicate analyses of classroom talk have sustained a generation of English teachers (Barnes, 1976). Taken up, outside the English teaching community, by sociologists interested in classroom interaction, they have also been influential more widely. As well, understandings drawn from psycholinguistics and from studies of language development have entered and supported studies of spoken language. It is some measure of the force of this work that oracy has remained a lively theme into the 1980s. New work is currently under way. The teaching of reading has also been influenced by concentrations on meaning and on active cognition in psycholinguistics and by the work of Don Holdaway and Marie Clay (Holdaway, 1979; Clay, 1972). There has been a long history of attention to the teaching of reading in the UK and the work of Joyce Morris and Elizabeth Goodacre is among the best known (see Morris, 1966; Goodacre, 1967). Within English teaching, Margaret Spencer Meek has played a crucial role in promoting more recent understandings. Her work has drawn on the approaches of Frank Smith and of Ken and Yetta Goodman and has helped to make the work of these theorists available in the UK. Reading figured less strongly than other concerns in the early formulations of language across the curriculum, partly a reflection of the secondary orientation of this early work. Margaret Spencer Meek's focus on 'Achieving Literacy' has bridged the interests of primary and secondary teachers and helped to integrate reading into the concerns of language in education more generally (Meek et al., 1977, 1983). An aspect of this enhanced understanding of reading has been a concern to connect reading adequately to the teaching of literature. Here again, different traditions in primary and secondary education have tended to divide understandings which should, logically, be held together. There has been a vigorous growth of work both at this point of intersection between reading and literature teaching and from a more literary perspective. As well as Margaret Spencer Meek's The Cool Web, we should mention Geoff Fox and Michael Benton's work on children's literature and on teaching literature more generally (Fox & Benton, 1985). Arising from an interest in 16-19 education, John Dixon has been concerned with literary response and with ways of writing about literature. In her book Eccentric

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Propositions, Jane Miller has edited a set of accounts of teaching literature at all levels which gives a wide range of examples of contemporary practice (Miller, 1984). In writing, there have been a number of newer accounts offering extensions or alternatives to Britton's Schools Council Project which was mentioned earlier. Andrew Wilkinson's 'Crediton Project' proposed a set of categories of general development and applied these to writing, as we have noted (Wilkinson, 1987a). There have been useful shorter books about writing by Geoffrey Thornton and by Robert Protherough (Thornton, 1980; Protherough, 1983). Alex McLeod and his collaborators have worked in classrooms, with a theory of critical literacy, and paid particular attention to collaborative drafting (McLeod et al., 1983). Myra Barrs, at the Centre for Language in Primary Education, London, has been developing work at primary level (Barrs, 1988). We should mention, too, the interest in writing which has been emerging among descriptive linguists. Catherine Perera's work has offered a useful complement to the concentrations which have been prevalent in English teaching (Perera, 1984). Some important contributions have been made in work which has looked at language at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. At primary, Connie and Harold Rosen's explorations of good practice, for a Schools Council Project, is still widely read for its sensitive documentation and powerful commentary (Rosen & Rosen, 1973). It is interesting to set this alongside Michael Armstrong's fascinating accounts of children learning in his Closely Observed Children (Armstrong, 1980). At secondary level, Peter Medway has reached teachers everywhere with his account of an innovative course intended to help young learners achieve autonomy, Finding a Language (Medway, 1980). Useful and stimulating books for English teachers have been written by Anthony Adams, Derrick Sharp and David Jackson though such a catch-all comment does them less than justice (Adams, 1974; Sharp, 1980; Jackson, 1987). Mike Torbe has continued to promote good practices in language across the curriculum in his work in Coventry and in his writing (Torbe, 1980, Torbe & Medway, 1981). Recently Dorothy and Douglas Barnes have researched different traditions in English teaching and presented a trenchant account of contemporary practice (Barnes & Barnes, 1984). At tertiary level, John Dixon's report of another Schools Council Project, 'English 16-19', usefully tackles relations between courses in Sixth Forms and those in Polytechnics. The central concerns of researchers in English in post-war years have been with universal understandings about language. They have paid particular attention to developing a general picture of language and learning and of language processes. Cultural and linguistic differences have been second-

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ary considerations. It was a further step to put difference, cultural conflict, diversity of linguistic repertoires at the centre of the picture. For many English teachers, during the 1970s, there took place a profound intellectual shift. This was towards an explicit recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity as at the heart of English teaching, not just an additional consideration or a modification required in areas with high concentrations of minority populations. During the 1970s, it became clear that adjustment was required to a curriculum which had been conceived within assumptions of cultural and linguistic homogeneity. It was necessary to scrutinise instruction and materials for linguistic and ethnocentric bias. Increased provision for community language instruction and for the teaching of English as a second language was also needed. As well, the position of vernaculars and dialects in relation to standard English, questions of gender and social class, of cultural and linguistic difference, suggested the need for a fundamental realignment both of practice and of English teaching's traditional theoretical concerns. Where schools and colleges re-thought English in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity, there were new connections to be made between English, the teaching of English as a second language and the teaching of modern languages. These were made more easily possible as modern languages was redefined to include not just a few specially placed European languages (French, German, Spanish) but a range of other languages (Arabic, Hindi, Gujerati, Urdu, Greek, Turkish) now spoken in the UK as well as in their countries of origin. A new content to language awareness as an educational factor became possible against this background. There were implications for revising public examining, especially with regard to the numbers of languages offered for accreditation (Rosen & Burgess, 1980). English second language teaching has had increased attention and there have been growing attempts to co-ordinate traditions in this and in English as a mother tongue. ESL provision has had its own distinctive course of development during the period, as we have noted at intervals in this account. It is a form of provision which has been shaped by special factors in the UK: the arrival of new bilingual communities in the 1950s and 1960s and the reorientation of relatively longstanding traditions of teaching English as a foreign language which was then required. Reviewing the course of development of ESL provision, it is perhaps fair to say that there has been a tendency to think for too long of ESL arrangements as merely temporary (Brumfit et al., 1985; Levine, 1981). The characteristic form of provision in the late 1960s and early 1970s

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was through language centres, locally provided. In-school and in-class support increased as this was perceived to be necessary and as the definition of the role of English Second language teaching changed: as earlier, assimilationist assumptions of a short period of adjustment were replaced by a recognition of continuing need for ESL instruction. But, though much increased, provision is still too ad hoc in nature. In-school support tends to be funded separately through Home Office Section 11 grants rather than being a main item on education budgets and is especially vulnerable to cutback. Policy at national level is still short of the realignment in curriculum which is needed. Developments are furthest ahead locally, in urban areas with strong concentrations of bilingual speakers and with local governments committed to improving provision. Within English teaching, Harold Rosen has been among those who have played a significant part in posing the new considerations of diversity. His work has continually been near the frontier of developments in English. As an English teacher at Walworth School in the 1950s he helped to create that tradition which emerged later in Reflections. His work on writing in the 1960s contributed to the new appreciation of variety and he helped to promote one of English teaching's most powerful, post-war conceptions: the aim of a language policy across the curriculum. In the 1970s, his pioneering rejection of deprivationist positions led to the formulation of a new requirement for language policies. This was that they be conceptualised in the light of the specific linguistic and cultural configurations of different areas. Influenced by the work of William Labov, his concentration on the 'language of inner city schools' brought together interests in dialect, bilingualism and social class. The informal research project of that name has reached teachers in many parts of the UK who have been concerned with thinking anew the responsibilities of English teaching in a multicultural society. One more word by way of closure. We have suggested here, we hope, the richness of a continuing tradition. English teaching, since the war, has achieved substantial consensus as to many of its most important themes and significant work has been developed around them. Varying emphases on language or literature are sometimes presented as evidence of division. In fact, as we have suggested, more significant tensions have seemed to us to exist between traditions setting out to theorise language while remaining deeply influenced by the study of literature and traditions, partly derived from applied linguistics or from English foreign or second language teaching, where attention to literature has been less central, though not absent. We have commented on this division in writing about the theoretical projects of the 1960s. In practice, among those teaching English in schools,

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it is not the importance of literature which is likely to be most contentious, we suspect. The manner of attention to language, the extent of language study, the teaching of grammar still form the issues where gaps and divisions exist. Despite the findings of the recent Kingman Committee (HMSO, 1988) such issues are unlikely to be settled simply, while their importance remains to their present extent symbolic of wider ideological positions and as embedded in different forms of first degree and English teaching qualification. The failure to act adequately on the findings of the Bullock Report has forfeited more than a decade in which English teaching practice might have been further consolidated. The current attempt by government to remodel the education service by statute (The Education Act, 1988) would require an article in itself to deal with. Here, we can only comment, as far as English is concerned, that a form of intervention which has been so narrowly and sectionally conceived cannot command confidence for the future even if, in practice, English teaching and professional dialogue will no doubt find ways of surviving in the changed circumstances which are coming into being. The new, national curriculum has been conceived without any attempt to grasp the multicultural and multilingual nature of British society. Its core subjects have been linked to a view of testing which is in origin more concerned with supplying a means of guaranteeing accountability of schools and teachers than appropriateness to subject content or pupil development, though there are some signs of modifying this position. Curriculum issues in the public sector have been made subordinate to reorganising the financing of education and to providing for the possibility of a layer of opted-out schools equivalent to those formerly financed by direct grant. Powers have been centralised in the Secretary of State, professional opinion caricatured and bypassed and its role reduced. In this, the government has just been wrong about the means to gaining assent for a common curriculum, about its privileging of private education, about teachers and about the omniscience of the market as a means for developing quality in education. But English teaching has strengths on which to draw while facing an uncertain future. One clear gain in the period which we have been reviewing has been the development of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) the common examination at 16+ which has replaced the formerly divided system of General Certificate of Education (GCE) and Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE). As we have commented earlier, change in the public system of examining began in the immediate post-war period with adjustments to the pre-war certificates and issued in the single subject examinations of 'O' and 'A' level. These were intended for some 20 and 10% of the population respectively. The Certificate of Secondary Education

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followed in 1966. This introduced the two tier system of public examinations, mistrusted by the public and disliked by teachers. The new General Certificate of Secondary Education, an outcome which represents one of the more curious about-turns of right wing policy and one which has been strongly influenced by teachers, is one important earnest in the years ahead. A second clear benefit has been the development of teachers' centres and, more generally, of teacher focused projects and explorations. We should note that accompanying this, the role of the universities has become more federated, a strand among a range of influences, partly because funding for curriculum research has been successively reduced following the demise of the Schools Council. The decline in research represents a serious retreat which needs to be engaged but at education authority level there have been gains as well as losses. Now English advisers in more than 70 of the 100 or so local authorities have responsibility for development of work in English. The English Centre, in London, has reached teachers everywhere with the quality of its teacher produced materials and of its 'English Magazine'. While unusual in the scope and quality of its work, it serves as one example of what is possible at local level. Neither a consensus among English teachers, nor a transformation of the public examination system, nor a network of local advisers and teachers' centres may have been envisaged quite in their precise form 40 years ago, the date selected for the beginning of the present story. But they are evidence of advances made through the energies which have been offered in UK's decentralised education system in post-war years. In the more centralised system which is presently coming into being, those energies will be manifestly crucial in the classrooms, local areas and professional debates which constitute the real business of teaching and learning and there is every reason to believe that they will survive and prevail. Bibliography ADAMS, ANTHONY 1974, Every English Teacher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ARMSTRONG, MICHAEL 1980, Closely Observed Children. London: Writers and Readers. BARNES, D. 1976, From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. BARNES, DOROTHY and BARNES, DOUGLAS 1984, Versions of English. London: Heinemann Educational Books. BARNES, D., BRITTON, J. and ROSEN, H. 1969, Language, the Learner and the School. London: Penguin. BARRS, M. 1988, Drawing a Story. In N. MARTIN & M. LIGHTFOOT (eds), The Word for Teaching is Learning. London: Heinemann. BERRY, M. 1975, Introduction to Systemic Linguistics, Vol I: Structures and Systems. Oxford: Batsford.

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BOLT, S. and CARD, R. 1970, Teaching Fiction in Schools. London: Hutchinson. BRITTON, J. (ed.) 1967, Talking and Writing. London: Methuen. 1970, Language and Learning. London: Allen Lane. 1982, Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays of James Britton (ed. G. Pradl). London: Heinemann. BRITTON, J., BURGESS, T., MARTIN, N., MCLEOD, A. and ROSEN, H. 1975, The Development of Writing Abilities, 11-18. London: Macmillan. BRUMFIT, C., ELLIS, R. and LEVINE, J. 1985, ESL in the UK: Educational & Linguistic Perspectives. ELT document 121. Oxford: Pergamon. CLAY, M. 1972, The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties. London: Heinemann. CLEGG, A. 1964, The Excitement of Writing. London: Chatto & Windus. CLEMENTS, S., DIXON, J. and STRATTA, L. (eds) 1963, Reflections: An English Course for Students. Oxford: O.U.P. COATES, K., and SILBURN, R. 1968, Poverty: the Forgotten Englishmen. London: Penguin. CREBER, J. P. 1965, Sense and Sensitivity. London: U.L.P. CRYSTAL, D. 1976, Child Language, Learning & Linguistics. London: Arnold. CURRIE, W. 1973, New Directions in Teaching English Language. London: Longman. DERRICK, J. 1966, Teaching English to Immigrants. London: Longman. DIXON, J. 1967, Growth through English. Oxford: OUP. DIXON, JOHN 1979, Education 16-49. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. DOUGHTY, P., PEARCE, J., THORNTON, G. 1972a, Exploring Language. London: Arnold. 1972b, Language in Use. London: Arnold. DRUCE, R. 1965, Eye of Innocence. London: Brockhampton. FOX, G. and BENTON, M. 1985, Teaching Literature, Nine to Fourteen. Oxford: OUP. GANNON, P. and CZIERNIEWSKA, P. 1980, Using Linguistics, An Educational Focus. London: Arnold. GOODACRE, E.J. 1967, Reading in Infant Classes. London: NFER. HALLIDAY, M. 1973, Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold. 1975, Learning How to Mean. London: Arnold. 1987, Language as Social Semiotic. London: Arnold. 1985, An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. HALLIDAY, M., MCINTOSH, A. and STEVENS, P., 1964, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Arnold. HOLBROOK, D. 1961, English for Maturity. Cambridge: CUP. HOLDAWAY, D. 1979, Foundations of Literacy. Sydney: Ashton Scholastic. HOURD, M. 1949, The Education of the Poetic Spirit. London: Heinemann. HUDSON, R. 1971, English Complex Sentences: An Introduction to Systemic Grammar. Amsterdam: North Holland. JACKSON, DAVID 1987, Continuity in Secondary English. London: Methuen. LABOV, W. 1972, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. LEVINE, J. 1981, Developing Pedagogies in Multilingual Classrooms, English Education, 13, 3. MACKAY, D., THOMPSON, B. and SCHANS, P. 1970, Breakthrough to Literacy. London: Longman/Schools Council.

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MARENBON, J. 1987, English Our English. London: Centre for Policy Studies. MARTIN, N. 1983, Mostly about Writing. New Jersey: Heinemann. MARTIN, N., D'ARCY, P., NEWTON, B. and PARKER, R. 1976, Writing & Learning Across the Curriculum. London: Ward Lock. MCLEOD, A., HARDCASTLE J., MELLOR, B., RICHMOND, J. and SAVVA, H. 1983, Growth, community & control in secondary school writers. In B. KROLL & G. Wells (eds), Explorations in the Development of Writing. Chichester: Wiley & Sons. MEDWAY, PETER 1980, Finding a Language. London: Writers and Readers. MEEK, M., WARLOW, A. and BARTON, G. (eds) 1977, The Cool Web. Oxford: The Bodley Head. MEEK, M., ARMSTRONG, S., AUSTERFIELD, V., GRAHAM, J. and PLACKETT, E. 1983, Achieving Literacy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. MILLER, J. (ed.) 1984, Eccentric Propositions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. MORRIS, J.M. 1966, Standards in Reading. London: NFER. MULLER, H.J. 1967, The Uses of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. PERERA, K. 1984, Children's Writing and Reading. Oxford: Blackwell. PROTHEROUGH, R. 1983, Encouraging Writing. London: Methuen. PYM, D. 1956, Free Writing. London: ULP. ROSEN, C. and ROSEN, H. 1973, The Language of Primary School Children. London: Penguin. ROSEN, H. 1972, Language & Class. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. ROSEN, H. and BURGESS, T. 1980, The Languages & Dialects of London Schoolchildren. London: Ward Lock. SHARP, DERRICK 1980, English at School: The Wood and the Trees. Oxford: Pergamon. STUBBS, M. 1987, Educational Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. THORNTON, G. 1980, Teaching Writing. London: Arnold. TORBE, MIKE (ed.) 1980, Language Policies in Action. London: Ward Lock. TORBE, MIKE and MEDWAY, PETER 1981, The Climate for Learning. London: Ward Lock Educational. TOUGH, J. 1977, Tire Development of Meaning. London: Allen & Unwin. WHITEHEAD, F. 1966, Tire Disappearing Dais. London: Chatto. WHITEHEAD, F., COPLY, A.C. and MADDREN, W. 1974, Children's Reading Interests. London: The Schools Council. WILKINSON, A. 1968, The Implications of Oracy, Educational Review 20 (2). 1971, The Foundations of Language. Oxford: OUP. 1987a, The Writing of Writing. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. 1987b, The Quality of Language, English in Education 21 (2). Reports 1954: Language, HMSO. 1959: 15-18 (The Crowther Report), HMSO. 1963: Secondary Schools Examination Council: Final Report, HMSO. 1964: Half our Future (The Newsome Report), HMSO. 1965: Working Paper No.3: English: Schools Council, HMSO. 1975: A Language for Life (The Bullock Report), HMSO.

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1984: Education for All (The Swann Report), HMSO. 1985: English 5-16, HMSO. 1988: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language (The Kingman Report), HMSO.

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2 The Growth Of Accountability And The Accountability Of Growth: Secondary School English Teaching In Post-War Scotland David Northcroft 1945-65: Tradition And The Rhetoric Of Change The 1947 'Report of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland on Secondary Education' is a notable document. Three-and-a-half years of enquiry, 155 witnesses and 884 clauses of exposition culminate in the grand recommendation of a pattern of education for the country's 12 to 18-year-olds whose actualisation is only now, 40 years later, taking place and that with practical difficulty and in an atmosphere of professional uncertainty and industrial unrest. But here, barely 18 months after VE Day, was a public report that totally committed itself to the ideal of full secondary school courses for all, courses dedicated to the furtherance of individual achievement as evaluated by a system of internal assessment. A network of common 'omnibus' schools, it urged, should replace the contemporary divisive arrangement of pupils into the 'senior' and 'junior' establishments which meant that the great majority were being condemned to a brief two or three years in the latter where, since they were excluded from national certification, there could be no assurance of any coherently structured courses nor recognised record of attainment to attest to any personal progress that might have been made. 1 English, according to the Report, was to occupy a very special place in

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its progressive new scheme of things: it was roundly declared to be not only the most important single subject in the curriculum but the very force whose humanising power could infuse the pupil's secondary school career with a sense of meaningful personal experience and so ensure his development into the articulate assured citizenship required by the post-war world. It was recognised, however, that to carry this effect, the school subject would have to be reformed away from a practice that had hitherto been preoccupied with a narrowly academic concern for stylised essay writing, latinate grammar exercises and a note-derived scholasticism in literature. It was a regenerated English, in which pupils could write about their own experiences, develop the power of speech and read within its rich literature about matters of individual concern, that would provide the basis for the new secondary courses. In this way the 1947 Report established a view of the subject as a 'field of human endeavour rather than a body of ordered knowledge' (para 128), a dedication to the growth of personal language as vitalised by the nourishing force of literature that Scotland's English teachers have been striving to give practical classroom expression to ever since. The SAC Report was enlightened, vigorous and eloquent; it was greeted with enthusiasm and it met with widespread acclaim. It was also totally ignored by the one body which then and always mattered the central authority of the Scottish Education Department. The 1947 document was to have no visible effect on either the structure or the conduct of an English teaching which was left to continue the way it had found it for the next 20 years. This disparity between the Report's message and the executive's indifference to its implementation tells us much about the reality of English teaching in Scotland and its post-war struggle towards the enactment of a common course founded on the enabling power of language and committed to the development of the individual child. Several forces combine to make up that reality, some distinctively Scottish but others representative, albeit in a heightened form, of the conditions which English teachers have had to encounter elsewhere during the last four decades. Although bound politically and economically to England and Wales within the United Kingdom, Scotland has always maintained a separate educational, as well as legal and Church (and football), system so that its schools are set in a surrounding landscape of self-consciously Scottish culture and values, the most honoured feature of which, historically, has been an upholding of the principle of equality of opportunity for all. This ideal is most vividly dramatised in the image of the lad o'pairts, the humble village boy who from whatever so lowly a station and however remote a croft could, given wit and determination, rise up to

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gain the schooling that would enable him to graduate in a University system that prided itself on being open to all duly qualified entrants after which he could prosper in the legal system, enter business, serve his country as Governor of a Canadian province or even return to his native heath as village dominie or schoolmaster. 2 Such a picture has, of course, the quality of a myth but if so it has proved to be a compelling one, sufficiently potent to shape national action and to be inferred in the individual careers of many of those who became influential in Scottish education and thus able to help it perpetuate these values of competitive egalitarianism. It was out of such peat-like soil that, as scrutiny of its membership and selection of witnesses reveals, the 1947 Report sprang, although its advocacy of education for personal fulfilment rather than external success does represent modification rather than a straight continuation of a tradition which had up till then preferred to put individualism to the test of a monolithic examination system. It was, indeed, exactly this liberalising impulse, infused no doubt with a generous spirit of post-war reconstructionalism, that weakened the Report's grip on the actualities. Its advocacy, for example, of the common 'omnibus' school for all the nation's pupils represented an idealisation of the existing system in that it was derived from the small town parochial school to be found everywhere in Scotland except in the urban Lowlands where 80% of the population actually happened to live. There schools were divided into the academic 'senior' and the non-academic 'junior' secondaries to which selection was made via a 'control' examination and a system of IQ testing in which Scotland was indeed something of a pioneer.3 Similarly, the enthusiasm for individualised internal assessment could be seen as a profound challenge to a system in which the external examination was valued as the essential guarantee of academic worth. 'Equality' in Scotland, in fact, existed only at the point of entry; 'opportunity' for all really meant for all but the gifted minority the chance to fail. It was the Report's bold radicalism on such crucial issues that would condemn it to a magnificent futility rousingly received by a profession awaiting liberation, indefinitely shelved by the SED as it simply got on with the real Scottish business of inspecting, testing and grading while the enthusiasms of 1947 eventually talked themselves out during that long, unchanging decade, the 1950s.4 The ambivalent reception accorded the 1947 Report showed that effective change in subject teaching would have to wait upon the reform of the structures of a school and examination system that firmly circumscribed the profession's freedom of manoeuvre. To bring that about it would never be enough to convert the teaching majority, especially in a country whose

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educational administration was and is so authoritarian in concept and centralist in operation. Scotland is, after all, a small country with a population little more than one half of the London conurbation's. At its base in Edinburgh, the Scottish Education Department can be held immediately responsive to the dictates of the Secretary of State for Scotland and from it, through its corps of Inspectors of Schools (the HMIs), it is able to command an intimate and logically connected system of local county or since the 1975 local government reforms regional and district Directors of Education who preside over the relatively small number of secondary schools (at present a total of less than 450 throughout Scotland) in their areas. Provision for teacher education is also on a correspondingly small scale, being centred on a handful of Colleges of Education whose perceived function at the time of the 1947 Report was accurately summed up in their designation as 'Training Centres', licenced to serve the needs of teacher production rather than to act as centres of curriculum initiative and development. There were in 1947, in fact, no alternative centres of professional interest through which to challenge or to enrich the directives that came from the centre. If as happened the SED decided to ignore the report of an Advisory Council as too progressive or impracticable then there was no other agency in English teaching no professional journal or teachers' organisation, no centre of subject-teaching research or tradition of in-service activity - to campaign for or to experiment with its ideas. The Secondary 'Advisory' Council was revealed as simply that it might well stand as a fine expression of a post-war desire to extend the best of the Scottish individual tradition in education, but it was divorced from any political structure that could give its recommendations effect. While the role of centrist authority has always been crucial in determining the possibilities open to Scottish teachers, it should be realised that what we are witnessing in the immediate post-war years is not so much totalitarian repression as organised inertia. The really remarkable thing about the country's English teaching from the 1930s right up into the 1960s is its sameness. The Inspectorate charged with the welfare of the subject were few in number, tended to be trained in the classics rather than English, and operated a system of ad hoc advice to one school at a time rather than of national investigation; they were content to interpret their remit as the maintenance of standards and the orderly conduct of the status quo. More important than anything they cared to say directly about the subject was the country's one external examination there being no independent examination boards north of the border which the HMI's both administered and marked. This, the 'Leaving Certificate' English paper, was designed for the

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senior secondary 17-year-old pupil only, and confronted him with an unvarying format of essay interpretation passage plus analytical questions language exercises literature questions on a range of named classic texts. But from within what could become a comfortably unchanging regimen the individual teacher who had at secondary level to hold a university degree in the subject and was thus highly educated if not well trained could take some freedom to, for example, teach the literary version of his subject that his university career had grounded him in, and to do so, in many memorable cases, with idiosyncratic verve and commitment. What was lacking in the Scotland of 1947 was not so much a simple freedom from authority as an imaginative and energetic exercise of it sufficient to bind together the individual efforts of its all-graduate English teachers and to work out the classroom methodology by which to give them effective shape. In a small country, perhaps, the enactment of liberal ideas can best come about through the enlightened use of the authority vested in a tightly integrated system, but an authority sufficiently broadened by the representation within it of teaching, and of research and development interests, to evoke a wide response and to generate the necessary ideas. This last point has since proved to be especially important: a review of all those factors, that have continued to obstruct Scottish progress towards the final institution of a humanely child-centred version of English teaching, indicates that it is not simply the restrictions of political power that have been significant; there has also been an abiding uncertainty among the profession as to how to go about such a task. And this, in its turn, has reflected the difficulty English teachers have had and perhaps not just in Scotland in defining either the aims or the methodology of their subject in compellingly precise and practical terms so as to satisfy their public and to ensure the effectiveness of their own practice. Once again, the 1947 Report acts as an informative trailer for what was to come, for while its vision is imposing, it manages to say little, all too little, about the teaching approaches necessary for its actualisation. To find root in a hard educational climate, proposals for an English teaching founded on individual development and guided by sensitive internal assessment must be able to furnish convincing demonstration of the means by which practitioners can turn away from the prevailing tradition of uniform subject-transmission towards classroom methods that will indeed draw upon the resources of the pupil and engage him in a learning experience that is at once personally meaningful, progressively self-realising and clearly effective in traditional literacy-producing terms. In this respect, however, the Report can only fall back on a series of

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suggestions that merely liberalise at the edges: its hope is that by dropping abstract grammar, by modernising texts and by breaking the classroom silence with lessons in speech skills, all pupils rather than the 'bookish' minority will be able to enjoy their English lessons as a personal satisfaction the source of which is still seen to lie within the subject itself rather than anything the pupil can bring to it. Any sense of an interaction between the two is effectively denied by the Report's suspicion of the contemporary pupil's culture (as 'debased by vulgarisms and corrupted by Hollywood') and most damagingly by its rejection of his own language, which it invites teachers to declare war on as an 'oppressive mass of merely debased and incorrect speech' (paras 277 and 282). It is words such as these that reveal the 1947 Report to be ultimately a somewhat datedly patrician document whose adherence to a tradition of populace-improvement cuts itself off from any possibility of working out the effectively pupil-directed methodology, informed by an understanding of the relevance of the child's own experience and the vitality of his language, appropriate to its progressive intentions. If 'progressive' is indeed what they truly were, for in the end it is difficult to see the Report as anything but civic in its orientation, not so much concerned with the individual himself as the befitting of him for citizenship of the 'free and well-ordered state'. 5 Certainly a document which exhorts its teachers to improve their practice by correcting the inevitably coarse speech of the pupil in 'a gracious and kindly' manner and which can talk quite so unselfconsciously of a need to conduct even the lowliest of their charges into 'the forecourts of the palace of literature' must be, despite the intrinsic decency of its desire to update an old tradition, bemused by the problem of how to engage the demotic energies of the masses in the enterprise of acquiring Standard English and of benefiting from the great 'storehouse of human experience' (para 318) that is deposited in its classic literature. 1965-75: Bulletins, Projects And Personal Growth It was not until the late 1960s that English teachers in Scotland began to develop the capacity to undertake the rigorous self-scrutiny of structure and of method necessary for real progress to be made towards the individualcentred English whose eloquent advocacy they had so admired in 1947. It was change in the educational milieu as a whole that forced the issue: the coming to power in Britain of a socialist government in 1964 precipitated a rapid move towards the institution of a 'comprehensive' school education by which to replace the old secondary divisions, that demanded everywhere

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a radical rethinking of the curriculum and the relationships within it between system and pupil. This major reform was accompanied by a spirit of buoyant enthusiasm, a willingness to innovate that was assisted by a pumping into education of money at a higher flow than ever offered before or since. Evidence of expansionism was dramatic: the school population was multiplying as the post-war birth bulge came to maturity, while there was growing, in any case, a popular demand for extended opportunity to gain the qualifications that were seen as necessary to the further acquisition of the higher living standard now expected by all. And to serve these needs, new universities and colleges were chartered so as to recruit fresh energies into a teaching profession where a general loosening of promoted places could now hold out the prospect of early arrival at positions of curriculum power. The need to respond to the complexities of a rapidly growing system persuaded the SED that there would have to be a devolution of its powers, that the traditional, personalised authority of St. Andrews House, Edinburgh, would have to broaden the base of its operation and to seek out professional advice on how to proceed with the new structures and the new courses that were now required. The result was that within a year of the promulgation of Circular 600 enforcing local authorities to draw up plans for comprehensivisation of schools, the Secretary of State established in 1966 a Central Committee on the curriculum as an advisory body in which school representatives could join Departmental officers in counselling him on curricular matters. Other changes that occurred in this period were in tune with this move towards the enhancement of a responsible professionalism among teachers the old Teacher Training Colleges were reconstituted as semi-autonomous Colleges of Education with added freedom to undertake research and in-service initiatives, while a General Teaching Council for teachers was established so as to allow them to have a major say in the control over entrance into the profession. And in the regions local authorities were beginning to appoint subject 'advisers' to ensure that everywhere teachers were kept in touch with new educational developments. Out of all these reforms it was, perhaps, the institution of a Central Committee that was to be decisive in initiating necessary change. The 'CCC' was not one body so much as an organisation of interconnected committees which, through a range of subject specialist panels and local offspring groups, offered a coherent strategy by which to involve a very broad spread of teachers in the national formulation of new syllabus ideas. Certainly the English panel acted energetically towards this end: it not only set up study groups and published papers on its own account but also instituted in

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Edinburgh the Centre of Information for the Teaching of English to which all English teachers were granted consultational access. It was from this Centre that Scottish teachers were at last given their own English journal as the CITE Newsletters of the early years (the late 1960s) quickly grew into Teaching English, which, under the enlightened editorship of Sydney Smyth, was to attract a range of lively writing and to establish a thoroughgoing review policy that has, since that time, been most influential in giving individual teachers a real sense of belonging to a genuinely professional discipline. The Panel also sponsored various in-service courses, including some very high-profile 'National Courses' designed to introduce an international or at least an England and Wales dimension into the Scottish scene. Most significant of all, however, was the rapid promotion of a multitude of 'Local Development Committees' throughout the land so as to give practically every English teacher in it the chance to contribute to the working out of practical reforms based on ideas coming from the centre. The Scottish system was, however, still small enough for the impact of individual personality, especially from those within an SED Inspectorate that still continued to hold overseeing power, to be felt and here it was fortunate that men of real quality and drive were now coming onto its English operations, most notably HMI's Andrew Chirnside and William Gatherer, the chairman of the first Central Committee English Panel. It was under the latter's vigorous leadership that right from its inception in 1966 the task was undertaken of carrying through nothing less than a complete reform of English practice and to do this by giving its teachers a sense of professional identity and purpose they had hitherto lacked. With dissatisfaction in what quickly came to be termed the 'old' prevalent English of fragmented exercises, stylised academic activity and impersonal language routines, the Panel embarked on a five year publishing plan that was carried through by a series of 'Bulletins' covering all aspects of secondary school work from Literature to Language and inclusive of common course work for 12- and 13-yearolds, as well as suitable activity for the 'early' school leaver (the School Leaving Age was raised to 16 during this period). Between 1967 and 1972 five such papers appeared, 6 each one of which was remarkably consistent in its promulgation of the new pupil-centred philosophy and quite confident in its ability to act as authoritatively seminal texts for in-service and Local Development work. Much hope was invested in the new Bulletin-led English as the effective strategy by which to bring about the long awaited classroom changes. Articles and papers of this time talk of what was happening in explicitly historical terms: one of the leading protagonists of the 1960s movement,

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Chief Inspector of Schools Chirnside, was quite emphatic in the contrast he could draw between the 'barren, spartan' 1940s and 1950s and the 'flowering' 1960s in which English teachers were being excitingly confronted with 'Nothing less than the review, reappraisal and. . . . .dismantlement and refurbishing of the subject by which they had lived and the methodology by which they had plied their craft'(Chirnside, 1973). The proposed 'methodology' was squarely based on the notion of pupil involvement: literary texts and language topics were to be selected on grounds of their 'relevance' (key word) to the contemporary child; all the various activities that would make up a renewed English course now widened to include personal writing, talk, media material and 'real-live' social register were to be dynamically organised into centres of interest, or 'projects', 'units' and 'thematic studies', in which pupils could fulfil their imaginative, curious and thoroughly modern selves in the creating of naturalistic dramas such as, for the Secondary 1, Secondary 2 and the young School Leaver, the 'Street Accident' or the 'Devastation of the Highland Village by the Bursting of the Hydro-Electric Dam' (letter-writing, newspaper reports, TV interviews and map-sketching); or, once into the upper school, they could set to with satisfying investigations into 'Love and Marriage'; 'Drug Abuse' and 'Colour Prejudice' among other issues-of-thetime (quality journalism, referential writing, Wole Soyinka, assorted twentieth-century poems and Shakespeare's 'Othello'). By the mid-1970s, however, it was becoming clear that however real the advances towards it were, the results were falling short of a pupil-centred revolution in English teaching. Despite the vigorous lead given from the centre, despite the by now extensive infrastructure of advisers, College of Education Staff, Inspectors of Schools with counselling rather than purely monitorial roles, of Central Committees and Local Development Councils, evidence was coming through that the actual teaching in the schools remained obstinately didactic, desks-in-rows and text-book dominated. An Inspectors' Report on the causes of learning difficulty, 7 for example, showed that the new methods had not really changed the individual child's perception of a curriculum that was still teachingrather than learner-centred, while investigation of the specific effect of the Bulletins on classroom practice concluded that in many cases these methods had not even been tried at all (Cunningham, 1976). The new movement had not, in fact, succeeded in dealing with the reasons that had rendered futile the Secondary Advisory Committee's work 20 years previously. Not at the root, anyway, for while the Bulletin's thinking had become more determinedly pupil-centred, its hold on the reality of the Scottish situation was far from complete. For teachers the real

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source of curriculum power remained the national examination system and as long as it continued to operate exclusively through monolithic external examinations aimed only despite the introduction in 1962 of a fourth year 'Ordinary' grade to supplement the traditional fifth year Higher Leaving Certificate at the 'top' 30%, teachers were going to feel little allegiance to the notion of 'common' courses in which the individual pupil or the innovative school-made syllabus must still struggle to find worthwile tangible recognition. And as retrospect began to take over, it was also becoming clearer that the new structure of 'centre' and 'local' committees was not really the exercise in participatory curricular democracy that had been intended. For many, a system in which the centre made all the pronouncements, and thus left the peripheral many to make the practical response, merely confirmed the traditional authoritarianism of the SED; for others the cutting off of teachers from the real Central Committee decision-making and the absence of any programme of evaluative research into the effectiveness of the 'new' methods underlined the endogenous gap between theory and practice in the Scottish educational world (those who can, teach those who can't, write about it). This failure to engage the energies of what was, after all, a highly qualified all-graduate secondary teaching force in the complex problem of making the new approaches work points to the real shortcomings of the 1960s movement. For the methodology as outlined in the Bulletins was scarcely detailed or incisive enough to show these teachers how to create change at the level where it really mattered the individual pupil's experience of 'English'. An excessive confidence had been placed in the potency of planning and selection, in the ability of 'relevant' materials organised into project-shaped sequences, to open up an awareness of the life-communicating properties of literature and language. But too often the 'relevance' represented an adult's perception of the matter and led to a teaching pattern in which 'significance' was seen to be in proportion to the subject's capacity for yielding lines of enquiry to be pursued according to teacher-made schemes of work. And, frequently, the centres of interest themselves proved to be little more than an ingenious reshuffling of all the old reading and writing obligations into 6-week packs of Hiroshima Childhoods, Imaginary Communities and Long Distance Lonelinesses. At the heart of the relevance problem was the issue of language. By the mid-1970s it was becoming evident that the Scottish attempt to make the English syllabus personally meaningful was being conducted at the level of topic rather than language. It was not that the Bulletins had ignored the latter indeed under the influence of HMI Gatherer, a noted authority in

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the field of linguistics, that could scarcely be the case but rather that their interests had taken the direction of seeing language as a form of human behaviour in the social sense, to be practised by an invocation of typical everyday contexts hence all that project-work. But this had given rise to an approach which externalised speech and writing into a series of rules-obeying products, the acquisition of which was to be gained through analytical imitation. The understanding of language as a personal process in which the individual makes meaning out of experience by exploring and reshaping it in his own words received at this time little consideration, as did the need for a corresponding methodology that, based on the introduction of the child's own experiencing into the classroom, might have led to the provision of opportunity to utilise his own expressive forms of speech and thus for example to collaborate with others in informal group work or to engage in intimately personal writing in order to make a classroom topic his own. Elsewhere, but most accessibly in England, work was going ahead in this field, but despite the excellent efforts of a lone figure such as Bill Jackson (1973-74) of Hamilton College of Education the arguments relating learning to personal language were slow to penetrate north of the border. It appeared that the newly designed structures of curriculum development were proving to be too tightly controlled, too inward-looking to accommodate fresh thinking or individual initiatives and a limited system of educational research too much the servant of the system to engage the energies of its English teachers in the solving of real learning problems in their own classrooms. The result was that the very ideas, by which their sought-for individual-centred curriculum might have been created, trickled into Scotland too late and too diffuse to catch the wave of institutional reform that began with the moves towards comprehensive education in 1965 only months before the year when their international colleagues at the Dartmouth, USA, Conference were being excited by the possibilities of an English curriculum based on personal growth. 1975-85: Certification For All And The Standardisation Of Growth In the last several years Scotland's secondary school English teachers have found themselves caught up in an onrush of change that has proved to be different from that of the 1960s, not only in volume but also in the controlling of its direction. Although the SED had taken the initiative for reform in that decade, the exercise of its authority had been restricted to the establishing of those conditions that would enable the profession itself,

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through the new supporting agencies of the Central Committee and its many Local Development Committees, to make its own interpretations of the subject's purpose and practice. More recent changes have differed in that they have proceeded from a general view of, and scheme for, the Curriculum as a whole, one that has sought to align English along with other 'core' subjects against wider social and individual pupil needs. Their origins are, however, to be found in the 1960s and their expansionist circumstances, for by the mid-1970s it was emerging that the liberalisation of traditional courses that had been permitted then was not going to be sufficient to satisfy the new demands now being made upon secondary schools. The universal establishment of comprehensive education and the complementary raising of the school leaving age to 16 were creating intolerable pressures on the existing national assessment system. Many thousands of late adolescent pupils were discovering that they had been forced to stay on at school to take courses which, in what they considered to be a meaningful sense, did not actually exist since official recognition and in the Scottish tradition that has always meant national certification was still only being given to the narrowly academic Scottish Certificate 'O' Grade and Higher syllabuses, and these were proving to be totally unsuitable for the many who were now being hopefully and hopelessly thrust into them. Accordingly, it was the Scottish Examination Board that in 1973 took the initiative by asking the Secretary of State to make enquiry into the assessment provision for senior pupils, with the result that he appointed the 'Munn Committee' in co-operation with the Central Committee, to enquire into matters of curriculum design and organisation and, with the Examination Board, the 'Dunning Committee' to report on assessment and certificate arrangements for the final two years of the secondary school (14-16 age group) a complementary distribution of responsibility which ensured that any proposals for syllabus reform had to be tied to the nationally controlled examination system, which thus continued to have the decisive influence. Indeed, we can view the whole of the Munn and Dunning machinery as not only an expression of Government concern but also of central power: the establishment of the twin national commissions, the making of representations and the central accumulation of evidence, the procedure of Enquiry, Report and Pronouncement, shaped itself into a characteristically Scottish ritual choreographed so as to culminate in the climactic declaration by the Secretary of State. When they were published in 1977 (SED, 1977a & b), the two reports read in such an interdependent fashion that they automatically became

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'Munn-and-Dunning', a curriculum-and-assessment double act that clearly expressed the centrist predilection for a clear national framework by which to articulate and keep under control any changing academic-social concerns. Thus, they proposed, courses should be constructed along well-set subject lines though now legitimated through an epistemologically respectable designation into 'Modes of knowing and interpreting experience' to be offered on a core plus options basis, the latter to occupy no more than minority time. There were to be three syllabus levels 'Credit', 'General' and 'Foundation' to provide for the differentiation of ability across the whole cohort, each one of which was to be nationally assessed and officially certificated. Several years of feasibility study and working party elaboration have since ensued to give us a final course 'Arrangements' that were Secretary of State approved for commencement in Session 1984/85 as the aptly named 'Standard Grade' Syllabus (SED, 1982). This directed that the final two years of compulsory schooling (ages 1416) were to be controlled by sets of 'National Guidelines' that would act as an imperative definition for each subject, of course components and pupil targets of performance, in terms of objectives and levels of competence as set out on a standardised 7-point scale of achievement. Each pupil could now expect to leave school with an individual profile that would constitute a record of course work and attainment but which would also be rationalised into one global grade to be computed through the aggregation of criteria scores. Although the Arrangements were not to be prescriptively detailed at the level of content, in order to allow schools to make up their own implementations according to outline aims-and-objectives, appropriate teacher practice was shaped by an extensive programme of in-service work which during the initial stages was directed by specially appointed 'Field Curriculum Development Officers' and secured by a system of school syllabus moderation answerable to the Examination Board. However, several years of feasibility study lie between the 1977 Reports and these first subject proposals, years in which practical investigatory help was also to be offered through the findings of the 27 research projects that were centrally funded in order to address relevant innovative problems such as the operation of criterion-referencing in assessment and, in English, the teaching of talk, writing and reading skills (SED, 1980). More importantly still, subject teachers were permitted to play a part in their development, albeit under the monitorship of the Secretary of State's HMIs and filtered through 'Joint (Examination Board-Central Committee) Working Parties'. In the early period the HMIs who were entrusted with the devising of the original Guidelines went into partnership with a specially

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selected range of 'pilot' schools so as to base later prescriptions on consultation and existing good practice. The kind of English that has emerged from the national requirement to produce a curriculum sufficiently clear in operation and rigorous in objectification, to act as nationally assessment-worthy, practical evidence producing courses for the whole range of the contemporary school population, has therefore come to be tempered in part by the ideas inherited by teachers from the 1960s. The final version of the English Arrangements (SEB, 1987) does represent a genuine attempt to use aims-and-objectives planning to recommend a rounded view of the subject in which personal 'growth and enrichment' stand alongside the obligations of 'competence', thus ensuring a continuing role for literature as well as acknowledging the place of socially useful skills. Similarly, its advocacy of the balanced, inclusive syllabus opens the way for a welcome broadening of activity to extend official status to at last 'talk' and 'listening'. The Arrangements use their necessary categorising to serve liberal intention in other ways as well: their definition of syllabus activity is left at the level of broad language behaviour rather than taken down to specific items, thus giving individual schools the freedom to make their own selection of materials and topics: these language areas are certainly formulated into outcomes but outcomes that are to be derived from the pupil's attempts to fulfil 'purposes', a strategy that opens the way to a teaching-and-learning approach based on formative, in-course assessment acting as meaningful preparation for the external evaluation stage. Encouragement for an experiential learning approach can also be found in the recommendation that grew out of the good practice shown in pilot schools that work continue to be organised into a series of 'units', that is into topic-based clusters of language and literature work activity that carry forward the 1960s Bulletins' enthusiasm but which may now be made more genuinely pupil-centred by an interpretation of 'projects' as contexts for purposeful language activity and not simply as a new portmanteau for old issues and relevant practices. It is by these means that the current Scottish development is attempting to put together a new synthesis in which, notionally at least, language and literature, skills and personal development the English subject aspirations of the earlier post-war period informing the directives of the present may be joined together in one purposeful syllabus enterprise. Unfortunately, further consideration of the way in which this compromise is going to work in practice does appear to suggest that the attempted consensus is in danger of breaking down beneath an inner contradiction of form and content, sufficient to undermine the genuine hopes of those who

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are striving to preserve the best of our post-war individualist traditions against the newer demands for objective certainties within public frameworks. There must, for instance, be a fear that the demand for a description of English in terms of accountable teaching targets has led the HMI authors of The Arrangements into the importation of a syllabus design that pursues an aims-and-objectives analysis that will become constrictingly reductive. In the stated scheme of things, for instance, 'growth' and 'enrichment' do appear but only as members of an unexceptional invocation of generalised 'aims' that must quickly yield place to detailed lists of activities based on a dividing up of linguistic behaviour into the four modes of talking, listening, reading and writing which can then be further broken down into sets of specific purposes such as 'stating a point of view' or 'communicating a personal experience'. In this way the destination of precise specifications for teaching objectives is reached, since these 'purposes' once identified may now be categorised into sets of component skills so that, for example, 'talk' competence may become 'conveying information to an audience', mastery of which can be shown to depend on a demonstration of 'organisation' of content and manner of 'delivery' sufficiently 'intelligible' and 'clear' to achieve the overall informative purpose. Assessment may now be calculated by setting individual evidence of effectiveness in these tasks against lists of criteria derived from the required skills; differentiation into grades is worked by arranging such criteria along a 7-point scale of comparative achievement as illustrated by the Examination Board item bank of exemplars for each level. All this makes for a logical flowline account of the business of the English syllabus but one in which, it may be felt, the publicly necessary rationalisation of activity has been attained by turning to a different tradition of English teaching from the one that post-war Scottish teachers of the subject have grown up in. Whatever the shortcomings in practice, the ideals of individual development announced in 1947 and developed in the 1960s assumed a pattern of learning which is essentially personal in nature and which recognise that the attendant values such as 'responsiveness', 'creativity', 'moral awareness' would appear to be inherently unspecifiable in overt instructional terms, both by reason of their fluid, open-ended character and their attachment to an individuality of experience. And now over 20 years later, many would continue to argue for English as a wholeness of experience that has to be nurtured, the living integrity of which cannot be accounted for by facile subcategorisation into so-called 'modes' and 'purposes', nor evaluated by the instrument of targeted criteria. These are fears that will have to be tested against the actual quality of

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learning experience offered to the individual pupil by classroom realisation of the new course. Early experience in this respect has not been altogether encouraging, for although English teachers have shown great resourcefulness in devising appropriate materials and topics, once these have been shaped into the requisite unit of work, the Standard Syllabus design has tended to act as a template that has tailored their activity into a turn-by-turn stitching together of skills, purposes, criteria and assessable objectives, in which a bit of 'listening for information' is made to join into some 'writing for special effect' before 'reading for referential meaning' can receive its designated due. Most damaging of all threatens to be the need to satisfy the voracity of a criterion-referenced assessment system which demands to be fed on a sufficiency of ingredients that are nevertheless so fine and purpose-specific as to enable the required accumulations of profiled performance to be served up. Thus will the flexibility and richness of the living language continue to be shredded down into interpretation passages disguised as technical reading taxonomies, into writing exercises to show mastery of the simulated letter of application for jobs that do not actually exist, into newfangled listening tasks based on old-fashioned factual recall and tape-recorded talk performances in solo, group and one-to-one model situations. For these reasons it is doubtful whether the new course will be any more effective than its predecessors in realising the ideals of an individual curriculum that can only be attained by its capacity to engage the pupil's own developing language powers with real learning experiences. Doubtful but not yet certain, for, it must be stressed, we are still at the stage of making projections and there are other more positive ways of reading the likely trends. At this early stage there must, for instance, remain the hope that a national syllabus will act as a genuine guideline that has the power to involve its teachers in a defining of aims and objectives and an integration of assessment requirements with their content planning that will achieve a new sharpness of direction for their teaching, as well as enabling them to share its underlying purposes with their pupils. And indeed, within the Standard framework as explained in the Arrangements, there is plenty of encouragement towards an interactive style of classroom practice to be attained through such formative approaches as writing based on personal drafting and self-evaluation, the use of pupil discussion, investigative reading styles and an imaginative exploitation of a full range of media supplemented by authentically contemporary artefacts and materials. However, to ensure that this is what will happen, a more flexible and teacher-trusting use will have to be made of an assessment requirement which at present threatens to do anything but release the teaching possibilities held within a syllabus design that, with regard to the freedom it permits

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teachers in their selection of content, is quite boldly school-based in conception. At present the proportion of assessment allowed to internally derived evidence is no more than 50% 8 and even this is to be managed through a system of grade related criteria 'The GRC' that appears to be no more than an ill-bred hybrid born of a necessity to serve the traditional grading requirements of rational certification as much as to acknowledge individual achievement. It demands that teachers become the producers of performance criteria that can act as not so much an indication of the pupil's progress but as evidence for the aggregating of a score with which he may be labelled in respect of his fellows. Teacher judgement is further to be controlled by a set of externally-produced exemplars, to operate which teachers must become expert in matching pupil attainment against official paradigms, rather than be encouraged to direct their attention to the personal learning needs that a properly used criterion-referencing should diagnose. If the Examination Board grip could be sufficiently relaxed so as to give schools the freedom to produce and as a greater proportion of the net result internal evidence in the form of broad descriptions of actual outcomes the value of which would be assured by the quality of the teaching syllabus that produced it, then assessment could indeed come to have more of a diagnostic than a testing effect. The SEB's lists of criteria could then be offered not as fixed targets but rather as the descriptive means by which sensitive analysis of individual learning needs and a reconsideration of instructional strategy might be made. Such a formative intention would best be satisfied by asking the pupil to review the new demand in the light of present capacity, to work at ways of interpreting fresh experience against existing knowledge; constructive self-knowledge would best come from giving him the chance to work out his own response and solutions, to explore and to evaluate his own progress, to collaborate with his peers in so doing. And all this would form a pattern of teaching-become-learning that would call upon the pupil's own language resources and thus realise the potential for creating learning within him, in a way that the reforms of the 1960s quite failed to do. If this is really to happen in Scotland then teachers must be permitted the chance to think of assessment in educative rather than managerial terms, to act as something other than the administrators of Examination Board procedure. Schools must be allowed to offer internal assessment based on descriptions of actual activity and achievement, made up by those who are in the best position to know, that is the teachers themselves. And despite the fact that this would be a departure from the Scottish tradition of competitive individualism within a system of centralised control, such a

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development could then perhaps become the long-awaited fulfilment of the liberal hopes of individual causes for all founded on internal assessment, with which the post-war story began in 1947. Conclusions: Growth, Accountability And State Development Two words bind the story of Scotland's post-war English teaching together, 'growth' and 'accountability'. And if the first expresses the shared philosophy that has inspired its progress from within during that time, the second is the external consideration that has increasingly come to haunt it. Within the profession, agreement as to the essential aims of the subject has been consistent: it is that English makes a unique contribution to the education of the individual because it nourishes his powers of self-expression, a process of Growth which leads us to discover what is in ourselves and our fellows through the humane medium of literature and language creatively used. This was the faith prologued in the 1947 Report's classical advocacy of the treasury of literature as an inheritance by which everyone had the right to acquire the civilised virtues; this was the idealism that was sustained by the romantic enthusiasms of the 1960s which urged development as the natural unfolding of the individual's language-given talents, and that was represented in the Standard Grade's proposals for a syllabus sufficiently inclusive and socially relevant to empower in the pupil a growing capacity to respond to all the circumstances of his life. But, in the post- no more than in the pre-war era, the teachers have never been set free to enact their liberal impulses, for the interplay that must always exist between any public education authority and its servants has been especially pronounced in the small, centralised country of Scotland. A characteristically Calvinist predicament, perhaps, except that the kind of problems that secondary school English teaching here and elsewhere has experienced, in developing the self-understanding and methodological expertise necessary to win a public acceptance of its pupil-centred aspirations, has also been picked out with a sharp enough focus on the well-defined Scottish stage to enable them to be seen by students of recent English teaching with heuristic clarity. What then, as we move towards the end of the century, might be concluded from the Scottish experiences since 1945 of attempting to strike the balance between the competing demands of subject idealism and social necessity, of Growth and Accountability? In Scotland the reforms of the 1960s offered the profession the opportunity and the supporting agencies to develop its own vision of the

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subject; since then, however, our English teaching has become constrained by a wider concern for the relevance of the secondary school as a social institution, first of all to the whole range of pupils who have come to stay on in it, but now increasingly to the demands of 'society' as interpreted in the economic terms that have been conditioned by Scotland's share in recent British industrial and employment crises. At a time when teachers are being asked to fashion a testing new Standard curriculum, the Tory Government of the 1980s has given a ruthless cutting edge to the notion of 'accountability' with its doctrinal demand of 'value for money'; this has demonstrated its own valuations by making education throughout the UK the object for cost-cutting, efficiency campaigns at school level while at the same time investing money in 'training' for 16 to 18-year-olds through various schemes which seek to thrust education and job preparation together in courses administered by educational sub-contractors such as the 'Manpower Services Commission' and the 'Training, Vocational and Educational Initiatives'. And in Scotland in particular, a brand new pattern of 16+ instruction has been launched by a partnership of school and 'technical' and 'commercial' colleges combining to offer vocationally orientated courses that come in modularised batches, controlled by nationally-produced 'descriptors' that invariably relegate language to the role of 'communication skills' (SED, 1983). In a country whose education has always been centrally regulated, authority is obviously well placed to shape the system in the required governmental image and the curricular bodies that were developed during the 1960s can quickly become an efficient chain of command, while the tradition of Edinburgh edict-directing ad hoc working party can be relied upon to supply the necessary practical details. That so far in the latest period of reform, 'accountability' has been interpreted as a call upon the subject to explain itself through a clearly structured syllabus and through firm assessment criteria is no reassurance. The fear must be that by using an aims-and-objectives approach controlled by an external examination system, we in Scotland have trapped ourselves in a curriculum model that, because of its very character as an imposition of socially useful targeting in which literature becomes simply another usable (?) language skill along with telephoning and computerese will actually prove to be alien to the free creativity and individual wholeness of experience upon which our concern for personal growth depends. In such a finely-balanced situation, three, inter-related issues cry out for resolution, the first two of which are the necessity to devise an effective methodology based on individual learning needs and characteristics, and the degree of teacher involvement permitted to contribute to its develop-

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ment. These, in their turn, lead to a third, underlying consideration the English teachers' capacity to articulate a professional concern for and to pursue an independently-voiced interest in the welfare and the conduct of their own subject. It has, in the first place, become all the more important that Scotland's English teachers continue to work at the devising of a methodology that, while based on personal creativity rather than the imitation of external communication models, will be demonstrably effective in its ability to lead pupils towards a mastery of language in all its applications. One of the lessons of our post-war experience is that if English teachers really are to hold fast to a philosophy of 'Growth' then they will have to show that it is as practicable as it is desirable, that it can be made to be accountable through the sureness of its aims and the clarity of its teaching strategies. If the 1960s in Scotland succeeded in overturning the comfortable old subject-centred methods that assumed that language had to be given to the child before he could be trusted to use it, they did not succeed in replacing it with a child-centred pedagogy that compelled the same degree of public assent. The work from south of the border by such as Douglas Barnes, John Dixon, Harold Rosen and, pre-eminently, James Britton, work which pointed towards an approach based on encouraging natural developmental processes through a language-and-learning logistic, began to enter Scottish teachers' consciousness in the mid-1970s, but it has yet to be defined into a thoroughgoing instructional practice. And this partly because advocacy of a classroom given over to the liberating energies of group talk and expressive writing has lacked conviction, not only in the eyes of both pupil and public but also in those of a university-trained profession who infer within its · apparently methods-free approach a disablement of their teaching expertise and a usurpation of their subject-based authority. If what is now required is the working out of an English syllabus that is neither subject- nor child-bound but is centred on an appreciation of the pupil-as-learner, an appreciation backed by an understanding of his linguistic resources and his communicative needs, then it might be that the research energies released by the Munn and Dunning programme rather than the ingredients of the formal Arrangements package represent the real step forward. Projects such as the Stirling University investigation into methods of writing instruction for 14 to 16year-olds, the work in Edinburgh and Aberdeen Colleges of Education on the application of formative assessment principles in both discussion skills and reading capacities in the same age group (Peacock & Roger, 1984; Francis, 1982; Fyfe & Mitchell, 1985), show how an educational psychologist's interest in learning processes may be allied to a regard for language development that promises to

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produce a methodology in which the achievement of set criteria can become a series of creative challenges for both pupil and teacher. But and this is the second major finding that emerges from this postwar account such work must be carried forward in a way that involves all teachers. One of the dangers of history writing is that by concentrating on the spectacular event the dates and the battles it can quite miss the flow of day-to-day experience; while, like kings and presidents, Bulletins and Pilot Schemes may come and go, didactic teaching to serried ranks of secondary school pupils threatens to continue for ever. Latterly, research attention has been paid to classroom styles in the average Scottish comprehensive school (Corrie, Haystead & Zaklukiewicz, 1982) and this has revealed a persistence of teacher-centred work based on purely pragmatic considerations; teachers, it would seem, can become too busy holding the ring between the competing claims of national exams, institutional constraints, resources scarcity and disciplinary routines, too busy, in other words, simply managing the system, to think of problem-solving, enactive or discursive learning alternatives to what they are didactically doing, as anything but remote theory. Even the Munn and Dunning programme's attempts to pilot work through classroom observation quickly became subverted by the demands of a national project that created its own team-like allegiances: accounts given by participant teachers (Eleftheriou, 1985) contrast the early leisurely days of experimentation with the later rush towards decision in which school-based activity gave way to rounds of weekend meetings, task delegation and working party subgroups where the HMI leaders found themselves having to set the agenda, limit the alternatives and hasten individuals towards collective acceptance an executive routine that quite restored the custom of SED decision-making from the centre. And latterly all progress has been held up by the lingering catastrophe in Scotland of an industrial action and a boycott on curriculum development by teachers, who have been responding not only to many years of depressed salaries but also to increased work-loads and to sharpened disciplines in consequence of new Standard Grade courses imposed, as they infer, from without. 9 These are difficulties that could be considered to be the inevitable results of the maintenance into the 1980s of an authoritarian Scottish regime that continues to reduce the professional scope of its teacher employees. But this would be too simple a conclusion, for examination of what progress has been made in English teaching over the last 40 years does reveal some capacity within the SED for enlightened action and, moreover, an exercise of power by individual officials within it that has been genuinely anxious to reconcile governmental demand with the welfare of the subject: indeed, one

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of the ironies of the Scottish situation has been the way in which as in the 1960s and in some aspects of the recent Standard programme central authority has acted as the instrument by which to impel liberal progress. An observation that brings us up against the last of the three unresolved issues that could be defined as determinants, not only of the post-war past but also of the future of the subject's teaching in Scotland the limits to professional self-sufficiency in a country where there has never existed any independent organisation of its English teachers. What has and has not happened since 1945 amounts to the playing out of a debate concerning the nature of English teaching and the role that the individual teacher can play in its shaping. And as, over the years, the reports and the edicts from the CCC, from the HMIs and the SED have mounted up, so, too, have the demands on professional expertise and responsibility. Problems concerning the curricular relationship between 'growth' and 'competence', the correct balance between external and school-based assessment, the nature of talk and listening skills, the assimilation of micro-technology into the syllabus, the definition and the development of a truly enabling literacy, are only a few examples of the kind of running concerns which, far from being mere Bulletins' enthusiasms or Standard Grade technicalities, are issues fundamental to the kind of subject we ought to be practising and to our ability to recreate it in effective classroom terms. In these circumstances knowledge is power: more than ever, it has become important for English teachers themselves to establish the leading voice in the defining of their subject, the freedom and the capacity to evaluate new ideas against their own judgements as to the nature of their calling otherwise, such is and has been the way of things in Scotland, control will finally pass into the hands of outside theoreticians and government agencies. Curriculum development has promised to work best in Scotland at those times when, as during the setting up of local development groups in the 1960s or the earliest days of Standard course piloting, the classroom teacher was able to play an active part, was given the time and opportunity to inform himself of new ideas, to define and to work out his own problems in partnership with consultant 'experts' but principally through his own action research and the shared experience of colleagues. The post-war Scottish system, especially as it has been developed over the last ten years, has, potentially at least, become flexible enough to accommodate the desired process of centreout dialogue, has now, with its Advisory Services, Colleges of Education, Central Committee groupings, local and national Resource Centres and the great expansion of school-focused in-service, established a potentially powerful network of collaborative resources ready

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to assist in individual staff development as the real centre of curriculum change. The persistent Scottish tradition of centralised, uniform administration does have its dangers, however, for in a small tightly-organised country liberal reform will always depend upon the centre's willingness to use its executive power to promote the values that teachers themselves are ready to campaign for. In a country whose 40 years of post-war experience has shown it to be inexorably moving towards a uniform system of syllabus and assessment to cover all pupils but where unlike the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and England, for example teachers have so far shown little interest in forming themselves into an independent body capable of promoting its own research and publications or of giving a united voice in the defence of that which is most distinctive and precious in their own subject's teaching, we can never be completely secure about the continued welfare of English. The Curriculum Development Service in Edinburgh that has now developed out of the original 1960s Centre of Information for Teachers of English, its periodical Teaching English and the Central Committee English Panel are each of them invaluable teacher-supporting institutions but they are dependent on Government patronage and subject to its reforms and economic rationalisations. For this reason they cannot substitute for the 'Scottish Association of Teachers of English' that alone would give Scotland's teachers a sense of united identity and an assurance of leadership in the development of their own subject's school curriculum as well as a guaranteed membership of IFTE and participation in the international exchange of ideas and experiences so necessary to the sustenance of a strong, free professionalism. More than ever it remains true to say that the state of English teaching in Scotland is as much a matter of unrealised possibilities as it is of problems that have yet to be surmounted. If the Scottish Education Department can now be persuaded, within the clear framework of a national policy of in-service and professional development with all the resources implications that that requires, further to devolve its powers in order to give school English departments the freedom to research their own teaching needs and to make their own informed demands upon the practical network that now exists of central and local committees, of subject advisers, research projects, Colleges and university departments; if schools could thus be permitted to work towards the creation of syllabuses that are both internally devised and assessed; and if the whole operation could be vitalised by the leading contribution of a profession so organised as to be able to act as a partner and as a counterbalance to those who represent the Government's Educational Department . . . then the Scottish system might at least succeed in fully

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mobilising the capacities of its highly educated teachers in order finally to establish the individual curriculum for all pupils that has been the professed goal of the nation's English teachers since 1947. Acknowledgement I should like to record my grateful thanks to James Inglis, former Head of the English Department, Jordanhill College of Education, Glasgow, for helpful discussions during my preparation of this study. Mr Inglis is presently engaged on a most valuable research into the history of English teaching in Scotland. Notes To Chapter 2 1. Before the comprehensivisation of the 1960s, Scottish secondary school courses were organised on a selection by examination basis, made at the age of 12 when transfer from the primary school (age 5-12) was effected. Pupils then undertook either the 'academic' 5-year course leading to the Scottish Leaving Certificate (the 'Highers') or, after the raising of the school leaving age in 1947 to 15, the three-year non-certificate course which condemned the majority (approximately two-thirds) right from the age of 12 to the certain prospect of leaving school with no nationally recognised qualifications whatsoever. In the towns these divisions were represented by separate secondary schools the academic 'senior' and the non-certificate 'junior' but in more rural areas both types of course might be offered within the one building, the bilateral or so-called 'omnibus' schools that established for the SAC the model that its authors were now wishing to extend to all areas of the country. How big a change this would have created may be seen from the fact that in the early 1950s Scotland had about 900 secondary schools of which only about 200 (and many of these the smaller country schools) offered the full 5-year Certificate course. 2. For extended accounts of the Scottish tradition in education see Scotland, 1969; Osborne, 1968; Humes & Paterson, 1983. 3. Through the Moray House Tests of Intelligence, developed by Godfrey Thomson, Professor of Education at Edinburgh University and Director of Moray House Training College for Teachers. 4. It is questionable whether the SED really ever did publicly respond to the 1947 Report at all: not till almost five years later did it produce its own statement of position with regard to Secondary schooling and that in a Memorandum (1952) of such bland conservatism as to signal an intention to keep the essential pattern of post-12 education commented upon by the SAC safely intact. Neither this document, nor the 1955 updating Secretary of State's Report, had anything but a few modestly improving suggestions to make about either the nature and conduct of English or the organisational or curricular context in which it was to be taught. The rest was silence. As for the Advisory Committee,

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it was gradually allowed to revert to a relatively minor, non-Report-making, quango role till its replacement by the sweeping Central Committee changes of the 1960s when things really did begin to happen. 5. See discussion of 'The Aim of Secondary Education' op. cit. paras 47-68. 6. All published by HMSO, Edinburgh as 'CCE Bulletins': 1) English in the Secondary School: Early Stages 2) The Teaching of Literature 3) English for Young School Leavers 4) English in the Secondary School, Later Stages 5) The Teaching of English Language In addition, a set of working papers, 'Projects in Practice', was also published. 7. In 1964, an Examination Board, which drew upon teachers as well as its own specialist staff for its functions, had been set up to administer the national system, thus ending the era of exclusive Inspectorate control over it. 8. Lately, even this proportion has come under threat since an SEB CCC working party has now (summer 1986) been set up to examine ways of simplifying the Standard Grade assessment procedures. One of the terms of reference is an invitation to consider the necessity of persisting with a large amount of school-based assessment in view of the time-consuming nature of its operation. 9. Since the time of writing summer 1986 the Scottish teachers' campaign for improved pay and conditions referred to here has been resolved. The effects of this dispute have, however, proved to be long-lasting. Beginning with a work- to-rule in 1985, teachers were to boycott all new curriculum development well into 1987, including the introduction of the Standard Grade courses. The result is that Standard Grade English has only become an actuality in a small minority of schools even now (summer 1988). Session 1987/88 has, though, seen much inservice and support work by Regional secondees and a national 'Central Support Group'. Following these preparations, almost all schools will become fully committed to the 'new' courses at last. References CHIRNSIDE, A. 1973, Robert Miller: A Chronicle of his Times. Teaching English Vol. 7, No. 1. CORRIE, M., HAYSTEAD, J. and ZAKLUKIEWICZ, S. 1982, Classroom Management Strategies. Scottish Council for Research in Education. CUNNINGHAM, D.K. 1976, Management of Curriculum Development. Unpublished thesis. Glasgow University. ELEFTHERIOU, M. 1985, School-based developments in foundation English. In S. BROWN & P. MUNN (eds), The Changing Face of Education 14-16: Curriculum and Assessment. London: Heinemann. FRANCIS, E. 1982, Learning to Discuss. Moray House College of Education. FYFE, RONALD and MITCHELL, E. 1985, Reading Strategies and their Assessment. London: NFER. HUMES, W. and PATERSON, H. (eds) 1983, Scottish Culture and Scottish Education 1800-1980. Edinburgh: John Donald.

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JACKSON, W.A. 1973-74, Occasional Papers Nos 1, 2 and 3. Hamilton College of Education. OSBORNE, G. 1968, Change in Scottish Education. London: Longman. PEACOCK, C. and ROGER, A. 1984, Success in Writing. Scottish Curriculum Development Service. SCOTLAND, J. 1969, History of Scottish Education, 2 Vols. London: University of London Press. SEB. 1987, Standard Grade Arrangements in English. Edinburgh: SEB. SED. 1977a, The Structure of the Curriculum: The Third and Fourth Years of the Scottish Secondary School. (The Munn Report) Edinburgh: HMSO. 1977b, Assessment for All: Report of the Committee to Review Assessment in the Third and Fourth Years of Secondary Education in Scotland. (The Dunning Report) Edinburgh: HMSO. 1980, The Munn and Dunning Reports: The Government's Development Programme. Edinburgh: HMSO. 1982, The Munn and Dunning Reports: Framework for Decision. Edinburgh: HMSO. 1983, 16-18s in Scotland: An Action Plan. Edinburgh: HMSO. 1978, The Education of Pupils with Learning Difficulties: A Progress Report. Edinburgh: HMSO. 1947, Report of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland on Secondary Education. Edinburgh: HMSO.

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3 The Teaching Of English In Ireland John Killeen and Tom Mullins Major changes in the structure, content and rationale of the teaching of English at both primary and secondary levels took place in Ireland in the 1960s. Attempts were made to reconcile more fully the functional and aesthetic aspects of the teaching of English; to determine the place of the basic skills of reading and writing within an overall framework of the teaching of English; to examine the role of literature in the education of the young, particularly at the post-primary levels where the set literary text occupied a central position in the teaching of English; to provide an educational experience within the teaching of English which ensured that pupils could not only become literate, but literary; that they would not only learn to read but read to learn. In the context of Irish education, major changes were enacted at both primary and post-primary levels. This chapter will deal with the changes which were made, their intended effects and the present condition of the teaching of English. The significance of these changes can best be understood against an historical background. In general, it can be said that more than one hundred years prior to the 1960s, the role of the teaching of English in Irish education veered from one of subservience to one of domination, depending on the prevailing official approach to the place of English in the educational system at the time. The situation of English in schools in Ireland has always been culturally and politically complex. Even today when most people (not all) in the country learn English at home as their first and only language, Irish is still officially recognised by the State as the first official language and all pupils are required to take it at both primary and secondary level; knowledge of Irish is essential for gaining entry to the teaching profession and for obtaining positions in state bodies. It is of fundamental importance,

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therefore, in trying to understand the development of English teaching to remember this continuing scenario of linguistic conflicts. English At Primary Level A Backward Look In the course of the nineteenth century, the Irish language was gradually replaced by English as the spoken and written vernacular of the country. From the time of its foundation in 1831, the national school system of primary school education emphasised the importance of English as a medium of school instruction and negated the native Irish language. Children were penalised for their failure to use English in the context of the school. The thrust of education at that time was directed towards the achievement of initial literacy in English and by 1920 English had well and truly triumphed. An important change took place after 1897 when a more humanising and liberal curriculum in English was enshrined in a Revised Programme for National School (1900). For the next two decades the centrality of English was emphasised and it was recommended that a considerable portion of the school day should be devoted to the teaching of English. Schools' Inspectors of that period reported considerable improvement in English as a result of the implementation of the Revised Programme (Coolahan, 1977). With the establishment of the Irish State in 1922, the policy of 'cultural assimilation' which had prevailed in Irish schools since the early part of the nineteenth century was replaced by one of 'cultural nationalism' (Coolahan, 1981). The new policy was based on the tenet that the school should be the prime agent in the revival of the Irish language. The result was that 'for most Irish children, the language of the home (English) was made subordinate in school to the target language (Irish) (de Buitleir, 1985: 3). Subsequent policy decisions of the new government reduced the importance of the position of English. The cultivation of a national tone in the classroom and the fixing of the Irish people in the 'Gaelic mould' became of paramount importance (Ireland, 1933). A new Irish Constitution (Ireland, 1937) declared that the English Language 'is recognised as a second official language'. The status of English in the schools was maintained at a low ebb, and official policy statements were said to be a contributory factor (Coolahan, 1982: 170). The curriculum was curtailed to ensure adherence to the essential features of the official programme. The Department of Education prescribed the syllabus in the different subjects for each standard was compiled and issued annually (de Buitleir, 1985).

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In 1929, a Primary School Certificate Examination was introduced on a voluntary basis. This examination, a test of minimum competency, involved tests in Irish, English, Mathematics, History and Geography. In 1943, the examination was made compulsory for all pupils in sixth grade classes, and the examinable subjects were reduced to three, comprising written papers in Irish, English and Mathematics. Many children left school without taking the examination. Investment in Education (Ireland, 1966), a major study of the role of education in Irish life, indicated that in the year 1962/63 approximately 71% of those leaving school did so without obtaining the certificate. The report concluded that, 'The annual emergence of such numbers of young people who apparently have not reached what is commonly considered a minimum level of education can hardly be viewed with equanimity' (Ireland, 1966: 14). The examination was discontinued in 1967. In 1968 free post-primary education for all pupils was introduced, and the school leaving age was raised to 15 in 1972, two decisions which had an important influence on the teaching of English at primary level and significant implications for the teaching of English at post-primary level. In 1985 over 98% of pupils moved on from primary to post-primary education. For a period of 40 years Irish primary school children followed a narrow curriculum based on the three R's and courses in History, Geography, Needlework (for girls) and Manual Instruction (for boys) (Ireland, 1966). The teaching of Irish, English and Mathematics accounted for two thirds of the average weekly timetable. Macnamara (1966) found that more time was given to the teaching of Irish than to the teaching of English. Almost all primary schools followed the same curriculum irrespective of their size or location. The system of education was centrally controlled. Curriculum design was the function of the Department of Education. During the period 1933-1959 the Notes for Teachers which were issued annually by the Department of Education indicated that the official syllabus for the teaching of English was restrictive both in content and tone. For example, the directives for the teaching of English for 1956 which had been issued unchanged for the previous two decades contained the following recommendations for standard six of the primary school: English (a) To read with intelligence a suitable reader or story book. Conversation skills. Explanation, spelling. (b) To memorise 60 lines of poetry. (c) Such elementary portions of grammar as are necessary for the correction of errors made by the pupils in speaking and writing. Easy exercises in analysis.

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Written English (a) Dictation. (b) Narrative. Simple description of familiar scenes and incidents. Letter writing (Ireland, 1956). A Council of Education Report (Ireland, 1954) did little to advance the position regarding the teaching of English in the primary schools. The recommendation regarding the teaching of English at secondary level had more substance and will be treated later. In the 1960s the Notes for Teachers reflected a more liberal attitude to the teaching of English with greater emphasis than before on the personal, expressive and aesthetic aspects of the teaching of the subject. A New Dawn In December, 1966 the primary inspectorate of the Department of Education was instructed by the Minister of Education to conduct 'a fundamental examination of primary education'. Early in 1967 a curriculum design team in the Department of Education addressed itself to answering questions relating to the purposes, content and methodology of the primary school curriculum. A steering committee within the primary school inspectorate formulated the rationale for a new curriculum for the primary schools. In 1967/68 a working document was produced and submitted to teachers, managers, associations, colleges of education, universities and other interested bodies for comment. In 1971, the New Curriculum for Irish primary schools was inaugurated. The curriculum guidelines were contained in a bilingual handbook in two volumes (700 pages) which had been prepared by schools' inspectors during 1970/71. The handbook stated that the aims of primary education were: (a) To enable the child to live a full life as a child. (b) To equip him to avail himself of further education so that he may go on to live a full and useful life as an adult in society (Ireland, 1971). The curriculum gave a new importance to the teaching of English in the primary school. No longer could the approach be one of grudging acceptance. The curriculum contained a positive and enthusiastic acknowledgement of the importance of developing a child's mastery of his first language. The oral development of the pupils was to be the basis of their subsequent success in reading and writing. Within a few years national surveys indicated that the teachers per-

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ceived the New Curriculum had been implemented to a moderate extent in over 90% of the classes and that there had been considerable improvement in the teaching of English (Conference of Convent Primary Schools in Ireland, 1975; Irish National Teachers' Organisations, 1976, Fontes & Kellaghan, 1977). Irish and English were among the subjects Which had been most affected by the curriculum. The Practice Of English Class readers have been a traditional feature of the teaching of English in Irish primary schools. For many years such readers have been approved by the Department of Education. After the publication of the 1971 curriculum a new series of basal readers was published. In the course of the 1970s there was concern that some of these readers were unsatisfactory with regard to reading difficulty levels and continuity from reader to reader. It was thought desirable to produce a new series of readers which would more adequately meet the varied needs of primary school pupils. An examination of the most widely used basal readers in sixth grades over the past 40 years indicates that such books have altered significantly. The more recent texts contain a higher proportion of illustration. There is also a greater use of story and fantasy material. There are fewer informational excerpts, and less emphasis on moralistic and religious themes. More use is made of contemporary and humorous poems. More attention than heretofore is given to sex stereotyping (Greaney, 1986). The fact that these reading schemes have been accompanied by workbooks which frequently call for routine, banal and mechanical exercises in English is no cause for rejoicing. Many teachers regard such workbooks as essential in providing the language activities which pupils require to further their capacity to use the English language correctly. Unfortunately, their use tends to deflect English teaching from one of its main functions of encouraging pupils to write continuous English in contexts which are meaningful and appropriate. One aspect of the teaching of English which appears to have improved over the past two decades is reading comprehension. In a study of the effects of bilingualism, Macnamara (1966) reported that fifth grade children whose mother tongue was English were inferior to British children by 17 months approximately of English age. Subsequent to this finding, a series of investigations into the reading comprehension of Irish children was conducted in the Dublin region. These studies, which began in 1964 and have been replicated at four or five yearly intervals since, have indicated

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significant improvement in reading comprehension and the narrowing of the gap between Irish and British children (Kelly & McGee, 1967; Travers, 1976; Ward, 1982). Recent national tests conducted by Schools Inspectors indicated that this progress has been maintained (Ireland, 1982). Apart from objective evidence of improvement in reading comprehension, both teachers and school principals indicate that there has been an improvement in the teaching of English (Irish National Teachers Organisation, 1976; Fontes & Kellaghan, 1977b). According to Schools Inspectors, improvement in English reading has been more marked than in any other aspect of the school curriculum (Ireland, 1982). However, despite the evidence for improvement in reading comprehension and perceived improvement in other aspects of the teaching of English, there is little room for complacency. There are indications that a sizeable number of primary school pupils are 'poor' readers; approximately one-fifth of the pupils in fifth grades in a number of Dublin schools fell into this category (Killeen, 1984). There is also evidence that about 15% of the pupils completing the primary school programmes are either unable to cope with the everyday demands of reading, or with the requirements of reading at the post-primary level (Fontes & Kellaghan, 1977a). There is also a considered opinion that while primary schools have been reasonably successful in the realm of comprehension, equal success has not been achieved in teaching and encouraging pupils to read to learn (Ireland, 1982). One indication of the willingness of pupils to read to learn is the amount of leisure time reading which they do. Studies of this aspect of pupil behaviour indicate that many Irish primary school children do little leisure time reading, either for information or pleasure (Greaney, 1980). The average amount given to leisure time reading was about 5% of the available time. Other studies of the leisure time reading of Irish primary school pupils indicate that girls read more than boys, that pupils from better off homes read most, and that boys read more non-fiction than girls. There is also evidence that most of the reading which is done by primary school pupils falls into the category of non-quality reading. The boom in the production of quality books for children in recent decades has had little effect on many Irish school children (Killeen, 1984). In this context, however, it has to be remembered that the influences which govern children's reading interests and reading habits are varied and complex, and that the school is only one of these influences. But the question has to be asked and answered: are the schools doing enough to encourage pupils to read independently with interest and enjoyment, and in what ways can teachers in their classroom

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create an atmosphere supportive and promotive of the reading interests of pupils? The new curriculum emphasised the importance of both functional and imaginative writing. Since 1971 Irish primary schools have put considerable emphasis on aspects of pupil writing such as personal and creative writing. However, there is evidence that in too many classrooms there is an excessive emphasis on drill-like exercises to promote writing skills. An undue emphasis on decontextualised exercises in writing has deflected attention from the use of English in contexts where continuity in the use of the language is the primary goal. When asked about their priorities in the teaching of English, the majority of teachers rated oral work as of less importance than either reading or writing. Many teachers did not appear to appreciate the interrelationships among all aspects of the teaching of English (Ireland, 1982). The approach of many teachers to the correction of errors in writing needs to be reviewed. Too many teachers still regarded the marking of errors in pupil writing as a key feature of advancing writing abilities. There is a clear need to embark on major research work into aspects of children's writing which would involve both longitudinal and case studies and which would be informed by advances elsewhere in analysing, categorising and understanding the role of writing in the education of the young. The Curriculum advocated a variety of approaches to the teaching of poetry. A recent survey of the teaching of poetry in schools indicated that the majority of teachers in senior standards did not utilise sufficiently varied approaches (Killeen, 1984). Most teachers were content to present poetry to the classes by reading a poem aloud. Little use was made of drama in presentation and few teachers invited children to compile anthologies of their favourite poems. There was still considerable emphasis on memorisation, and the average number of poems taught over the period of a month was about three. Most teachers appeared to draw on the poems in the basal readers for the material of their lessons (Killeen, 1984). Although the most recent series of classroom readers contains a number of contemporary poems, publishers claim that they have been under pressure to include more traditional poems in the readers. Looking To The Future Within the past decade important changes have been made in the structure and control of Irish education. The formation of a Curriculum Unit in 1977 within the Department of Education indicated an official conscious-

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ness about the importance of English in the education system. Since 1978, the Department through the Schools' Inspectors has embarked upon a series of national surveys to monitor the implementation of the New Curriculum and to check progress in aspects of the work of schools. Such surveys have already produced valuable information on a national level about aspects of the teaching of English (Ireland, 1982). In 1984, the Minister for Education convened the first meeting of the newly created interim Curriculum and Examinations Board. Within months a consultative document, entitled Issues and Structures in Education (Curriculum and Examinations Board, 1984), was produced which outlined the factors which would have to be considered in restructuring Irish education. Three discussion documents followed in 1985. One of these outlined the aims of primary school education. It was considered important that at the end of primary school, pupils should be able to: (a) read fluently and accurately, with understanding, feeling and discrimination; (b) develop the habit of reading for leisure; (c) develop a legible style of handwriting and satisfactory standards of spelling, syntax, punctuation and usage; (d) communicate clearly in speech and writing in ways appropriate for various occasions and purposes; (e) communicate orally and in writing through the Irish language at a level appropriate to their general ability and linguistic background; (f) communicate in a modern European language at a level appropriate to their general ability; (g) listen attentively and with understanding; (h) acquire information from various sources and recall information and findings in various ways and (i) develop an interest in and value for the arts. The document, Language in the Curriculum (Curriculum and Examinations Board, 1985b), acknowledged the centrality of the mother-tongue in the education of the young. Particular importance was placed on oral development within the school. Schools were urged to implement language policies which would put more emphasis on language use and less on language practice. Particular emphasis was placed on the importance of extensive use of the first language in schools where pupils are considered to be disadvantaged or socially deprived. Policy regarding the use of a second language related to its use for specific periods each day and its extension to other aspects of the curriculum as far as the abilities and the backgrounds of the pupils allowed. In the document, language was presented as a communication skill, and the traditional role of literature in the curriculum, particularly at post-primary level, was questioned. Overall, the past two decades have brought improvements in the teaching of English, and greater enthusiasm for the life enhancing aspects of the teaching of the subject. Reading comprehension levels have improved. There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of imaginative

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writing in the lives of the pupils. Teachers have more access than before to a varied selection of attractively produced basal readers. Never has there been such a supply of potentially interesting reading material for pupils, albeit more available in public libraries and book shops than in schools. Both radio and television have encouraged imaginative and informational reading. Colleges of Education have put greater emphasis on the role of children's literature in the classroom. The inauguration of the Reading Association of Ireland and the impending foundation of the Children's Literature Association of Ireland are welcome indications of vitality within the sphere of the teaching of English. The most important change which has taken place in the teaching of English at primary level is an official acknowledgement that the home language is the primary instrument in the intellectual and aesthetic development of primary school children. English is now seen as not only a world language with a cultural deposit significantly enriched by an Irish dimension, but also as a potentially integrating force for the North and South of Ireland. English In Secondary Schools 1924-1988 Introduction The history of English teaching in Second Level schools in Ireland falls into two distinct periods divided by the decade of the 1960s. After 40 relatively stable years Ireland changed radically from being rural and inward-looking to a more urbanised society intent on building a new industrial economy and avidly looking outwards to the modern world for ideas. This dramatic re-orientation caused much questioning of the purposes and objectives of second level education: many of the questions posed at that time have still not been answered adequately. Up to the 1960s Irish Second Level Education was a dual system: the majority of pupils attended private, nominally fee-paying schools and colleges (government subsidised through capitation grants) largely run by Roman Catholic religious orders of priests, brothers and nuns. In these secondary schools pupils were prepared for two examinations: The Intermediate Certificate taken after three or four years and The Leaving Certificate taken after two more years which terminated the pupil's education. This structure essentially remained unchanged for 60 years. These secondary schools were socially and educationally very acceptable but it was not quite so acceptable to enter the other strand of the system entitled the Vocational Schools. These were state-run schools established

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in the 1930s and largely staffed by lay-teachers catering for the non-academic pupil. These schools prepared pupils for a final examination held after three years called The Group Certificate. Pupils in the vocational scheme could not take the secondary school examinations. This socially divisive system was eventually changed in the 1960s when a comprehensive education scheme was introduced and later again a series of community schools were built with a broad curriculum to cater for academic and non-academic pupils. Likewise the vocational schools were academically upgraded in that they could now prepare their pupils for all examinations at Second Level. Frozen Worlds 1924-66 When the new Irish nation emerged in the 1920s it inherited from the previous English colonial administration an educational structure at second level which it largely retained. The inherited curriculum in English, however, was narrowly prescriptive and in the Intermediate Education (Amendment) Act of 1924 the newly founded Department of Education in the Irish government changed the English curriculum decisively. While the underlying rationale for the curriculum remained steadfastly Arnoldian, the prescribed texts were replaced by an 'open' course. English teachers were encouraged to use the new freedom to stimulate wide reading by their pupils. English teachers then were given the scope to be truly professional; they could within certain broad limits (admittedly academic) devise their own curriculum for pupils from year to year. From a centrally administered educational system it was a most enlightened flexible approach but unfortunately, as it soon became apparent, rather ill-advised. The Department had been unduly optimistic about the professional expertise of teachers and the sophistication of the pupils' reading skills. Within a few years it was necessary to publish aids for the teachers who were unable to cope with the freedom of choice offered and felt lost in this 'brave new world'. Teachers who worked in the previous prescribed programme, where the payment by examination results system operated, could not adjust when the examination pressure was reduced in the new open system. By the early 1930s a crisis point was reached, teachers directed their teaching towards imagined examination questions and the examiners themselves had difficulties devising questions to cater for the wide ability range of the pupils taking the one course. Consequently, in attempting to facilitate all, the questions tended to become easier to cater for the less endowed and so offered no challenge to the above-average pupils.

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Eventually in 1934 in both Intermediate and Leaving Certificate Courses a new English course was introduced entitled English Language. This course was largely concerned with the acquisition of written skills and was seen as an entirely separate subject from English Literature. Although it was imaginatively impoverished in content it allowed some space for the non-academic pupil in the English curriculum. At this time in Ireland there was a prevailing hostile attitude to all things English, as already noted. While English was the vernacular of the majority of the population the state established Irish as the first official language and made it the responsibility of the Department of Education to foster the revival through the school system. Something of the intense quality of the opposition to English can be gathered from the proclamations of Professor T. J. Corcoran of University College, Dublin, who stated trenchantly: 'A command of English and of English expression is essential for Ireland and Irish Education: but the need for it should not be a ground for tolerating either English thought, or the expression of Irish thought in English in any enduring way' (Corcoran, 1922:270). Professor Corcoran was an immense influence in Irish educational thinking for many years and as a result many in positions of power in education were intent on undermining English as a subject in the schools in subtle and not so subtle ways. So in the programme for schools, 1925-26, the final note makes it clear that English is to be treated like any 'other foreign language'; the recommended reading of European authors in translation, while apparently culturally enlightened, was also a way of avoiding if possible too much immersion of the pupil in 'English thought'. Finally, there was no honours grade available in the Certificate examinations in English it was a pass subject, although honours could be obtained in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Irish and Spanish. The state of English in the secondary schools during this early period was most unsettled. By the 1940s when it was clear that the revival of the Irish language was foundering, it became explicit Government policy that English was to be deliberately down-graded in the schools. The then Minister for Education, Mr Eamonn De Valera, stated, 'we shall have to be satisfied with a less high standard in English. There is no other way for it' (Dail Eireann 1094, 27 May, 1941). The failure of the Irish revival was partially attributed to widespread reading of English literature in the secondary schools; other nationalistic groups felt equally strongly about the situation: 'The intensive study of, and critical expository command over a vast

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range of English literature, simply dripping with specifically English spirit, is a theory simply not to be endured any longer' (Ua Meacair, 1935: 123). As a result of these diverse pressures prescribed courses were reintroduced in 1941-42: the new programmes in English lacked coherence and were irremediably dull. The English Language course at Intermediate Level had just one novel and ten poems prescribed as reading material. If a pupil left school having completed the Intermediate cycle this would be his total experience of English Literature. If a pupil chose to continue his education at Leaving Certificate level he was quite unprepared to encounter the range of literature prescribed which consists of about 30 poems and a selection of essays from Goldsmith's Letters to a Citizen of the World. In the Intermediate English Literature programme and in both Leaving Certificate programmes no fiction was prescribed and the drama was represented by one Shakespearean text. Prose essays at both levels were generally uninteresting to adolescents and the selection of verse was included on nationalistic grounds, to which one would not object unduly except that quite a few of the poems were frankly of poor literary quality. The sense of the make-shift which characterises these programmes was given exemplary expression in the Syllabus for 1946-47, which refrained from even naming either the poems or authors at Leaving Certificate and simply proclaimed 'the even number series' (the 'numbers' were the numbers of the poems in the contents of the official Anthology of school). Very few in the educational context felt independent enough to protest against this blatant manipulation of the English curriculum. English teachers had no professional body at the time to represent their interests and bowed to the inevitable. There was one lone voice who protested forcefully against the deliberate negation of English and English Literature: Rev. Peter Birch, who objected to the deterioration in standards which the new courses would inevitably bring and saw the programme as a clear outcome of 'intolerant political and national prejudices' (Birch, 1944:391). He attacked the view that if Irish was to be revived English would have to suffer. 'From the purely educational point of view, the policy that would ignore the cultural possibilities of a modern language which has become naturalised and easy to assimilate, is not based on reason' (Birch, 1944:393). But the Rev. Peter Birch was a voice crying in the wilderness: these programmes continued in Irish second level schools until 1966. The state of English then during these 25 years could be described as quite moribund. An English teacher who first entered this programme as a pupil and then

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subsequently returned to teach it described both experiences as 'excruciating'! (Connolly, 1986). In the 1950s Ireland was a rather self-righteous, self-satisfied nation. The cultural mould had been forged on the anvil of revolutionary history and hardened in the isolationist policies adopted in the first 40 years of the Irish state. The schools according to the nation were effective in initiating the pupils into the national inheritance; there was no need for change or development. It was a long hard winter. Signs Of Spring In 1950 the Department of Education established a body called The Council of Education to review the state of Irish education. The Council was composed mostly of educationalists from various interest groups within the system. It took 10 years to complete the project. The delay was essentially caused by ideological incompatibility between various members and not by any lack of commitment. After such a long period of gestation one might have expected some innovatory suggestions but the report resolutely opted for the status quo. It stated that the principal objective of education was the moral, religious and cultural development of the child: social and economic perspectives were not considered by the Council. The stance was characteristically theoretical and dogmatic: 'In its deductivist approach to analysing problems, its deference to the status quo, and its isolation of educational issues from their wider social context, it is an almost perfect reflection of much contemporary thinking' (Sheehan, 1979: 62). Nevertheless, despite its conservative stance, it did make a number of recommendations about the teaching of English which gave some hope for the future. The report was unequivocally positive about English, accepting its undeniable place as the vernacular of the country. Because of this it made strong recommendations that more attention should be paid to the hitherto neglected area of oral skills, and advocated 'such activities (e.g. debates, class discussions, dramatic performances) as will encourage young people to express themselves aloud with ease, and the use of teaching aids such as the gramophone, tape-recorder and sound film-projector' (Ireland, 1960: 160).

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In relation to written English, traditional grammar instruction was still strongly recommended, albeit with more attention paid to usage rather than arid analysis in the Leaving Certificate cycle. The literary areas were generally found acceptable although broadening of the range of material was advocated. Thus the report noted that in the Intermediate Certificate English Language course there was a 'prevalence of poems of a melancholy type. The inclusion of some humorous or light verse of various periods from Chaucer to modern times would be a great improvement' (Ireland, 1960: 162). Other minor changes were advocated in the selection of prose and verse at Leaving Certificate level and they advocated that the practice of memorising verse should be curtailed. It is obvious that the Council of Education was intent on pleasing everyone and although some new moves were suggested nothing was discarded. The influence of this report was minimal; by the time it was published events in the country had progressed at such a rate that its timid suggestions were overcome by the torrents of change in Irish society. A new society was emerging in Ireland resulting from the unprecedented economic development; education long taken for granted by successive governments now came under intense scrutiny. Under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (O.E.C.D.) a six-member committee of high-level civil servants and economists was formed to examine the educational system and to report on its economic infrastructure and general efficiency in serving the needs of the 'new Ireland'. The report entitled Investment in Education (Ireland, 1966) was not flattering to the system: it found much duplication of resources, inefficient procedures, intolerable environments and alienation of pupils, particularly of the lower socio-economic groups from the school system (Ireland, 1965). Subsequent to these findings certain significant changes were initiated within Irish education. Comprehensive schools were established in certain disadvantaged areas, the vocational system was upgraded and a free education scheme for all pupils was introduced. Numbers of pupils attending second level increased by 18,000 in the year 1967 and this upward trend continued for many years subsequently. The second level system burgeoned not alone with new pupils but with problems and dilemmas of all kinds. A much broader social spectrum now was found in the classroom; many of these pupils were anxious to improve their social and economic position and saw in education the means to that end. These pupils were looking for an up-to-date forward-looking curriculum catering for diversity in abilities and needs - they were essentially

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demanding 'relevance'. The curriculum in its philosophic outlook was not based on 'relevance'; about this issue for many years a conflict waged particularly in the context of English teaching; as yet the issues have not been resolved. The Department of Education in response to the Report established Syllabus committees in various subjects. The English Committee was composed of various interest groups, teachers, inspectors, academics, trades unionists. The committee worked for a number of years to revise the whole curriculum in English and in 1966 the first innovations were introduced in the Intermediate Certificate cycle. New anthologies were published in verse, prose and short-stories, the latter a particularly successful and welcome move. These anthologies ranged quite widely over the field of English and Anglo-Irish Literature and dispensed with most of the chauvinistic material which had bedevilled the previous programme. Likewise, at Leaving Certificate level a new anthology of verse was introduced and some fiction and drama. Relatively modern authors appeared in all these anthologies but the orientation of the curriculum was still largely literary, historical and academic. Nevertheless, teachers responded enthusiastically to these new programmes and the teacher quoted earlier described the new courses as 'exhilarating'! (Connolly, 1986). Clearly in the midst of all this educational ferment English teachers were being challenged in new ways. In 1964 with the formation of The Association of Teachers of English (A.T.E.), teachers at last found a community to give a forum for discussion of their needs and ideas and equally important to give them a professional voice in the context of changes envisaged at the time or in the future. The Association immediately directed its attention to influencing the formation of the new syllabuses and also made important contributions to such controversial issues as examinations, teacher-training and the role of the Inspectorate. In 1966 the A.T.E. initiated an annual English Summer School which still continues. The A.T.E. has consistently advocated that any English programme must have as its objective the fostering of a dialectic between literary experience and pupil experience: from this encounter opportunities will issue for an endless variety of linguistic activities ranging from the functional to the poetic, through which the pupil will become truly personally literate and learn to cherish the creative power of language. In May, 1968 the Association had reason to make its voice aggressively heard when the then Minister for Education, Mr Brian Linehan, suddenly announced that the Department planned to introduce a common examination paper at Leaving Certificate level devoted solely to linguistic skills. In a statement Mr Linehan proclaimed:

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'The emphasis will be on the speaking and writing of languages . . . the children will not have to learn large slabs of Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats. The simple essay will be the aim. The policy will be tilted at how to speak and write original and simple thoughts without reference to slabs of poetry and prose' (The Irish Times, 1968, 21st June: 1). The Minister thought that the children would be much more usefully employed reading the daily newspaper rather than reading Shakespeare. This announcement was greeted with anger and dismay by the A.T.E. and by the English Syllabus Committee which had been working for years to devise the new Syllabus. Professor Denis Donoghue, University representative on the Syllabus Committee asserted: 'that in fact the new syllabuses and examinations will be worse than the old. By ''worse" I mean: enforcing lower standards, a general depression of achievement, a specific programme which caters for the lazy and the dull at the expense of the intelligent student . . . This arrangement was denounced by every member of the Syllabus Committee: we considered it a retrograde decision, calculated to reduce the amount of literature taught in schools and to depress the standard of teaching in English' (Donoghue, 1968:60). The universities announced that the Leaving Certificate Common English paper would not be acceptable for Matriculation. The weight of the opposition eventually forced the Department to modify its position and this reductionist plan for English was modified and the Common paper was not introduced. The contribution of the A.T.E. to the shaping of the present condition of English in Irish secondary schools has been considerable. It rescued English teachers in the first instance from the imprisonment of extensive grammatical exercises and memorisation which had plagued the curriculum for many years: it resisted any attempt to introduce an over-functionalised approach to the teaching of language and it confidently asserted its trinity of humanistic ideals, the power of literature, the importance of the individual person and the creativity of the word, in the teeth of much cynical opposition. English teachers owe a large debt to the A.T.E. for preserving a coherent positive view of the profession when it was under threat in this country. Professor D. J. Murphy outlines, in a review of research on English teaching, the nature of the present challenge to teachers in Irish schools and therefore to the A.T.E.: 'The argument for placing imaginative studies at the centre of the

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English curriculum has a long and respected ancestry and I would suggest it has not been invalidated by recent debate. The cultivation of imagination should continue therefore to be the primary aim of English teaching. The aesthetic model of English, however, is excessively restricted, and, if implemented, would involve a serious neglect of certain forms of linguistic competence. It is essential that a comprehensive programme of linguistic development be built into the English curriculum, so that the pupils can experience the diversity of language within the unified framework of a discipline specifically intended to further linguistic competence. The alternative concept of "language across the curriculum" is simply impractical in our present circumstances. It is particularly important that this programme ensure a balanced development of imaginative and functionalistic uses of English. The latter issue has particular urgency for us in view of our high rates of functional illiteracy. We need, also, to formulate carefully thought-out policies on the teaching of the basics and the development of oracy' (Murphy, 1985: 62). Promises Of Summer In A.T.E. 11 (1985) the editorial makes the point that it is now twenty years since any curriculum changes were introduced on a broad scale and that it is imperative that a review and overhaul of the English programme should be initiated. Although this rejuvenation is certainly needed it may be quite some time before it actually happens. The excitement of the 1960s has settled down and the in-built malady of the teaching profession, inertia, becomes more obvious from year to year. The presiding presence in Second Level education dictating the activities of many teachers at Senior Level is the understandable ambition of the pupils to acquire the necessary 'points' for university entrance. These 'points' are dependent on the grades a pupil achieves in the Leaving Certificate; this ruthless meritocratic system has ensured that most classrooms are dominated by 'Text and Test'. Only teachers with a very strong conviction and belief in their role as English teachers have managed to avoid succumbing to the demands imposed for results. It is not to be wondered at that in such a difficult context professional inertia flourishes and more lofty ideals and objectives gradually fade. This is a bleak picture but there are some glimmerings in the darkness. The report Investment in Education recommended that educational programmes needed constant revision to adapt to the changing demands of the

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individual and society. While the Department of Education has been slow in taking up this suggestion other educationalists have acted upon it, urged on by the obvious alienation of pupils from the curriculum. During the 1970s funded in various ways (frequently from E.E.C. resources) a series of pilot projects were initiated in different regions. These projects restructured the curriculum in a manner which broke down traditional boundaries between subject disciplines and redirected the curriculum towards the achievement of objectives such as life-skills, work-skills and social awareness. These projects had various titles, Social and Environmental Studies Programme (S.E.S.P.), Early School Leavers Project (E.S.L.P.), Shannon Project of Intervention for Relevant Adolescent Learning (S.P.I.R.A.L.). While none of these particular programmes were directly concerned with English, they did provide the opportunity for new, meaningful explorations of and with language on which English teachers could capitalise in their own way. There was one scheme which did more directly impinge on the English teacher. This scheme, The North Mayo Project, funded by a philanthropic organisation, The Irish Foundation for Human Development, was unique in its orientation and approach. It sought to introduce the pupils to a range of new experiences which would develop their personal resources of imagination, creativity and self-awareness. Many progressive and modernist approaches were used, such as imagery, fantasising, meditation and interpretative dance and mime. Unfortunately, the project while well intentioned and most positive in outlook was ill-fated from the start due to a complexity of social and administrative factors. The most decisive government move in the Irish Educational System for decades occurred in 1984 when a new interim body called The Curriculum and Examinations Board (C. E. B.) was established to review the whole system. It is planned that the Board will ultimately become a statutory body distinct from the Department of Education and responsible for the educational system. The Board over the last two years has been publishing a series of documents on aspects of education and has had much to say about English in the curriculum particularly in two documents, The Arts in the Curriculum (C.E.B., 1985a) and Language in the Curriculum (C.E.B., 1985b). The Arts in the Curriculum included literature as one of the arts in its introductory preamble: however, when it came to consider each individual art, while it adequately discussed the role of drama, dance, music and the

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visual arts, no detailed consideration of a rationale and programme for literature was presented. This was a most surprising and unfortunate omission, a splendid opportunity was lost to give literature a richer creative context or locus on the curriculum. Such a locus would have offered exciting professional opportunities for teachers in the way of reading, interpreting and presenting literary texts. The other document, Language in the Curriculum, has much to say on the teaching of English. The document illustrates quite clearly the degree of change which has occurred in official attitudes to English. Without reservation the document states 'through speaking English as a mother tongue, or as an exceptionally fluent second language, we can have access to another and particularly influential culture' (C.E.B., 1985b: 6). And again in the light of former attitudes the following statement is welcome,'as a small country we need to avoid the risk of cultural isolation'. On the actual teaching of English the document is quite forthright on its conception of past practice. 'Traditionally, the mother-tongue has tended to rely heavily on literature to provide the substance of its syllabuses in Irish schools. The leaving Certificate English syllabus in Rialacha agus Clar remarks: '. . . a writer's style and technique may invite, either orally or in writing, exercises in analysis, discussion, comparison and imitation. Likewise the content of a piece of writing may offer opportunities for oral and written exercises in comprehension, discussion and summary. The overall aim to be kept in view should be a fuller experience of the work studied. The final sentence leaves little room for doubt. It is the literary work which is seen as important the students' efforts in language as subsidiary. The aim of the teacher of the mother-tongue is made quite clearthe cultivation of "sound criteria of literary judgment and good taste"' (Rialacha agus Clar, 1983/84, p. 153). 'Such an approach, however admirable in itself, hardly seems sufficient to prepare the pupil to manage with the many-sided linguistic and cultural aspects of living. This approach starts from a bookish view of society and aims to preserve rather than to discover. It leads away from the important linguistic demands of contemporary life, or else towards them by an unnecessarily tortuous and circuitous route. It is inadequate, if not altogether out of date' (C.E.B., 1985b: 15). It calls for a much less academic stance and suggests: 'The context in which the mother-tongue should be studied and taught

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in school is the context in which it is used in life; not just for literary/ artistic purposes, but generally, as, for example, in the home or outside the home, in contact with the media, in private reading and reflection, in the pursuit of information, in the creation of entertainment, in the discovery of self, and in the variety of ways through which ideas, feelings and values are communicated and received, orally or aurally or in writing' (C.E.B., 1985b: 16). The document advocates that in general the teaching of English should be largely accomplished through the communicative approach, which it characterises as language always being purposefully used rather than 'practice at language'. Such an approach is best cultivated as it continues, by adapting a task-approach in the classroom and where the live process of language is continually encountered by the pupil in meaningful personal and social situations. The teacher in this changed linguistic context must not be a remote pedagogue but rather'a resource for pupils, a manager, a facilitator of learning' (p. 19). In the area of assessment it suggests that 'assessment should help learners by diagnosing weaknesses' and marks should be weighted to favour communicative ability. The document finally states that 'a communicative approach is more a matter of re-analysis than revolution' but it recognises that the reorientation of it if it is to be successful will necessitate large-scale involvement by English teachers at all levels of design and implementation. 'They should also have the opportunity to take part in curriculum projects concerned with the elaboration and piloting of appropriate syllabuses, materials, methodology and tests at primary and post-primary levels' (p. 21). The approach advocated here appears to be an honest, forthright attempt to adapt the English programme to contemporary life and to give it flexibility to suit the challenges faced by different teachers in different classrooms. Nevertheless, many teachers would have reservations about the marginalising of literature in the document. While it is not totally dismissed it is generally presented as not being of great importance. With a foresight bred from past encounters with state agencies, the A.T.E. anticipated this negation of the role of literature by the C.E.B. In the Newsletter (A.T.E., 1984) largely based on submissions from English teachers, the association expressed reservations about the initial utilitarian directives which had been given to the Board and voiced the opinion that the implications for English could be ominous. The Newsletter declared: 'In the first place it may be tempting to lessen its (English's) significance in the curriculum. Stronger still, however, will be the urge to direct the

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attention of a vast majority of pupils towards the achievement of basic communication skills, especially in the area of functional writing: the urge to move towards courses and examinations that develop proficiency in this area alone, to the exclusion of literature' (A.T.E., 1984: 2). The Newsletter editors showed a keen awareness of the manifold problems besetting English teachers in the country: it constituted the 'authoritative statement' which had been called for in A.T.E. 10. The shortcomings and imbalances of the present syllabus and the 'stultifying' examination pressures were well highlighted in a detailed and wide-ranging analysis. Many specific suggestions were made: more flexibility in literature courses and more enlightened examination procedures were strongly advocated. In the area of linguistic skills the Newsletter stressed the need for more emphasis on oral and aural skills and for the rejuvenation and enrichment of the present narrow approach to the teaching of writing. Characteristically the imaginative and aesthetic centre of English teaching was repeatedly underpinned in statements such as the following: To deprive pupils however limited their ability of access to the richness of imagination and to the most powerful source of transmitted humane experience is to rob them of a potential for growth both emotional and intellectual as well as reduce not enhance the quality of life and capabilities of leisure (A.T.E., 1984: 3). Thus while both the A.T.E. and the C.E.B. feel strongly that the English curriculum needs radical revision to meet the present day needs of pupils there is a fundamental philosophical difference evident between their proposed alternatives. However, a recently completed pilot project for the Intermediate Certificate (Lower Course) demonstrated that a creative compromise was possible. This project, largely urged on by the English Inspectors within the Department of Education, intimately involved English teachers on an action-research basis in curriculum planning and design. The material was chosen from a wide range of sources and the curriculum ranged freely over creative drama, the mass media, contemporary literature and literature for adolescents. The project was pursued in a number of schools throughout the country and culminated in assessment procedures which included continuous assessment as well as a conventional examination. The latter, however, strongly emphasised personal response rather than an academic or critical response and allowed plenty of creative space for the pupils in their answers and interpretations. While the final report in this project is not yet

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available, the writers were assured by some of those teachers who participated in the project that it was a most revitalising experience for all concerned. It would appear, then, that the multifarious strands that constitute successful English teaching are slowly being woven together in Ireland in a new pattern. By 1988 it is hoped to introduce a new anthology of contemporary verse at Leaving Certificate Level to provide an alternative to the present historically structured course. Already at this level the range of drama has been significantly enlarged by the works of modern playwrights such as O'Casey, Miller and Friel. After a slow gestation period the Second Level English Curriculum in Irish schools appears to be growing in flexibility and becoming more teacher-pupil orientated. If the promise now being revealed (and there is still much to be done) is ultimately fulfilled then English teachers will have the liberty and responsibility of presenting their subject in as challenging and creative manner. Addendum In September, 1989 a new Junior English Syllabus was initiated in all second-level schools in Ireland replacing the Intermediate Certificate Syllabus. The new syllabus was planned by a Syllabus Committee of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (formerly the Curriculum and Examinations Board). The new Syllabus is a radical reorientation of the direction of English teaching in the country. Prescription of specific texts has been omitted and teachers are free to plan programmes in their broad guidelines to suit their own pupils. The syllabus emphasises that each pupil should develop competence and awareness in the areas of personal, social and cultural literacy and that language development and literary encounters should be creatively integrated with the pupils' own experience. The traditional barrier that was perceived to exist between the culture of the English class and the culture of the child has been removed by the recommendation that much young-adult literature and the mass-media in all its forms should play a significant role in English teaching. With this syllabus English teaching in Ireland has opened an intriguing episode in its story. English teachers have been empowered significantly and given a great opportunity for professional growth. It remains to be seen whether the State agencies provide the essential supports and resources,

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specifically in the form of extensive and repeat in-service seminars, so that the vision enforcing the syllabus can be comprehensively achieved. English teachers and their pupils are going through interesting times in Ireland and the future should be one of educational debate full of potential for all concerned. References ABBS, P. 1981, English and the Arts. London: Heinemann. A.T.E. 1970, Editorial. Journal of the Association of English Teachers 1: Dublin, p. 3. 1983, Editorial. Journal of the Association of English Teachers 10: Dublin, pp. 5-6. 1984, Newsletter. Dublin. 1985, Editorial. Journal of the Association of English Teachers 11: Dublin. BIRCH, P. 1944, Secondary School English, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 63: pp. 391-95. CONFERENCE OF CONVENT PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN IRELAND 1975, Evaluation of the new curriculum for primary schools. Dublin: Conference of Convent Primary Schools in Ireland. CONNOLLY, I. 1986, Senior English Teacher, St Angela's College, Cork, Ireland, in conversation with writer, September 1986. COOLAHAN, J. 1977, Three eras of reading in Irish National Schools. In V. GREANEY (ed.), Studies in Reading. Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, pp. 12-26. 1981, Irish Education: History and Structure. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. COOLAHAN, Jr. 1982, Developments in English Reading in Irish National Schools, 1937-1977. In D. SWAN (ed.), Perspectives in Reading. Dublin: The Glendale Press. CORCORAN, J. 1922, How English may be taught without Anglicising, The Iris Monthly 51, Dublin: pp. 296-73. CURRICULUM AND EXAMINATIONS BOARD (C.E.B.) 1984, Issues and Structures in Education: A Consultative Document. Dublin. 1985a, The Arts in the Curriculum. Dublin. 1985b, Language in the Curriculum: A Curriculum and Examinations Board Discussion Paper. Dublin. DE BUITLEIR, S. 1985, Towards a General Theory of Curriculum and Evaluation. Dublin: Department of Education. DE VALERA, E. 1941, (May 27th) Proceedings of Dail Eireann, Cols. 1094-95. Dublin. DIXON, J. 1966, Growth Through English. Reading: National Association for the Teaching of English. DONOGHUE, D. 1968, University Professor, Studies LXIV. Dublin: pp. 60-65. FONTES, P. J. and KELLAGHAN, T. 1977a, Incidence and correlates of illiteracy in Irish primary schools. Irish Journal of Education. 11. 1977b, The New Primary School Curriculum: Its Implementation and Effects. Dublin: The Educational Research Centre, St Patrick's College.

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GREANEY, V. 1980, Factors related to amount and type of leisure-time reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 15. 1986, Reading: How are we doing. Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Reading. IRELAND 1933, Department of Education. Notes for Teachers, English. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1937, The Constitution of Ireland. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1954, Department of Education. Report of the Council of Education. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1956, Department of Education. Notes for Teachers, English. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1960, Report of the Council of Education. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1966, Department of Education. Investment in Education. Report of the survey team appointed by the Minister of Education in October, 1962. Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1971, Department of Education. Primary School Curriculum. Teacher's Handbook (2 vols.). Dublin: The Stationery Office. 1982, Department of Education. English in the Primary School: Survey Report. Dublin: The Stationery Office. IRISH NATIONAL TEACHERS' ORGANISATION 1976, Primary School Curriculum: Curriculum Questionnaire analyses. Dublin. KELLY, S.G. and MCGEE, P. 1967, Survey of reading comprehension. New Research in Education, 1. KILLEEN, J. 1984, Contrasting approaches to the teaching of English in some Irish primary schools: and Pupil outcomes in leisure time reading and in writing. Unpublished doctoral dissertations, University College, Dublin. MACNAMARA, J. 1966, Bilingualism and Primary Education. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. MURPHY, D. J. 1985, English: Current aims and needs. A.T.E. 11. Dublin: pp. 50-63. NELSON, L. 1973, Chairman's Address Summer School 1972. A.T.E. 4. Dublin: pp. 81-89. SHEEHAN, J. 1979, Education and Society: Ireland 1945-70. J. Lee Gill (ed.) (pp. 61-72) Dublin: Macmillan. The Irish Times (1968, July 4). Dublin. TRAVERS, M. 1976, A second replication of a survey of reading comprehension in Dublin city schools. Irish Journal of Education, 16. UA MEACAIR, A. 1935, Reorganising Irish Education, The Catholic Bulletin 25. Gill: Dublin: pp. 120-25. WARD, N. 1982, A fourth survey of reading comprehension in Dublin city national schools. Irish Journal of Education, 16.

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4 The Swinging Pendulum: Teaching English In The USA, 1945-1987 John S. Simmons, Robert E. Shafer and Linda K. Shadiow When key documents and retrospectives have been published on the teaching of English in the United States, their titles have consistently acknowledged a struggle: Freedom and Discipline (Report on the Commission on English, 1965), Tradition and Reform (Applebee, 1974), Consensus and Dissent (Farmer, 1986). The changing social and political fabric of the United States has pushed the operational definition of English teaching first toward one end of the continuum and then the other. The interim periods of momentary balance were usually disrupted by some socio/political event that reverberated beyond the political arena and into the educational one. 'Innovation', a movement toward one end of the philosophical continuum or the other, was sure to follow. In a 1966 article (whose title also acknowledges the perpetual struggle 'Innovation and Revolution'), Frank E. Ross points out that the original meaning of the word 'innovation' is not 'nova', or 'something new' but instead is 'change'. And 'change' implies 'choice'. Reviewing the teaching of English in the United States from 1945 to the present takes in changes and the subsequent choices occurring post-World War II through Sputnik, Vietnam, civil rights reforms, renewed social activism, and re-emphasised conservatism. At every juncture both choices and changes were made in the path of the teaching of English; some innovations were renovations some innovations were new. The beginning lines of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Road Not Taken' serve as a reminder of the endless possibilities a re-examination of history affords. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood

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And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth . . . Post-War Politics: 1945-1950 Many educators saw wartime service between 1941 and 1945. When they returned to their schools and classrooms they found that the progressive education of the 1930s still formed the basic philosophical directions for schooling in American society; the Seven Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (formulated by the National Education Association's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education in 1918) were still dominant in the thinking of American educators: (1) health, (2) command of fundamental processes, (3) worthy home membership, (4) vocation, (5) citizenship, (6) worthy use of leisure, (7) ethical character. The latest translation of this progressivism and its seven cardinal principles was formulated into a new report, Education for All American Youth, published by the National Education Association in 1944. The report recommended that most youth continue their education through high school and junior college, and urged educators to recognise the educational value of practical lessons. This approach was a continuation of the spirit represented in many of the progressive statements of the 1920s and 1930s, and was a natural post-war rallying point. According to Education for All American Youth, the focus of schooling was to be 'on the present lives of youth, on the improvement of community lives and on such practical matters as competence and occupations, citizenship, and family living' (p.12). Many traditional academics were disturbed at the inherent threat this approach seemingly represented to traditional academic disciplines. Thus, the period from 1944 to the late 1950s spurred a 'great debate' in American education during which many teachers trained in liberal arts and science disciplines found it increasingly difficult to teach within this 'life adjustment' approach. This 'great debate' accelerated between 1949 and the mid-1950s when books like Mortimer Smith's And Madly Teach (1949) complained that progressive education (as represented by the life adjustment movement) had become 'the official philosophy of American public education' and characterised teachers, administrators and schools of education as having a 'truly amazingly uniformative opinion regarding the aims, the content and the methods of education'. Books and rhetoric such as this prompted the formation of organisations like the Council for Basic Education which entered the fray in 1956 and championed educational conservatism.

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The membership of the Council for Basic Education was made up largely of professors teaching at various universities, editors, journalists, and several self-appointed critics who feared the takeover of all public education by Deweyan apostles and, as they saw it, the inevitable 'watering down' of the curriculum: 'The Council for Basic Education was established in the belief that the purpose of education is the harmonious development of the mind, the will, and the conscience of each individual so that he may use to the fullest his intrinsic powers and shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship . . . It insists that only by the maintenance of high academic standards can the ideal of democratic education be realized' (Lynch & Evans, 1963). In two monographs which led to the founding of the Council for Basic Education, And Madly Teach by Mortimer Smith (1949) and Educational Wastelands by Arthur Bestor (1985), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) was upbraided as one of the chief proponents of creeping mediocrity in public school curriculum development. J. N. Hook (1979) in his personal history of NCTE, A Long Way Together, describes English teachers' point of view on 'education for all American youth' and the 'life adjustment' emphasis in American education during this period: '. . . in general the life adjusters downplayed subject matter except when it contributed to the individual's self-knowledge or to relationships with others . . . The life adjusters to summarise somewhat unfairly wanted to teach literature and composition for their possible contributions to such youthful concerns as getting along with one's family, dating, making friends, and developing one's personality or to the more adult concern of getting and keeping a job'. The life adjustment movement inevitably affected much teaching of English. But it was by no means universally accepted. In 1945, a new NCTE Commission on the English Curriculum was appointed under the leadership of Dora V. Smith, Professor of English Education at the University of Minnesota. Members of the Commission were divided over the 'life adjustment' proposals and, because of the problems and debates, the Commission did not issue its first publication, The English Language Arts until 1952. This publication defined the English Language Arts as a product of the progressive tradition proposing 'to develop in students the ability to think and communicate in the English language and to understand the humanizing values of literature'. Its goals were to develop 'the linguistic abilities and the awareness of the values of life which are required by the fully mature civilized human being' (p.8). The Commission proposed that 'a

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reasonable chance of achieving these goals' in the curriculum 'must be developed in the light of two major guiding principles': (1) using language power as an integral part of all growth, and (2) developing language power in social situations. Because of this emphasis on the process and utility of English (e.g. reading, writing, and speaking) instead of the content of English (e.g. literature and language study), The English Language Arts (Smith, 1952) and its five companion volumes struck fear into the hearts of those teachers and professors representing the disciplines of language and literature. An early reaction by Professor Ruth Wallerstein of the University of Wisconsin demonstrated this: 'The report does not clearly enough define our objects as teachers of the language arts. Yet surely a clear statement of what an educated citizen is, is our starting point. To keep clearly in mind what those subjects give, however taught, measures whether we are using fruitfully our knowledge of the individual and the stages of his development: and it must strictly determine our priorities of time' (Wallerstein, 1953:371). This single early criticism soon expanded into many. As one former President of the National Council of Teachers of English stated, 'when the report arrived on Washington Square (the headquarters of the Modern Language Association of America) it was assumed to be a major disaster' (Letter from Albert Markwardt to Robert E. Shafer, March 14, 1968). Throughout the decade, the battle raged between the forces of the progressives and the conservatives, largely in counterpointed publications and at national professional meetings. The cold war and the pervasive McCarthyisms of the 1950s provided an atmosphere conducive to such battles. To The Eve Of Dartmouth: 1950-1965 1950s Political Context In the 1950s, the US English curriculum reflected the mood of the nation and that mood had evolved to a taciturn one. The Eisenhower years were years of cooling off: from the intensity of the World War, from the frustrations of the Cold War, from the puzzlement of a 'no-win' war in Korea. The country needed to take a deep breath from all of this. 'Don't

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rock the boat' seemed to be the watchword phrase as the decade entered mid-stream. In 1954, the Supreme Court entered its historic decision on Brown vs. Kansas, a ruling that invalidated the longstanding 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which had established separate-but-equal schools in the nation. The long overdue Civil Rights movement began in earnest. One of the most important elements of the civil rights movement was the desegregation of the nation's schools and, as one viewed the public school curriculum, English took a position of vital importance. School instruction in English classes provided the keys to developing the literacy skills vital to Blacks' abilities to procure voting privileges and prepare themselves for jobs. As access to a meaningful education in public schools became a top priority of civil rights' leaders, the question of the appropriateness of the English curriculum loomed larger and larger. Philosophical Context Senior high teachers, trained to teach (and experienced with) older adolescents had developed a heavily contentoriented programme usually dominated by formal, academic literature study in a predictable pattern: genres in the tenth grade, American literature in the eleventh grade, and British literature in the twelfth. This was supplemented by some instruction in language and composition, but primarily in the teaching of the five-paragraph theme and Latinate grammar. In the 1950s the pragmatic life-adjusters were of limited influence. At a time when the civil rights movement was challenging the schools to adjust to a 'new' population of students, many theorists supported a kind of status quo curriculum in which grammar dominated the landscape in the earlier grades and then gave way to literature in the later ones. Book reports, which were to the traditionalists a convenient blending of literature and writing, represented the bulk of literature study in the junior high years. Senior high literary study was dominated by the so-called 'classics'. Another point of view, however, was increasingly present. In direct contrast with this academically conservative philosophy was that of the contemporary pragmatists (descended philosophically from the progressives and the 'life adjusters'). These pragmatists produced a sizeable amount of professional literature on the nature and goals of the English curriculum in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The position was advocated but never adopted by the majority of English teachers. Using the philosophy of John Dewey (1938), particularly as expressed

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in Experience and Education, as a point of departure, they advocated the position that the function of English curriculum was to provide young people with school experiences which mirrored those of life itself (e.g. Wilbur Hatfield's An Experience Curriculum in English, 1935). Although this position was advocated by an articulate, visible minority, including the leaders of the National Council of Teachers of English (and in its publications like the five-volume English Language Arts), it was not adopted nor widely practised by the mainstream of classroom teachers. These conflicting forces were at work in attempting to determine the shape of the English curriculum in the mid 1950s. Two manifestations of this struggle can be seen in the 'grammar controversy' and in certain movements in literature pedagogy found throughout the nation's schools during the period. Language Instruction During this period the traditional, prescriptive method of language instruction was challenged in the textbook arena and in professional debates by the advocates of the structural approach. A series of questions about the nature and purpose of language instruction were shaped by varying professional points of view, research, and social issues of the day. The place of traditional, Latinate grammar had grown in significance in the English curricula throughout the twentieth century. During the 1930s and 40s, one particular language textbook series, English in Action by Arthur Tressler (1925), was the one most used nationwide. Some teachers followed its rules, examples, and exercises with near-religious fervour. Beginning in the late 1940s, however, the Tressler text was gradually replaced by a series written by John Warriner (1982), English Grammar and Composition, that clearly implied a link between the study of formal grammar and the development of the writing abilities of young people. Despite more than 50 years of research to the contrary, many teachers believed that grammar study had a direct, positive' effect on students' abilities in reading, speaking and writing. By 1955, this belief had become solidly entrenched across the country. Members of the teaching profession took sides in this controversy. The topic continues to be one which is the subject of heated debate even today at local, state and national professional meetings. The impact of subsequent research, all of which confirms earlier findings, has met with a surprising amount of indifference, even hostility and indignation, within the ranks of the teachers and citizens.

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In the mid 1950s, however, another factor was introduced: the emergence of structural or descriptive grammar in both the professional literature and the school curricula of some communities. First elaborated by Charles C. Fries (1940) in his book, American English Grammar, the basically inductive, oral-to-written approach to grammatical analysis grew in visibility during the ensuing years. Published professional materials (e.g. Markwardt, 1967; Francis, 1963; Gleason, 1961) however, had very little impact on classroom teachers as a whole, but did add another voice to the debate. And then in 1958, Paul Roberts published Understanding English, a text that presented a simplified explanation of the nature and processes of structural grammar. The resulting attention from university linguists, English educators and curriculum supervisors on all sides prompted the publication of Patterns of English (1956), a text designed for direct use in the high school classroom. As more teachers tried out the new structural and descriptive approach and as more English educators discussed it in their methods courses, the questions it raised challenging the traditional approach multiplied: 'Which grammar is best to teach?' 'What good does the learning of grammar do?' 'What is the place of usage in the course of English study?' For many years, usage was directly tied to grammar study, its rules based on those of Latinate, prescriptive grammar. The University of Wisconsin scholar, Robert C. Pooley, in Teaching English Usage (1946), introduced usage as a linguistic concept (a concept closer to the descriptive rather than prescriptive approach) and recommended the identification of 'appropriate levels of usage' instead of the 'Doctrine of Correctness' in usage teaching. (This doctrine had been created by British grammarians of the eighteenth century and had also been disseminated by Noah Webster in the Colonies.) And so another question was added to the professional debate: 'Which approach to usage is best to teach?' While both sides believed they could authoritatively answer the questions, none of the questions were resolved. In a related curricular area, the teaching of writing during this period was either shoved 'under the rug' or placed on the 'back burner'. Many teachers assigned a few themes, usually on such innocuous subjects as 'My Summer Vacation' or 'Why I am Going to College,' evaluated them with red pencil overkill and called that writing instruction. Others taught formal grammatical elements: labelling parts of speech, labelling parts of sentences, diagramming sentences and called that composition instruction. Still others assigned no writing at all to avoid the burden of heavy

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paper load. As the end of this decade neared, composition in the public schools of the United States was in considerable difficulty. Literature Instruction Movement in literature instruction posed fewer dramatic confrontations than did language instruction. There was one area of controversy, however, and it has persisted to the present day much as the 'role of grammar' issue has in language instruction. During the mid 1950s, most of the debate on literary scholarship centred on historical approaches versus those of explication de texte. While the proponents of these two formidable schools of thought were 'squaring off' on university campuses and at meetings of the Modern Language Association of America (the principal scholarly organisation in the fields of modern languages and literature, including English), another force was gaining strength in the public schools. This force was in evidence largely in the junior high schools which, having had to evolve their own curriculum from the ground floor, had no tradition of literary choices to fall back on. Some literary bill of fare had to be found which would introduce students to literature and, at the same time. provide an appropriate transition for early adolescents from the reading to the study of literature. By the 1940s there were some unexpected rumblings on the horizon of literature for young people. A series of 'junior novels' written by serious authors expressly for a young adult audience began to emerge. Most of these novels attempted to develop significant themes around the world of adolescence, themes of the adolescent's growing up process through such milieu as sports, animals, travel, history and general adventure tales. Young adults responded with enthusiasm: teachers responded with hesitancy; critics flatly denied the value of the genre; and, as might be expected, young adult literature drew immediate fire from the Council for Basic Education. Critical criteria for judging such works began to take shape in the late 1950s with professional books examining the merits of the genre (Dwight Burton's 1959 text, Literature Study in the High Schools) and the merits of the books themselves (Dorothy Petitt's 1960 'A Study of the Qualities of Literary Excellence Which Characterizes Selected Fiction for Younger Adolescents'). This would culminate in the formulation of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the early 1970s and the publication of the quarterly journal, ALAN Review, in 1978.

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School Integration On September 23, 1957, Little Rock Central High School (Arkansas) was forcibly desegregated when 1,000 US soldiers accompanied a small number of frightened Black students through the front doors of the heretofore allwhite school. Little Rock caused a fundamental change to take place in American education because the vast majority of newly integrated Black youngsters proved to be woefully unprepared academically to meet the demands of their new schools. And at the centre of this problem lay their marked inability to handle the English language in a school setting. The responses of integrated schools to this illiteracy problem were frequently slow and inept, and the problem was compounded by the need to integrate a large number of poorly trained Black English teachers into these schools. But that change was delayed with the launching by the Soviet Union of an unmanned space satellite, October 4, 1957. This scientific/technological event sent immediate shock waves through the US education establishment and turned the attention of educators and particularly English educators away from the pressing needs of newly integrated schools. Soon after the Sputnik launching, the US Congress created its first National Defense Education Act (NDEA) whose main purpose was to support the public school curriculum in science, mathematics and foreign languages. In that legislation, the National Science Foundation was established to co-ordinate this massive improvement enterprise. While the discipline of English was left out of this initial support effort, leaders in that field soon began to stir. Basic Issues Conference The National Council of Teachers of English became preoccupied with galvanising support for change in the English curriculum. J.N. Hook and John Gerber joined with George Winchester Stone of the Modern Language Association in arranging a series of conferences on the pressing needs of the English curriculum. Eventually the American Studies Association and the College English Association joined the effort. Of the 28 participants invited to attend this conference series, 23 were college or university professors of English. This heavy preponderance of college English teachers is significant and would show up again at the Dartmouth Seminar in the 1960s. The strong academic tone of the conference became clear in its main document (described in 'The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English,' in English Journal, September 1959). Participants developed a list of 35 basic issues, each framed as a key question and amplified by related questions

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in this way the conference sessions called for continued collaboration and dialogue. Of these questions, the first two are the most significant and general: 1. What is 'English'? We agree generally that English composition, language and literature are within our province, but we are uncertain whether our boundaries should include world literature in translation, public speaking, journalism, listening, remedial reading . . . Some of these activities admittedly promote the social development of the individual. But does excessive emphasis on them result in the neglect of that great body of literature which can point the individual's development in more significant directions? 2. Can basic programmes in English be devised that are sequential and cumulative from the kindergarten through the graduate school? Can agreement be reached upon a body of knowledge and set of skills as standard at certain points in the curriculum, making due allowance for flexibility of planning, individual differences, and patterns of growth? . . . What assumptions, if any, should the teacher at any level be able to make about the training his students have received at lower levels? How much responsibility does the teacher at any level have to prepare his students for the next higher level? With these two questions and their answers, a trend was established in the theorising about the teaching of English, which would last for the better part of ten years. The answer to Basic Issue No. 1 set in motion a curriculum concept called the 'tri-component', or 'tripod' model; i.e. English is language, literature and composition and nothing else. This model was also to become the lightning rod for federal support in the next decade. The response to Basic Issue No. 2 was provided in the work of Jerome Bruner in theory and the work of several Curriculum Study Centres in practice. The main text to emerge from the conference was Issues, Problems, and Approaches in the Teaching of English by George Winchester Stone (1961), but the bulk of the book is a series of articles on linguistic and literary study, none of which were outcomes of the Basic Issues conference. College Entrance Examination Board's Commission On English In 1959, the prestigious College Entrance Examination Board, an organisation which sets academic standards for all secondary schoolspublic and private preparing students for higher education, appointed for the first time a Commission on English to propose standards of achievement for college preparatory students. While this Commission was disbanded only a few years later, it left its imprint on curricular thinking primarily

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because it was clearly in step with the hyped-up academic, beat-the-Russians spirit of the times. During the early 1960s it would produce position statements, underwrite summer institutes on college campuses for experienced high school English teachers, and publish, in 1965, a text which set the pattern for hundreds of federally sponsored summer English institutes to follow. 1960s Political Context The election of John Kennedy as President breathed new life into the spirits of American progressive intellectuals in general and within the English teaching ranks as well. The domestic issue which commanded most of President Kennedy's attention was Civil Rights, and most centred on school desegregation. After President Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan who was committed to integration of American society and to using federal dollars to cope with social ills, was sworn in as Kennedy's successor. Under Johnson, the far-ranging Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The impact of these events on support for English instruction was substantial indeed. Out of the Civil Rights legislation came huge amounts of money for the improvement of basic literacy skills among disadvantaged groups, especially Blacks in the Deep South, and for the funding of new instructional materials. The greatest emphasis was on the training of teachers already employed in the nation's public school systems. Philosophical Context Coincident with Kennedy's election in November of 1960 James R. Squire was installed as executive secretary of the NCTE. Given the spirit of the times, Squire was the ideal leader of American English teachers of that era. He was soon on the move to establish bridges of formal contact (in a manner similar to the co-operative efforts reflected in the Basic Issues Conference of the 1950s) with the Modern Language Association, other national professional English-related organisations (e.g. College English Association and American Studies Association), the National Association for the Teaching of English in the United Kingdom and the US Office of Education. One of Squire's efforts, NCTE's Committee on the National Interest, led to the publication of a portrait of the status of the profession that was instrumental in convincing government and business leaders to lend financial support to a myriad of projects. The framers of the study, The National Interest and the Teaching of

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English (Committee on National Interest, 1961), placed great emphasis on the literacy needs of a modern, technologically progressing society, the need of society to transmit its cultural heritage via well-taught English courses, and the need to recognise the critical role played by the subject of English in school success as well as post-school success. In making its case, the document reported basic findings about the status of public school English instruction. The National Interest and the Teaching of English revealed: 1. As many as 60% of currently employed English teachers had not completed a college major in English. 2. About 25% of those teachers had received one course in English linguistics and fewer than 10% were acquainted with any recent research in English linguistics or language learning. 3. About 50% had received a course in composition beyond the required freshman offering. 4. About 50% had been given a course in English methods related to their level of teaching. The timing of this published report could not have been more propitious. The culturally oriented President and a Democratic Congress turned a sympathetic ear to these announced needs and problems. Federal support soon became available in unprecedented amounts, and the result was the initiation of a series of projects, conferences, and initiatives that built on the approach and content of the Basic Issues Conference and built toward the AngloAmerican Seminar on the Teaching of English the Dartmouth Conference of 1965. Project English In September 1961, the Congress authorised money for the improvement of English instruction. The goals were outlined for a three-part approach to such funding called 'Project English'. The three kinds of projects were: (1) Individual Research Projects to be conducted by scholars to assess the impact of innovative approaches to English instruction on young people; (2) Demonstration Centres designed to implement the curricula developed by colleges or universities linked with co-operating public schools; (3) Curriculum Study Centres located at various colleges or universities and designed to develop experimental curricula related to certain levels and/or components of the English discipline. The number of individual research projects that were funded was relatively small and the number of demonstration centres was also limited.

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The most broadly developed and heavily funded component of Project English was that of the Curriculum Study Centres. Before describing them, however, it is necessary to describe an educational conference and resulting text which profoundly affected the philosophy of many of those centres. Woods Hole Conference The advocates of a sequential, articulated, cumulative, spiral curriculum in English found strong support in Jerome S. Bruner's enormously popular and influential The Process of Education (1960), a report which emerged from a conference of 35 scientists and educators who had gathered at Woods Hole on Cape Cod to consider ways to improve the teaching of science in the elementary and secondary schools. Bruner noted 'a renewed interest in complex learning of a kind that one finds in schools, learning designed to produce general understanding of the structure of a subject matter and world where changing social, cultural and political conditions continually alter the surroundings and the goals of schools and their students'. Bruner emphatically asserted that literature as well as the sciences and social sciences could be taught with an emphasis upon the intuitive grasp of ideas and upon the use of basic ideas. In his explanation of the spiral curriculum, Bruner specifically attacked the problem of teaching literature: 'If it is granted, for example, that it is desirable to give children an awareness of the meaning of human tragedy and a sense of compassion for it, is it not possible at the earliest appropriate age to teach the literature of tragedy in a manner that illuminates but does not threaten?' Because Bruner's description of the spiral curriculum was intellectually exciting, because he offered a framework for the kind of sequence called for by the Basic Issues Conference, and because he addressed himself directly to the teaching of English in the schools, accounts of this period (like Shugrue, 1968) cite the enormous impact of his theories on the curriculum work done by the curriculum study centres in English. This was the work that would undergird the curriculum study centres being funded through the US Department of Education. Curriculum Study Centre Twenty-two study centres were eventually funded through Project English. A summary description of the work of a few of the centres illustrates the scope of their activities. At the University of Oregon the focus was on putting theory into practice in the field of English teaching; at the University of Minnesota Brunerian thought was applied to language teach-

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ing; at Hunter College in New York the teaching of urban adolescents was the central concern; at the University of Nebraska the spiral curriculum was developed for a K-12 sequence; at Florida State University, options for junior high school curriculum were the focus. The Centre at the University of Oregon (under the direction of Professor Albert Kitzhaber) developed a tricomponent curriculum (language, literature and composition) grades seven through twelve. The overall approach was sequential and cumulative in the spirit of the Brunerian spiral, but the project was clearly developed for more able students. The University of Minnesota Center (Stanley B. Kegler was the director of record and Harold Allen was its spiritual father) developed a language-centred curriculum for grades seven through twelve. The overall approach was Brunerian, but the theorist who was most closely followed in the selection of content was the linguist H.A. Gleason (An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, 1961). The concept of language to be explored was a broad one embodying historical, sociological, psychological and semantic dimensions as well as grammatical ones. The writers in this project developed weekly units of instruction for each grade level, units that reflected contemporary linguistic scholarship and were quite technical in nature. The Hunter College Center in New York (directed by Marjorie B. Smiley) developed English methods and materials appropriate for junior high school students whose achievement in English had been diminished by environmental, largely socio-economic, disadvantages. This was one of the few centres which did not purport to be Brunerian in nature. The writers developed a series of anthologies centred on literature dealing with personal, familial and neighbourhood themes. Language and composition activities were to grow out of these readings. Perhaps the most ambitious project of all was the one designed at the University of Nebraska. Its directors were Paul Olson, an English professor, and Frank Rice, a veteran high school English teacher and department head from a Nebraska high school. The centre was unique in that its goal was to develop a sequential and cumulative curriculum from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Moreover, the directors first trained 44 teachers representing all grade levels and from all corners of that large, sparsely populated state in a summer institute and then coordinated with these teachers in disseminating their courses of instruction statewide. Their main premise was that all composition activity should grow out of literary and linguistic study. Their materials were extremely sophisticated from early grades upward.

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The Florida State University Center (directed by Dwight Burton) took as its point of departure, the English curriculum in junior high school that had been a chaotic mix of diverse elements from its beginnings in the mid 1940s. Thus, the writers put together three curricula, grades seven through nine: a tri-component model, a model based on themes, and a Brunerian-based model. These three models were taught to students of average ability in six Florida junior high schools. At the end of the ninth grade curriculum all students plus a control group of 50 students of similar ability levels were given nine tests on various phases of English designed by a psychometrician with input from the Centre staff. Each of the 22 curriculum study centres did have unique aspects, but they also had much in common that reflected the tenor of the professional times. While generalisations are always suspect, a few of those that can legitimately be made about the study centres as a whole illustrate their relationship to the professional and political contexts of the period: 1. Most followed the sequential-cumulative thinking of Bruner. 2. Most emphasised a tri-component model of English instruction. 3. Most developed materials for students of at least average and usually above-average ability. 4. Most sought only to produce materials. Only the centre at Florida State proposed the goal of testing approaches, and only that centre did so in a systematic manner. 5. Most established their target audience as students in secondary schools (grades seven through twelve; ages 1217). 6. Most produced materials that were 'teacher proof'; i.e. few classroom teachers were ever involved in either the writing or the evaluation of the materials. 7. Most did little with the treatment or use of adolescent (young adult) fiction in the development of their overall literature scheme. 8. Most featured instruction in transformational-generative grammar as their main element in linguistic instruction. During the mid 1960s, the work of the Curriculum Study Centres was disseminated to virtually all interested universities or school systems (although many universities and school systems were either oblivious or indifferent to the whole project). In 1965 the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English supported by a grant from the US Office of Education formed the English Institute Materials Center (based at New York University) which disseminated materials from all the centres to summer teacher institutes (see NDEA Institutes, p. 106).

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Allerton Park Conference Project English funds also provided the major portion of funding for a meeting of 88 English department chairs from leading colleges and universities throughout the country. The Allerton Park Conference (held in Monticello, Illinois) directed its attention to the responsibilities of English departments for the preparation of teachers for the public schools. While college English department chairs made up the great majority of participants, a few English educators (among them J.N. Hook, James R. Squire and Dwight Burton) also participated. The first of the 11 resolutions adopted by the group, titled 'The General Obligation of the Profession,' characterises the extent of their intended involvement in English Education: 'The preparation of teachers of English and their continuing education as teachers are among the important responsibilities of college and university departments of English. These responsibilities may call for the development of sustained programs of teacher education . . . Such efforts to strengthen the teaching of English should be accepted as professional obligations . . .' Conference On English Education The Allerton Park Conference demonstrated the emerging interest shown by traditional English department academicians at institutions of higher education. With this support, English educators (led by Squire, Burton, Kegler and Ingrid Strom) arranged for a 1963 organisational meeting of a Conference on English Education under the auspices of NCTE. The rationale for the formation of this group was reported later that year by NCTE president David H. Russell (1963: 3-4): 'A preliminary inquiry by the National Council of Teachers of English revealed that some 1,150 persons throughout the United States have, as part of their academic assignment, had responsibility for students in ''methods courses" in the teaching of English . . . Although the Council has always been concerned with English education in the broad sense, the Executive Committee felt that the time had come for a study of problems specifically focused on the preparation of teachers of English'. The following year the Conference on English Education became an official subgroup of NCTE. Language Instruction In the late 1950s, the work of Noam Chomsky (1957) (Syntactic

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Structures) and Paul Roberts (1967) (English Sentences) brought added perspectives to the linguistics component of English with the transformational-generative theory. This decade felt the impact of that earlier work. Chomsky was heralded as the creator of a new grammar (one which reflected the truly contemporary nature of English language systems in a way that the traditional Latinate system surely could not), and Roberts published English Sentences, the same type of explanation of this grammar that his earlier Understanding English had provided for the structural approach. The difficulty of translating Chomsky's theories into comprehensible English prose became a major issue during those years. In 1965, Indiana University linguist, Owen Thomas, published a text for people who sought to implement the transformational-generative approach into their teaching (Transformational Grammar and the Teaching of English). Who could know then that by the end of the decade none of these new texts would exist in revised editions, that no new translators or popularisers of the system would emerge, and that, by 1977, a revised Warriner & Griffith's English Grammar and Composition (with its Latinate, structural approach) would be breaking all sales records in the public school textbook industry? While serious concern with the writing skills of young people was largely missing from this era as it had been in the previous one, the publication of an NCTE document Research in Written Composition (1963) by Richard Braddock, David Lloyd-Jones and Lowell Schoer of the University of Iowa, provided reviews of hundreds of research efforts completed during previous decades and described in detail the best of them. Its main conclusions, however, were that most of this research was flawed, that it pointed to no consistently rewarding practices in the teaching of writing. Literature Instruction Two literary footnotes to the early years of the 1960s foreshadowed concerns that would garner attention in the next decade. In 1964, James Squire published an NCTE research monograph, The Response of Adolescents While Reading Four Short Stories, describing problems and processes in the interaction between tenth graders and that literary genre. This research report was published at the height of the academic explication de texte spirit in professional writing on the teaching of literature in public schools, and in that context the reader-response emphasis seemed clearly out of step with the times. More than a decade later, it would become widely regarded as one of the documents precursory to the reader response era of the present day. English Journal editor of the time, Richard Alm (1987),

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also cites the importance of the continuing work of Louise Rosenblatt whose journal articles in the 1960s amplified her 1938 work, Literature as Exploration. The book was republished in 1968 and has been characterised as 'a beacon for two generations of English teachers in its clear insistence that well-selected literature is an experience for the reader because it uses his uniquely human capacity to sympathize, to identify with the experiences of others' (Lodge, 1977: 132-3). In 1962, the NCTE's Committee on the Right to Read published a small pamphlet, The Students' Right to Read, a concise statement on an emerging problem of the times, censorship of literary choices in public (largely secondary) school English classrooms. In a 1957 Supreme Court ruling (Roth vs. U.S.), the decision had included the statement that 'All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion have full protection of the First Amendment guarantees unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important areas'. This ruling did not, however, have the effect of dismissing all obscenity cases. And in the next decade, the Supreme Court would hand down a ruling with new guidelines on the meaning of 'obscenity' that would allow local standards to prevail, even if something might be acceptable in another state. In the 1960s, though, few teachers paid much heed to the threat which prompted the publication of The Student's Right to Read. Within fifteen years' time, however, the ultra-conservative movement would be well under way and US teachers would be closely scanning Ken Donelson's 1972 revision of the pamphlet for an articulate response. In the 1970s and 1980s, the attention of professional organisations (e.g. American Library Association, Association of American Publishers, National Council of Teachers of English) and the work of individuals within the profession (e.g. Ken Donelson, 1977; Ed Jenkinson, 1980; Lee Buress & Ed Jenkinson, 1983) would continue to alert classroom teachers to the magnitude of the problem and to provide guidance for defending intellectual freedom. National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Institutes Between 1965 and 1969 the NDEA Institutes for English, Reading, and Social Studies teachers, as well as for those who taught disadvantaged youth, took place. These summer institutes were held on college and university campuses and taught, for the most part, by faculty from that level. The English institutes evolved at the height of the tri-component theory. Therefore, most programmes consisted of three courses: one in

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modern linguistics, another in new rhetoric, and a third in literary theory. Frequently, there was some kind of 'curriculum laboratory' tacked on as an afternoon offering. The institutes were well-attended during the four years of their existence and while they stand as another example of the efforts going on to improve the teaching of English, they did little to create fundamental change in the ongoing curricula of their participants' schools. The typical NDEA Summer Institute participant went back to his/her school and went on with the status quo programme of study as if nothing had happened. Freedom And Discipline The academic, tri-component conception of English rose to its probable zenith during 1965. At the annual NCTE meeting in Boston, John H. Fisher, Executive Secretary of MLA, urged his university colleagues who were involved with preparing English teachers to 'pursue significant research and scholarship and not allow the humdrum duties of your office to deter you from that quest'. In the proceedings publication of the same conference (Burton's English Education as a Scholarly Discipline 1965), Dwight Burton declared that 'English education as a scholarly discipline has been long arriving, but it has arrived'. Probably the most significant document to appear in print during that year, however, was the text Freedom and Discipline in English by the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB). The direction taken by the theorists to move the curriculum toward 'excellence' in the narrowly academic sense of the word found its accumulated voice in this document: 'What is English? . . . the Commission's purpose was to improve the teaching of English in America's schools and colleges . . . to propose standards of achievement for college preparatory students and to suggest ways of meeting them . . . experience with students in the College Board Advanced Placement Programme continues to reveal that better teaching of able students affects the whole school. The Commission's efforts, then, though aimed at one group, are intended to influence all tracks and all levels' (p. 1). Chapters on language, literature and composition provided an elaborate rationale for and description of the tricomponent approach. Language study recommendations focused on the assimilation of modern grammatical systems (traditional, structural and transformational) and the mandatory assumption of correct usage. 'Works of high quality' was the dominant recommendation in the literature chapter. The chapter on composition

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presented a plea to teachers to follow classical models in prescribing both the content and the form of student writing. The needs of basic or disadvantaged students were never mentioned, oral activities were seldom described, suggestions for instruction in reading or basic composition techniques were nowhere to be found, the merits of adolescent literature were called into doubt. The framers of the tri-component model and the authors of Freedom and Discipline in English seemed oblivious to the significance of the political winds which blew around them; they would soon find themselves in an adversarial dialogue with some curricular theorists who came to the Anglo-American seminar with somewhat different ideas. Dartmouth Conference And Its Impact: 1965-1970 Conference Scope In late August, 1966, 49 English scholars/educators travelled to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to participate in the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English. NCTE, MLA, and NATE of the UK sponsored the seminar (which was funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation of New York). A large number of the British participants were specialists in the training of English teachers while the American participants were primarily academic scholars. Most of the time during the four week session was spent in working parties, small study groups, and seminars wherein all attendants had a voice. Summarising the nature of the seminar, John Dixon (Growth Through English, 1967) suggested that the meeting moved participants from a discussion of 'What is English?' to a discussion of 'What is involved in the activity of bringing together and composing the disorder of our experience?' (McPherson, 1977:181). And these voices were often strident. From all reports the arguments rose to fever pitch every day and in virtually every gathering; points of contrast between the two national approaches came frequently and joltingly to the fore. The Americans brought to the seminar an academically-oriented view of English for young people. To bolster this position, they came armed with their tri-component, Brunerian, Project English materials. The British countered with a language experience, growth and development, student-centred approach which held tight academic prescription in total disregard. The fundamental assumptions of what English was or should do were at the heart of the arguments. Americans immersed in transformational-generative theory were taken aback by the British notion of using the students' language as the basis

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of classroom activity. Composition which grew out of classroom interaction proved to be another foreign notion to the Americans, and literature as a reflection of experience rather than as the focus of scholarly scrutiny was yet another. And there was no clearer dichotomy than the place of oral language in the classroom. The UK participants saw it as central to the teaching of English, with a decided emphasis on the promotion and valuing of student talk. US educators, tacitly embracing the notion that children should be seen and not heard, had real trouble in making such a curricular commitment. Given this contentious atmosphere, it is little short of amazing that the group as a whole agreed, and indeed published, eleven points of agreement about what English should be for young people: 1. The centrality of the pupil's exploring, extending, and shaping experiences in the English classroom. 2. The urgency of developing classroom approaches stressing the vital, creative, dramatic involvement of children and young people in language experiences. 3. The importance of directing more attention to speaking and listening experiences for all pupils at all levels, particularly those experiences which involve vigorous interaction among children. 4. The wisdom of providing young people at all levels with significant opportunities for the creative uses of language: creative dramatics, imaginative writing, improvisation, role playing and similar activities. 5. The significance of rich literary experience in the education process and the importance of teachers of English restudying particular selections to determine their appropriateness for readers at different levels. 6. The need to overcome the restrictiveness of rigid patterns of 'grouping' or 'streaming' which limit the linguistic environment in which boys and girls learn English and which tend to inhibit language development. 7. The need to negotiate the limiting, often stultifying, impact of examination patterns which direct attention of both teachers and pupils to aspects of English which are at best superficial and often misleading. 8. The compelling urgency of improving the conditions under which English is taught in the schools: the need for more books and libraries, for better equipment, for reasonable class size, for a classroom environment which will make good teaching possible.

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9. The importance of teachers of English at all levels informing themselves about the result of pertinent scholarship and research so that their classroom approaches may be guided accordingly. 10. The need for radical reform in programs of teacher education, both preservice and inservice. 11. The importance of educating the public on what is meant by good English and what is meant by good English teaching. (Markwardt, 1967: 104-105) In terms of the thinking of English educators in the United States, the Dartmouth Seminar had a profound impact. The force of the student-centred argument offered by the British altered greatly the perspectives of the majority of teacher educators in the American colleges and universities. Teacher educators began an agonising reappraisal of the true value of tri-component curricula, Brunerian spirals, Chomskyan grammar, the new rhetoric, explication de texte with young people and others. Political Context Once again in the late 1960s, as in the Little Rock-Sputnik play-off earlier, political events intervened and this time got in the way of the spirit of Dartmouth's influence over English teaching in the US. The year 1967 saw the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam and the consequent expansion of the protest movement from coast to coast. The year 1968 can be seen as a watershed year in which the political turmoil in the US was brought to a boil and the American people, in electing Richard M. Nixon President, said in essence that they preferred control as the dominant factor in their public schools rather than student freedom of self-expression. The New Frontier and Great Society programmes of the Kennedy/Johnson years were dismantled. In quick succession went the NDEA institutes and fellowships and several other initiatives that had been aimed at improving the teachers and teacher-trainers. Philosophical Context In the new spirit of authoritarianism teachers were to be made accountable for what they taught. By 1969, teachers all over the country were meeting after school to assimilate the skills necessary to write behavioural objectives and then to key individually prescribed instruction to them. The logic of developing objectives which focused on observable student behaviour, which could then be tested or measured, was forced on these teacher/learners.

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A considerable proportion of the leading English educators found the whole accountability package distasteful, dehumanising, trivial, and ultimately incompatible with the basic principles of English teaching. To ignore this mandated curricular approach, however, was at least quixotic and at worst disastrous. In a 1970 'Statement of Accountability' NCTE's Commission on the English Curriculum stated that 'the present very real and complex problems of adequate measurement . . . hold a threat to the discipline of English, the threat of a narrowly defined, "measurable" curriculum and the spectre of teachers defensively limiting themselves to the superficial aspects of literacy in language and literature' (Maloney, 1972:ix). The marriage of accountability and the approaching 'back to basics' phenomenon was forged in the reaction of Middle America to the activism of the 1960s. Portents of this union were visible among governmental priorities like, for example, the Right to Read movement. Funds provided for the promotion of Right to Read carried the constraint that only teacher education in reading would be allowed. Reading instruction was, for the most part, cast in the form of narrowly conceived gimmickry and seldom related to the psycholinguistic research and scholarship of Frank Smith (1971) and Ken and Yetta Goodman (Goodman, 1973; Goodman and Burke, 1972). The teaching of reading in secondary schools was, as Margaret Early (1977) describes it, 'no longer a question [by the mid1970s]' but 'implementation was meagre and of dubious quality'. Usually stamped with the instructional systems label, reading programmes of this ilk began to occupy more time and space in the middle school and junior high school English courses. Reading, in the extreme skills-centred sense became the 'magic word' during the Nixon administration and thus an additional example of an area where political agendas and philosophies had a direct impact on curriculum. By the 1980s this led to a re-examination of the use of basic readers within the English/language arts teaching profession (led by members of NCTE's Commission on Reading) and a reconsideration of instructional methods and desired outcomes. Tri-University Project The most visible attempt to reconcile traditional assumptions about the teaching of English and the behaviourist position was made through the Tri-University Project. Funded by the US Office of Education, a joint curriculum writing team was established at the Universities of Illinois, Indiana and Purdue to develop a middle ground position between those of the behaviouralists and the humanists. In doing so, team members attempted to develop a series of behavioural objectives which would repre-

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sent this middle ground and a series of middle instructional units which were keyed to these objectives. The influence of the Tri-University Project on the English curriculum was negligible. No serious attempt was made by anyone to export the objectives or instructional materials to schools in any part of the country. At local levels, district school board offices continued to mandate the writing of behavourial objectives as part of their staff development master plans. Most English teachers did so obediently and then continued to teach as they always had. By the mid 1970s, the movement had virtually disappeared. Literature Instruction Literary offerings became more diversified in the late 1960s and 1970s providing teachers with some alternatives to the heavily Anglo Saxon flavour of most hardback anthologies in use throughout the nation. Minority literature, largely due to the Civil Rights Movement, had an even greater impact on the literature phase of the curriculum during this period. As would be expected, Black literature rose more quickly into prominence, although additions in Hispanic, Native American (Indian), Oriental and Middle Eastern literary works of all genres were added to the school bibliographies. At the college level, English departments were scrambling to add Black literature classes to their programmes, and publishers of literature anthologies for secondary school students began combing all resources for 'acceptable' works by Black authors. The frequent use of objectionable language and explicit descriptions of sexual activity by many Black authors caused the growth of many additional gray hairs among the publishers of school textbooks along Madison Avenue. Overall, Ken Donelson (1977) cites a series of eight specific influences on the literature curriculum that stemmed 'from the Dartmouth Conference, federally sponsored projects' and other sources of the times: (1) paperbacks, television, and motion pictures ('sometimes supplementing and often supplanting the basic anthology'): (2) response to literature (stressing both the student and the literary work); (3) reading interests and free reading ('capitalizing on student interest'); (4) ethnicity (pushing for a broadening of the curriculum); (5) sexism (examining stereotypes); (6) science fiction ('becoming a staple of the English curriculum'); (7) adolescent literature (achieving a 'limited respectability and use'); (8) contemporary literature (balancing the old and the new). The impact of the work at the Dartmouth Conference also led to a rethinking of the true value of the tricomponent categories of 'language'

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and 'literature'. Oral activities became more widely advocated and improvised drama made its debut in both the professional literature and courses of study. When Dorothy Heathcote came to the US in 1969 to introduce ideas about this classroom approach, she found herself in great demand. James Moffett's reactions to the Seminar, coupled with his strong desire to interject some of the theories of Jean Piaget into the US curricular frameworks, led him to publish a text for teacher educators, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968) and a curricular overview, A Student Centred Curriculum K-13 (Moffett & Wagner, 1976). The Elective Approach A truly culminating feature of the post-Dartmouth experimentation that did flourish in spite of the accountability push is seen in the rapid rise of English elective programmes in the late 1960s. Two highly publicised ones, the APEX project in Trenton, Michigan, and the phase elective programme in Melbourne, Florida, were already underway before the Dartmouth Seminar convened. In the former, the traditional senior high sequence (genres in the 9th/10th grades, American literature in the 11th, and English literature in the 12th) was replaced by a series of short term electives representing various aspects of the tri-component theory language, literature and composition. The Melbourne experiment provided five levels of English courses built on increasing levels of subtlety, complexity and sophistication. Students either chose their own entry level or were 'counselled' into one. The electives were spread across all three (10th, 11th and 12th) grade levels. With further counselling, students could make intermediate moves up or down in the vertically organised curriculum. As the popularity of electives grew in the early 1970s, a variety of structures emerged. The electives curricula became the subject of substantial professional debate during this period. The biggest problem with the elective approach, according to researcher George Hillocks (Alternatives in English: A Critical Appraisal of Elective Programs, 1972) was that it eventually became top-heavy in literature instruction, sharply reducing the study of English linguistics, further limiting the slight attention paid to the writing process and shortchanging any instruction in oral language development. The electives movement represented a valiant but inadequate attempt on the part of the profession to stem the tide of the accountability forces. As the accountability proponents foreshadowed the Back-to-the-basics rallying cry of the 1970s, elective programmes began to disappear. National Assessment Of Educational Progress (NAEP) In the early 1960s, US Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel

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brought the focus of the United States Department of Education back to its 1967 mandate and its responsibility for determining and monitoring the educational progress of the states. Keppel sponsored a number of small conferences, one of which was to consider the development of an assessment programme which would provide benchmarks of educational progress. Work began on just such a testing programme (eventually given the title The National Assessment of Educational Progress) in the latter months of 1967. A series of instruments were developed for testing of knowledge and ability in literature, reading and writing. The tests were prepared for implementation with a nationwide sample of students from the fourth, eighth and twelfth grade levels plus a group of voluntary adults (ages 26-35). By early 1972, all ten tests had been given. It represented another dimension of the accountability movement and can be identified as one of the forerunners to the statewide testing movement which began in 1977. Language Instruction There is no clearer indication of how the English curriculum had swung, than in a brief recapitulation of what happened to linguistics in US public schools during the period. The mid 1960s saw the rise of transformationalgenerative grammar. Paul Roberts had completed eight books of a ten-book series called Roberts English Series (grades 3-12) when he died in the summer of 1967. In the spring of 1968, the company that published Roberts' series, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, decided to contradict conventional textbook-publishing wisdom that argues that a company should not compete with itself on a textbook series. HBJ decided to preserve John Warriner's traditional-approach text as well as Roberts' transformational-generative approach. In 1977, 'back to basics' was a national slogan, statewide testing was swinging into place, and Warriner's text with its traditional approach was back on top of the sales list where many veteran English teachers asserted it should have been all along. A second linguistic wave rose and fell during the period that of broader linguistic study. The second half of the 1960s saw the publication of several single texts and series which introduced both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic concepts to secondary school students. One of the main topics being explored by these new text series was that of dialectology. In 1964, NCTE had published a pamphlet (by Malmstrom & Ashley) titled Dialects USA. It became immediately popular. Five years later, the distinguished linguist, William Labov, published a pamphlet summary of his

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study of urban dialects. The Study of Nonstandard English went through eight printings in the next four years and became a widely quoted resource on the topic, especially in its treatment of Black dialect. Now the battle over what aspects of linguistics should be taught and how they should be approached was on in earnest. It was waged at NCTE conferences as well as those of its state affiliates. Unlike some other theoretical issues, it came right down into the ranks where classroom teachers at all levels joined in heated dialogue as to whether their fundamental duty was to describe the English language or to legislate prescriptive judgements about it. The debate came to a head at the meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication of the NCTE in Minneapolis during the annual convention in 1972. By a very narrow margin, the membership voted approval of a resolution supporting 'students' right to their own language'. The resolution: 'We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity . . . A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language'. Without a doubt, a most courageous and forward-looking statement, but it was put forth on the eve of the 'back to basics' era whose leaders weren't never gonna stand for no 'right to their own language' kind of agitation. Another linguistic happening began with research efforts to demonstrate that the 'new' transformational-generative grammar could be the answer to using grammatical study in the classroom to lead the students to increase writing proficiency, especially in the area of syntactic clarity and maturity. During the 1960 Project English period, one of the few individual projects funded was a study by Kellogg W. Hunt at Florida State University. Hunt (1965) examined the differences in the sentence structures of fourth, eighth and twelfth graders and developed the concept of the T-unit as a measure of syntactic maturity. Hunt's work laid the foundation for later research which would bring transformational-generative grammar into even more classrooms. In 1969, John Mellon published the results of a study which combined the transformational-generative approach with a few 'sentence games' and showed that the experimental group of students showed slightly more syntactic growth than the control group. While

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Mellon downplayed the influence of the 'games' on the improvement cited in his study, their possible effects did not escape a graduate student at Florida State University, Frank O'Hare (1973), who began the design of a study in which these games, now called Sentence Combining, would be presented to an experimental group which, during the treatment, would be provided no grammar study. Besides finding gains in syntactic maturity on the part of the experimental group. he also found that these students were clearly superior to the control group in 'overall quality of writing'. The work of both O'Hare (1975) and Bill Strong (who in 1981 completed a text for college freshmen which offered unstructured sentence combining activities on a range of contemporary topics) ignited the sentence combining explosion in American schools and universities. A true measure of the inroads sentence combining has made lies in the fact that the 1982 edition of Warriner's grammar series added a chapter of sentence-combining work. Despite the emergence of sentence combining, the general movement of linguistic study in US schools symbolised the wholesale abandonment of the free and experimental period of the 1960s and a return to a more rigid, sterile, narrow, tradition-bound approach to English teaching strongly influenced by state mandates that saw 'back to basics' as a curriculum that was 'safe' and uniform. Prelude To The Basics Movement At least in one small corner of the profession there burned the fire of resistance to the onset of accountability in its modern dress. A growing number of educational philosophers, spokespersons, futurists, curmudgeons, et al. were raising their voices of protest in print. Herbert Kohl's text 36 Children (1965) described the irrelevancy and inadequacy of schools, programmes and teachers of Black children in Harlem; two years later, Jonathan Kozol (1967) won a National Book Award for Death at an Early Age, a first hand description of the humiliation and brutalisation of Black children in the schools of Roxbury, Massachusetts; another two years later, Nell Postman & Charles Weingartner (1969) provoked even more interest in the problem of irrelevancy in American schooling with Teaching as a Subversive Activity; in 1970, Charles Silberman delivered an even stronger attack on curricular irrelevancy in Crisis in the Classroom. The thrusts of these books and others were that (1) education had become bureaucratic, sententious, mindless and trivialised: (2) children, especially minority children, had been overlooked, under-valued, and treated with hostility; (3) the child not the syllabus should be the

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centre of classroom attention; and (4) education should reflect the contemporary milieu rather than the romanticised past. Many of these sentiments had been discussed earlier at the Dartmouth Seminar, and now, in a reaction to the accountability movement, were expressed in an even broader and more public arena. Their position was in opposition to the stance of the Council for Basic Education academics who had voiced their criticisms in the previous decade. While much of this writing was detailed, passionate and well-documented, it failed to have a tangible effect on the accountability trend of the 1970s. US English teachers, once again, were faced with 'two roads diverging in a narrow wood'. The excitement, the promise, the hope of the road which led from the Dartmouth Seminar, was, however, not the path most teachers would travel; they were shoved, without inordinate resistance, down the other. The year 1972 witnessed events, largely unrelated to each other, which reflected the ominous Zeitgeist of accountability. At the NCTE meeting in Minneapolis that year, the English specialists of National Assessment of Educational Progress presented their findings from the literature, reading and writing components of the testing programme. The picture they painted was dreary as they concluded the need for more uniformity and indeed conformity through wider use of prescribed instruction. At the same meeting, and at the opposite end of this philosophical continuum, the Conference on College Composition and Communication executive committee presented their resolution on 'The Students' Right to Their Own Language'. In the broader political sense, all of the above pales before the realisation of what the American people were saying in their landslide re-election of Richard Nixon. The reactionary mood of the electorate was clear. Already beleaguered by the frustration of the Vietnam War, they soon had to face the reality of the trauma of Watergate. But all of this did little to stem the conservative tide that was running throughout the country at the time. The tide, fuelled by the accountability movement, gave impetus to the 'back to basics' and statewide testing initiatives to come. The road from Dartmouth was clearly the one less travelled. A Crisis Of Confidence: 1970-1988 Political Context By the mid 1970s the public dissatisfaction with the schools had reached a high-water mark. The experiments with open education, elective programmes in high school English, and alternative schools had all but ended.

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The experimental schools programme into which the Nixon Administration had poured 55 million dollars over a five-year period had brought about only meagre results. What was to have been a 'comprehensive' school reform involving teachers, administrators and community members in hundreds of school districts shattered against the wall of ill feeling and indifference left over from the failures of the piecemeal efforts of the Great Society programmes of the 1960s. As Diane Ravitch (1983:258) has pointed out, 'teachers resented programmes they felt were imposed on them, and internal conflicts undermined many of the projects'. As the federal efforts toward comprehensive reform diminished in the 1970s and schools became increasingly under fire for poor teaching, indifference to students, bureaucratic rigidity and low standards, the number of competing agencies seeking power over the schools increased. Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association increased their membership so that by 1980 more than 75% of all teachers were members of teacher unions. The unions sought bargaining rights not only concerning the traditional matters of pay and working conditions but over matters of class size, text books, curriculum, and over all other matters concerning the general management of the school. Additionally, the states moved to increase their role in educational policy making. State legislature education committees began to develop 'accountability models' which their members felt would increase the efficiency of the schools by forcing schools into a 'management by objectives' mode similar to such schemes developed earlier in industry and government. 'Accountability' and 'back to basics' became the watch words of American education in the 1970s and 1980s. Foreshadowing what was to come in the actions of many state legislatures, in 1974 an Iowa teacher was fired by her school board because her pupils' scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills of Educational Development were too low. A District Court ordered that she be reinstated. The US Circuit Court of Appeals, however, reversed the lower court declaring that 'such matters as the competence of teachers and the standards of its (sic) measurement are not . . . matters of constitutional dimensions' (Council-grams, 1975:36). The United States Supreme Court declined to review the Court of Appeals ruling, leaving stand the School Board's original action. As testing expanded in all subject areas in the schools in the early 1970s, the National Council of Teachers of English established a Task Force on Measurement and Evaluation to study the phenomena in English. By the end of the decade, standardised tests were to become commonplace in every area of the curriculum. The National Assessment of Educational

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Progress continued to target subject areas to be assessed regularly every four years. In mid-November of 1975 the results of the comparison of the 1970 and 1974 national assessments of writing were released. The findings were cited in the National Assessment of Educational Progress Newsletter a month later: National Assessment found that, in 1974, students aged 13 and 17 used a simpler vocabulary, wrote in shorter, 'primer-like' style and had more incoherent paragraphs than their counterparts in school four years earlier. Only the 9 year olds' papers showed an improvement with a proportion of good writers rising in 1974 . . . The writing of 17 year olds nearing high school graduation, declined in quality between the two assessments . . . students showed an increase in awkwardness and run on sentences and a tendency to write as they would speak. (Education Commission of the States, 1975:1) Composition Instruction English programmes at all levels were affected by the growing wave of dissatisfaction with the teaching of writing in American schools. Although reading had been a target of various attacks for many years, little criticism had been levelled at the teaching of writing. Suddenly in a 1975 issue of Newsweek magazine the leading article, 'Why Johnny Can't Write', brought forth a national tidal wave of criticism. Quoting the recently released NAEP study, the Newsweek article claimed that writing was being neglected in American schools. By the end of the 1970s, a plethora of books on the same subject had appeared, including The Literacy Hoax (Copperman, 1978); What's Happening to American English? (Tibbetts & Tibbetts, 1978); The Great American Writing Block (Wheeler, 1979); Empty Pages (Fadiman & Howard, 1979); and Less Than Words Can Say (Mitchell, 1979). It was never possible to know whether there actually was a writing crisis in 1975 because of the variety of ways of teaching and assessing writing in American education. It was clear, however, that many people were concerned about the quality of American writing. In a study done for the Ford Foundation published in 1978 (Balance the Basics, Let Them Write), Donald Graves of the University of New Hampshire produced clear evidence that writing was being neglected in the American educational system. Graves pointed out that most teachers had not had adequate training in their undergraduate teacher preparation for teaching writing. The evaluation of writing was identified as a deterrent to the teaching of writing since most English teachers had more than 100 students per week and marking their written essays took considerable time

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out of school. Graves noted a preoccupation with spelling and punctuation, grammar and usage in the minds of most teachers. His report raised an important question about teacher preparation in writing. As he was working on his study, an answer to the question he was raising had already been formulated and was being put into practice in Berkeley, California. National Writing Project The National Writing Project began in Berkeley, California in 1974 as the Bay Area Writing Project. James Gray, a former high school English teacher and now a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, had noted the failure of the 'top-down' teacher in-service programmes of the NDEA Project English in the 1960s. In 1974 Gray and his colleagues at Berkeley brought 22 exemplary writing teachers to the campus. He abandoned the traditional rules and told the teachers, 'you are going to make presentations about the things you do well in classrooms, and I'm going to do the same. Then we will talk about what we have said, and do a little writing. Now who wants to be first?' (Holmstrom, 1984:167). This in-service model of education has now expanded to more than 150 sites in 43 states and 7 foreign countries. Approximately 2,000 teachers are trained each summer in NWP summer institutes and in turn they train more than 70,000 each year. More than a decade later, the effects of the NWP are being described and lauded: in a 1984 article, Mark F. Goldberg maintains that the National Writing Project 'may well be the most successful in-service effort in history' (p.357); The Council for Basic Education has endorsed the NWP as 'perhaps the most successful and certainly the most far-reaching of all the recent initiatives to improve the condition of writing in American schools and colleges' (p.357). Questions Of Quality And Purpose As the Reagan Administration began in the 1980s Terrel H. Bell was appointed Secretary of Education. Bell, a former high school science teacher, school superintendent and professor of educational administration from Utah, had been Deputy Commissioner of the US Office of Education from 1974 to 1976 during the Ford Administration. President Reagan had hoped to do away with the Department of Education or perhaps merge it with another department, but in the first term of Reagan's presidency, Bell emerged as a statesman for the education community, preserving the department at cabinet status and harmonising many of the dissident voices

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which had been critical of education within the Congress. In this position, Bell appointed the National Commission on Excellence in Education with the charge to (1) assess the quality of teaching and learning in public and private schools and colleges and universities, (2) compare American schools and colleges with those of other advanced nations, (3) study the relationship between college admission requirements and student achievement in high school, (4) identify educational programmes which result in improving students' access to college, (5) assess the degree to which major social and educational changes in the last quarter century have affected student achievement, (6) define problems which must be faced and overcome if we are successfully to pursue the course of excellence in education. Its 1983 report said we were A Nation at Risk the first sentences of the report provided its basic theme. . . . we report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride at what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and people . . . our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to obtain them . . . (pp.5-6) A Nation at Risk provided a theme which many subsequent group reports followed: The Need for Quality (a report by the Southern Regional Task Force), Educating Americans for the 21st Century: A Report to the American People (National Science Board Commission on Pre-College Education and Mathematics and Science Technology), Action for Excellence: A Comprehensive Plan to Improve our Schools (Education Commission of the States Task Force on Education for Economic Growth), Academic Preparation for College, What Students Need to Know and be Able to Do (College Board Education Equality Project), Making the Grade (Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Policy). And individuals like Mortimer J. Adler outlined proposals for the 'ideal' school or curriculum (The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto and The Paideia Proposal and Possibilities: A Consideration of Questions Raised by the Paideia Proposal). All of these reports had a similar theme which had been set by A Nation at Risk. The continuing failure of the schools to perform their traditional roles adequately, together with a failure to respond to the emerging needs of the 1980s, would have disastrous consequences in such areas as national defence, technology and productivity.

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The general public dissatisfaction with schooling in the 1980s extended to the English curriculum. Parents and taxpayers and local school boards reacting to what they considered to be too much experimentation in English programmes in the 1970s called for more teacher accountability, widespread competency testing in basic skills and continued emphases on staff development under full control of the local superintendent's staffs. Membership in the National Council of Teachers of English dropped by more than 20% during the late 1970s as English teachers, like other teachers, seemed to see their professional organisation drifting further away from the realities of daily classroom teaching. Sydney, Australia Conference In August of 1980 more than 1,000 teachers of English gathered together at the Fourth International Conference for the Teaching of English in Sydney, Australia. The keynote address by James Britton of the University of London called for the 1980s to be the 'decade of the classroom teacher'. Commissions met on every aspect of teaching English with considerable interest going to the explosion of knowledge in the teaching of writing. Donald Graves of the University of New Hampshire emphasised the 'joy' of watching children learn to write and James Moffett emphasised the necessity of using 'partners and coaches with whom to talk over and try out ideas before and during written composition, in order to aerate and revise inner-speech across successive versions, and the teaching of meditational techniques for knowing, focusing, controlling inner-speech . . .' But even while these events were taking place in Sydney many American English teachers were readying themselves for a resurgence of the grammar curriculum. As parents called for more 'back to basics' textbook publishers were planning new textbook series with the same content of traditional grammar which had been in most American grammar textbooks since the publication of Bishop Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar in England in 1762. Philosophical Context Meanwhile, educational researchers were looking at reforms from a different perspective and building a strong philosophical context for school improvement. In John Goodlad's epic study of schooling in America (A Place Called School) involving 27,000 subjects in a variety of school districts, he comments on the English curriculum: The English/Language Arts formed the backbone of the curriculum in

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the classes we studied, especially at the elementary level. The various subjects and activities falling under this rubric . . . occupy more time at the elementary level and more teachers at the secondary level (combining both junior and senior high schools) than any other subject . . . The dominant emphasis throughout was on teaching basic language use skills and mastering mechanics, capitalization, punctuation, paragraphs, syllabication, synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, parts of speech, etc. These were repeated in successive grades of the elementary years, were reviewed in the junior high years, and reappeared in the low-track classes of the senior high schools. Goodlad also characterised the method of instruction through which this content was delivered: We saw, then, in the English/Language Arts Program, a kind of repetitive reinforcement of basic skills of language usage throughout the twelve grades a heavy emphasis on mechanics in the topics covered by teachers, textbooks, stressing these topics, and work books, work sheets, and quizzes, emphasizing short answers and the recall of specific information. (1984:205-207) In A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-First Century, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and its Task Force on Teacher Education focused on teachers and the conditions of teaching, reasoning that unless the quality of teachers and the quality of their working conditions were addressed none of the other problems with American education would be solved. The report called for more effective recruitment programmes for teachers and stressed that the dwindling population of young people from which business, the military, and education must draw their recruits will contain an ever larger proportion of minorities. Because the schools themselves will need more minority teachers, the report emphasised the importance of attracting and retaining the best minority teacher candidates possible. The report also called for changing the organisation of schools to empower teachers in making curriculum decisions about the best programmes necessary for a particular school. As the decade of supposed educational reform of the 1980s began to draw to a close and the Reagan administration's policy of reducing the federal government's role in education appeared successful, school reformers were asking how schools could have appeared to have changed so much yet also have appeared to stay the same. . . . How can schooling have changed so much over the last century yet still appear pretty much the same as it has always been? . . . Recall that a number of second order reforms established the dominant structures

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of schooling between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, e.g. the self-contained classroom, the graded curriculum, the fifty minute period, frequent testing, the reliance on textbooks and work sheets and the current governance structure of schools were once reforms that have since become institutional bench marks of what constitutes proper schooling . . . (Cuban, 1988:343.) Cuban goes on to point out that the changes that have taken place in the 1980s by the activist state legislatures essentially strengthened past reform bills aimed at getting teachers and students to work harder in classrooms, put in higher graduation requirements with more tests and tighter connections between the tests and what is taught, and, in essence, to continue with the 'back to basics' and 'accountability' games that pervaded the 1970s. Reform Perspectives In an attempt to explain the reasons that many proposed school reforms have not worked in English classes, James Moffett laid bare what he considered to be the basic conflict between parents, citizens and English education reformers concerned with changing reading and writing programmes. Parents who fear losing their children and the majority do in some way want the content of reading and writing to be controlled. Teach my children to read, but I don't want them to read this or this or this. Teach my children to write but I don't need to delve into that or that or that. Just teach them attitudes. Steering ambivalently between the necessity of literacy and the threat it poses ultimately delivers to schools the message that they should teach youngsters to read just well enough for them to follow orders and to write just well enough to take dictation . . . . . . But, if at all, society as a whole fears losing the minds of the young, teachers, in particular, fear losing their own minds if they try to teach the way they know they should. They fear the loss of classroom control and of status if they allow youngsters to choose the content and form of what they read or write. Making students active and teachers reactive sounds like a gratuitous relinquishing of power but empowering others is the teachers' job . . . (Moffett, 1985:53-54). During this period, English teachers were finding ways to 'empower' themselves. At the 1975 national convention of NCTE, a 'political action arm,' SLATE (Support for Language Arts and the Teaching of English) evolved. SLATE Starter Sheets were developed during the following years

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which identified a problem (e.g. censorship), synthesised related research, and presented suggestions for further action. The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) continued to attract more members and to take an increasingly active role in national meetings. The 1987 NCTE Commission on Reading issued a report critical of the widespread use of the basal reader. Teacher recognition programmes increased (national Centres of Excellence in the Teaching of English/Language Arts were designated annually, student writing award programmes flourished, and teacher-researcher grants were awarded). Although the fervour of the reformers focused attention (both critical and supportive) on education, many of the issues members of the profession were writing about still echoed those of previous decades. A 1988 issue of English Journal carried the following articles: 'Employers' Language Expectation and Nonstandard Dialect Speakers', 'Revising the Literature Curriculum in a Pluralistic Society,' 'Sexual Stereotyping and the English Curriculum,' 'Close vs Closed Reading: Interpreting the Clues,' 'Against Formulaic Writing,' 'Alternatives to the Traditional Research Paper.' The 'empowerment' that teachers were seeking for both themselves and their students did, however, influence how many of these discussions took place, where they took place, and who was involved. 1987 English Coalition As English teachers in the United States began to view the nature and challenge of their task for the 1990s a major effort to achieve consensus was funded by several major foundations under the leadership of Phyllis Franklin, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association of America. This effort culminated in an invitational seminar held in June of 1987 where 60 participants from a coalition of eight English associations met at WYE Woods in Maryland. The convenors of the conference hoped that the plans emerging from the meetings would be significant in charting the course for English for the 1990s and beyond. They had even nicknamed the conference 'Dartmouth Two' during the four years of planning that preceded it. At this writing the major impact of the conference is yet to be felt. There seemed to be support for an ideal English classroom which would offer a rich and supportive environment for learners actively engaged in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking and listening, the teacher's task being to create situations and to provide materials that encourage student inquiry, practice in the use of language, and interaction with peers and adults. Teachers should serve as model learners and users of language and should help students learn how to reflect about language.

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In the words of one of the classroom teacher participants at the conference, 'teachers must help students learn how to reflect about language and the curriculum at all levels and should focus on works that challenge students' abilities' (Hydrick, 1988:1). In addition to recommending children's literature over basal readers, the coalition advocated that students read widely . . . in both traditional literature and literature that reflects the diversity of American culture and that students become familiar with as many different kinds of writing as possible . . . Diversities and pedagogy and curriculum specifics became petty questions compared to the overriding missions of life-long learning, and the empowerment of teachers and students empowerment which can be derived only from language. (Hydrick, 1988:1) Questions For The 1990s Agenda The period from 1945 on continued the tradition of posing multiple questions and seeking alternate answers in US English education. Issues from nearly a century earlier were wrestled with to varying degrees depending on the political climate (What 'grammar' should be taught.'? What 'literature' should be taught? How can 'composition' be taught?). Additionally, during this time, English education was also coloured by social issues (like civil rights), technological issues (like Sputnik), political issues (like Watergate), and public interest issues (like accountability and back to basics and the cultural literacy demanded by E.D. Hirsch, 1987). But lest this myriad of issues seem fragmented, lest they falsely reflect an endless maze of wrong turns, it is important to remember that this was a period of productive collaboration and optimistic coalitions. The Basic Issues Conference of the 1950s, the Dartmouth Conference of the 1960s, the International English Conferences of the 1970s and 1980s, the Bay Area Writing Project then the National Writing Project of the 1970s, and the English Coalition of the 1980s collectively stand as powerful examples of the professional networks seeking to benefit from integrated rather than isolated discussions of questions and answers of problems and resolutions of actions and consequences. While many of the questions about 'What is English? will undoubtedly remain the same into the 1990s, the methods for dealing with these questions can only be strengthened by the dialogues and arguments of this recent period. There will still be the professional 'roads diverging in a yellow wood', but if 'empowerment of teachers and students' could be the road taken in the decade of the 1990s, perhaps the prophecy James Britton made at the 1980 Fourth International

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Conference for the Teaching of English in Sydney might indeed become a reality. We are in need of his 'decade of the teacher'. Acknowledgement The authors wish to acknowledge their appreciation to James R. Squire for his thoughtful and critical reading of this chapter. References ADLER, MORTIMER 1982, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto. New York: Macmillan. ALM, RICHARD 1987, Lessons from the decades: former EJ editors speak. English Journal 76 (September): 3637. APPLEBEE, ARTHUR 1974, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. BASIC ISSUES CONFERENCE 1959, The Basic Issues in the teaching of English, English Journal, September. BESTOR, ARTHUR 1985, Educational Wastelands, (2nd Edition). Urbana Ill: University of Illinois Press. BRADDOCK, RICHARD, LLOYD-JONES, R. and SCHOER, L. 1963, Research in Written Composition. Urbana Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. BRUNER, JEROME 1960, The Process of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. BURESS, LEE and JENKINSON, EDWARD 1983, The Students' Right to Know. Urbana: NCTE. BURTON, DWIGHT 1959, Literature Study in the High School. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1965, English education as a scholarly discipline. In The Changing Role of English Education. (Selected addresses delivered at the second conference on English education). University of Illinois: NCTE. CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING 1986, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-first Century. Pittsburgh, PA. CHOMSKY, NOAM 1957, Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. COMMISSION ON ENGLISH CURRICULUM OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH 1952, The English Language Arts. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. COMMISSION ON ENGLISH OF THE COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION BOARD 1965, Freedom and Discipline in English. Princeton, NJ: College Entrance Examination Board. COMMITTEE ON THE NATIONAL INTEREST 1961, The National Interest and the Teaching of English. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. COPPERMAN, PAUL 1978, The Literacy Hoax. New York: Cox Publications. CUBAN, LARRY 1988, A Fundamental Puzzle of School Reform, Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 69, Number 5, January, pp. 341-48. DEWEY, JOHN 1938, Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan.

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DIXON, JOHN 1967, Growth through English. Reading, England: National Association for the Teaching of English. DONELSON, KEN 1972, The Student's Right to Read (rev. ed.) National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana. 1977, General influences on the changing literature curriculum. In JAMES R. SQUIRE (ed.), The Teaching of English, National Society for the Study of Education, Part I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press pp. 158-67. EARLY, MARGARET 1977, Reading in the Secondary School. In JAMES R. SQUIRE (ed.), The Teaching of English, National Association for the Study of Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 189-96. EDUCATION COMMISSION OF THE STATES 1975, National Assessment of Educational Progress, Newsletter, Denver, Colorado. FADIMAN, CLIFTON and HOWARD, JAMES 1979, Empty Pages. Belmont, CA: Fearon Pitman. FARMER, MARJORIE (ed.) 1986, Consensus and Dissent. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. FRANCIS, NELSON 1963, The English Language: An Introduction, New York: W.W. Norton Company. FRIES, CHARLES 1940, American English Grammar. English Monograph No. 10 of the National Council of Teachers of English. New York: D. Appleton-Century. GLEASON, H.A. 1961, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, (rev. ed.) New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. GOLDBERG, MARK F. 1984, An Update on the National Writing Project, Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 65, Number 5, January, pp. 356-57. GOODLAD, JOHN 1984, A Place Called School. New York: McGraw-Hill. GOODMAN, KENNETH (ed.) 1973, Miscue Analysis: Applications to Reading Instruction. Urbana, Ill: NCTE. GOODMAN, YETTA and BURKE, CAROLYN 1972, Reading Miscue Inventory. New York: Macmillan. GRAVES, DONALD 1978, Balance the Basics, Let Them Write. New York: Ford Foundation. HATFIELD, WILBUR 1935, An Experience Curriculum in English. A Report of the Curriculum Commission, National Council of Teachers of English. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co. HILLOCKS, GEORGE 1972, Alternatives in English: A Critical Appraisal of Elective Programs. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. HIRSCH, E.D. Jr. 1987, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. HOLMSTROM, DAVID 1984, 'The Write Stuff', American Way, Vol. 17, No. 6, June, pp. 167-69. HOOK, J.N. 1970, The Tri-University BOE Project: A Project Report. In JOHN MAXWELL and ANTHONY TOVATT (eds), On Writing Behavioral Objectives For English. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. 83-84. 1979, A Long Way Together. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. HUNT, KELLOGG W. 1965, Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels, Research Report Number 3, National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana. HYDRICK, JANIE 1988, Arizona English Teachers Association Newsletter, Volume 8,

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Number 2, December/January. JENKINSON, EDWARD 1980, Censors in the Classroom. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. KOHL, HERBERT 1965, 36 Children. New York: New American Library. KOZOL, JONATHAN 1967, Death at an Early Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. LABOV, WILLIAM 1969, The Study of Nonstandard English. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C. LODGE, HELEN 1977, Values in the English Classroom. In JAMES R. SQUIRE (ed.), The Teaching of English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 126-44. LOWTH, ROBERT 1783, A Short Introduction to English Grammar. London. LYNCH, JAMES and EVANS, BERTRAND 1963, High School English Textbooks: A Critical Examination. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown. MALMSTROM, JEAN and ASHLEY, ANNABEL 1972, Dialects USA. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. MALONEY, HENRY (ed.) 1972, Accountability and the Teaching of English. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. MARKWARDT, ALBERT 1967, The Dartmouth Seminar. NASSP Bulletin 57 (April), 104-105. 1968, Letter to Robert E. Shafer. March 14, 1968. MCPHERSON, ELIZABETH 1977, Composition. In JAMES R. SQUIRE (ed.), The Teaching of English, National Society for the Study of Education, Seventy-Sixth Yearbook, Part I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 178-88. MELLON, JOHN C. 1969, Transformational Sentence-Combining. National Council of Teachers of English Research Report No. 10. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. MITCHELL, RICHARD 1979, Less Than Words Can Say. Boston: Little Brown. MOFFETT, JAMES 1968, Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1985, Hidden Impediments to Improving English. Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 67, Number 1, pp. 50-56. MOFFETT, JAMES and WAGNER, BETTY JANE 1976, Student-Centered Language Arts and Reading, K-13 (Second edition). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH (NCTE) 1962, The Students' Right to Read. Urbana: NCTE. 1975, On test scores and accountability, Councilgrams 36, 2, March. p. 36. NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION 1944, Education for All American Youth. Washington, D.C. O'HARE, FRANK 1973, Sentence-Combining. Research Report Number 15, Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. 1975, Sentencecraft. Lexington, MA: Ginn and Company. PETITT, DOROTHY 1960, A study of the qualities of literary excellence which characterizes selected fiction for younger adolescents. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Minnesota. POOLEY, ROBERT 1946, The Teaching of English Usage. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. POSTMAN, NEIL and WEINGARTNER, CHARLES 1969, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delacorte Press.

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RAVITCH, DIANE 1983, The Troubled Crusade. New York: Basic Books. ROBERTS, PAUL 1956, Patterns of English. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1958, Understanding English. New York: Harper Bros. 1962, Understanding Grammar. New York: Harper and Row. 1967, English Sentences. New York: Harper and Row. 1968, The Roberts English Series. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ROSENBLATT, LOUISE 1938, Literature as Exploration. New York: D. Appleton Century Crofts Company, Inc. ROSS, FRANK E. 1966, What's wrong with the secondary section? English Journal, Vol. 55, No. 9, December pp. 1231, 1232. RUSSELL, DAVID 1963, Preface. English Education Today. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. SHUGRUE, MICHAEL 1968, English in a Decade of Change. New York: Pegasus. SILBERMAN, CHARLES 1970, Crisis in the Classroom. New York: Random House. SMITH, DORA V. 1952, The English Language Arts. New York: Appleton Century Crofts. SMITH, FRANK 1971, Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. SMITH, MORTIMER 1949, And Madly Teach. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. SQUIRE, JAMES 1964, The Response of Adolescents While Reading Four Short Stories, Research Report Number 2. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana. STONE, GEORGE WINCHESTER 1961, Issues, Problems and Approaches in the Teaching of English. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. STRONG, WILLIAM 1981, Sentence Combining and Paragraph Building. New York: Random House, Inc. The Students' Rights to Their Own Language, College Composition and Communication, Volume 23, October 1972, p. 325. TIBBETTS, ARN and TIBBETTS, CHARLENE 1978, What's Happening to American English? New York: Scribners. THOMAS, OWEN 1965, Transformational Grammar and the Teaching of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. TRESSLER, ARTHUR 1925, English in Action. Boston: D.C. Heath & Company. WALLERSTEIN, RUTH 1953, Report of the Curriculum Commission: a criticism. English Journal, Volume XLII, Number 2, October, pp. 371-87. WARRINER, JOHN 1982, English Grammar and Composition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. WARRINER, JOHN and GRIFFITH, FRANCIS 1973, English Grammar and Composition Courses 1-5; Complete Course. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. WHEELER, JOSEPH C. 1979, The Great American Writing Block. New York: The Viking Press. 'Why Johnny Can't Write', Newsweek, December 1975.

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5 Teaching English Language Arts In Canada: 1965-1985 Sam Robinson, Laurence Walker, Nan Johnson and Trevor Gambell 1 In 1759 Voltaire in Candide wrote that England and France were at war 'for a few acres of snow', not worth the cost of fighting over. In some respects, Voltaire was right. Canada is a difficult country. It is big, four thousand miles from Atlantic to Pacific. Much of Canada is uninhabited, with most of Canadian civilisation strung out like a narrow ribbon along the Canadian-American border. It is divided by region, language, and religion. It has long been dominated by the American giant to the south and imperial England across the cold North Atlantic. Much of the story of Canada's development is the struggle to disprove Voltaire's charge. The period under review in this chapter covers one of Canada's most nationalistic periods. In 1967, Canada celebrated its Centennial and rejoiced at Expo 67 in Montreal. At this time, studies such as the Hodgetts report (Hodgetts, 1968) revealed that Canadian schools were anything but Canadian. It was the task of the 1960s and 1970s to find Canada and to discover its place in the school curriculum. Teachers of English took up this challenge with vigour. Stephen Leacock (1939), a Canadian humourist, once quipped, 'Medieval education was supposed to fit people to die. Any school-boy of today can still feel the effect of it.' To some extent, the history of the teaching of English language arts in Canada during the past 20 years suggests an awakening to the medieval nature of our practices. Teachers of English language arts learned to question the wisdom of a rule-based, information-disseminating model of education. Instead, they have begun to explore a model that allows for individual expression and freedom, a model that turns from rules to life. The readers of this chapter are alerted to the fact that this outline of the history of teaching English language arts in Canada, 1965-1985, is not

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intended to be complete. It is, rather, the personal impressions of four English educators who have lived through much of the period in question. As such this chapter is as much a personal statement as a history. If nothing else, the bringing together of the information for this chapter stresses the need for further study. The Development Of A Profession The 1965-1985 period saw the development of a national association of English language arts teachers in Canada. By rights, such an association should not exist since many forces in Canada work against national union. The geographical regionalism makes association among members difficult and often impossible. It costs a lot of money to link people across a four thousand mile expanse. And there is no national focus for education in Canada since the British North America Act of 1867 gave the responsibility for education to the provinces. There is only a resolve to be Canadian. The national fervour that saw the rise of the Can Lit movement in the 1960s gave impetus to the development of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English (CCTE). Through the work of Merron Chorny, who would become the first president, Canadian English teachers were encouraged to form a national association by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the United States. NCTE adapted its constitution to accept provincial associations from Canada as affiliate members of the Council. The Alberta English Teachers' Association in 1964 joined with NCTE as the first international affiliate, and other Canadian provincial associations joined shortly after. CCTE became an official entity on August 21, 1967, in Vancouver. At the second CCTE conference in Calgary, Alberta, President Merron Chorny provided this reflection on the founding of CCTE: This day marks the first anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English. This conference gives substance to the vision of many English teachers in this country who have worked for a national association. Yet, in terms of what might have been considered realities twelve months ago, we are participating in a meeting that some would have judged as premature and holding no prospect for success. Its being proposed at all may have been viewed as disregarding fact, reason, geography, history, economics, administrative principles, the temper of the time, and the national character. (Chorny, 1968) In spite of the odds against survival, CCTE has continued, a national

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organisation that runs on the enthusiasm of English language arts teachers. CCTE has moved through several stages. Its first purpose was to bring English language arts teachers together, with the annual conferences central to its operation. Recently, CCTE has expanded its emphasis, becoming more aware of its function as a national voice for English language arts, for example publishing a national statement on evaluation in English (Evans, 1984). CCTE is currently moving into the field of publication, both disseminating appropriate materials from other associations and, more importantly, publishing Canadian-produced materials. The legacy of CCTE has been considerable. This organisation has united Canadian educators and given them a true sense of professional consciousness. English teachers across this country know one another; they have visited each other; they have listened to and read the regional literature; they have discovered common interests and common problems; they have discovered, and learned to value, real differences. From the work of CCTE has grown a true Canadian awareness among English teachers. The Canadian Context It is this unity in diversity that characterises Canada. Regional differences are strong. Newfoundland, the island of rock that juts out into the Atlantic, has long suffered the problems of an economic depression. Yet it is from Newfoundland that we have learned to value our traditions. Newfoundlanders were among the first people in Canada to take pride in local literature and include it in the school curriculum. Then there is the Maritime region, the provinces of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Like Newfoundland, these provinces have discovered the pride of regional literature. During the 1980s, educators in Nova Scotia have contributed to the Canadian phenomenon of whole language, a grass roots movement. Teachers of whole language believe that children learn to read and write in a whole context and that the skill by skill approach of basal readers is an unnatural way to learn to be literate. The province of Quebec provides for a totally different context for the teaching of English language arts. This province is dominantly French, with the English speaking schools in the minority. Educators in Quebec, more than in other parts of Canada, have had to deal with the issue of bilingualism. In response to this issue, they have developed immersion programmes in which native speakers of English begin school with French

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as the language of instruction. Highly successful, these immersion programmes have spread throughout Canada. Ontario has long been the giant in Canadian education, the rich industrial heart of the country the trend setter. The city of Toronto has a particularly rich history in dealing with its multi-cultural population. One of the most innovative experimental programmes in Canadian elementary schools has been in operation in the Toronto Board for some ten years under the title The Inner City Project. This project has instituted a school-wide, language-based curriculum. Starting with one inner city school, the scheme has been extended to include several schools in similarly deprived areas. In these schools, additional staff were hired to release regular teachers for school-based professional development. What has been unique about this arrangement has been the initial commitment of all teachers to the philosophical basis of the programme. Those teachers who were uncomfortable with the programme transferred out, and the schools were staffed by teachers who wanted to be there. As a consequence, all members of a school staff have been actively engaged in the training aspect of the programme. And the philosophical basis has been a commitment to the interactive nature of teaching and learning and the value assigned to children's own language as the medium of interaction. The prairie provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, face similar educational challenges. About half of the population of this region is rural, with many small schools. Teachers have learned to cope with multi-grade situations. In some school districts, the concerns of bussing students compete with educational matters. In addition, many indigenous people live in this region, and these provinces are just beginning to understand the issues involved with Native Indian education and to provide the indigenous people with a just place in society. The far northern regions of Canada, Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories, have been long concerned with the education of the Indian and Inuit people, who are the dominant group in this society. Curriculum developers in these territories have provided leadership in dealing with such issues as Indian and Inuit languages and the introduction of the children of these groups into schools. Finally, the province of British Columbia, separated from the rest of Canada by the Rocky Mountains, has taken its own approach to education. Like the prairies, educators in British Columbia have come to understand the importance of education for Indian people. And like Toronto, the city of Vancouver has had to learn to deal with a culturally diverse population.

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Language Teaching Language study in the English language arts curriculum has been the site of an epistemological debate between the traditional theory-into-practice model of language learning and the experiential learning model. The first approach assumes that effective language use is dependent upon a prior mastery of propositional knowledge about language, an assumption that authorises an information-based language study curriculum. The second approach maintains that effective use develops out of purposeful experiences with language for communication and reflection, leading to an experiential, student-centred, process curriculum. Both positions, of course, have been deeply rooted in continuous traditions within the two-thousand year history of Western educational thought. Traditionally the teaching of English language arts in Canada was firmly based in the information-based model. Challenges to these traditional beliefs and assumptions gathered momentum in the 1960s. Beliefs about the value of grammar, a normative standard English, or the tripartite English curriculum, for example, tended to survive longer in classrooms than in provincial departments of education and in the pages of professional journals. The conservative loyalties of many classroom teachers found support in the frequently expressed public concern over standards of literacy among school graduates. Since the 1950s, there has been an intermittent, but recurring, media preoccupation about the quality of English, with bitter complaints from university professors and employers that students had not succeeded in mastering English by the time they finished high school. They also charged that the reason for this decline in achievement, often assumed to represent some deterioration from former standards, was that schools were no longer teaching the rigorous aspects of English such as grammar. These charges were given rather spurious academic authenticity in Hilda Neatby's (1953) So Little for the Mind, a vigorous attack on progressivism in Canadian education. Included in her criticisms was an alleged neglect of the teaching of grammar. L.D. Hamilton (1954), a Montreal principal, took issue with Neatby's charges, pointing out that the question of a decline in standards of literacy was difficult to sustain in light of the increased retention of secondary students after World War II. He also questioned whether desires such as Neatby's to return to the basics were really justified. Examining the contents of traditional programmes, he noted that they 'produced some children who could define a moose but who would not have recognized the beast had they seen it' (Hamilton, 1954: 77). Some 20 years later, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce published

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Basic Educational Skills (Canadian Chamber of Commerce, 1975), a survey of the level of satisfaction among university officials with the fundamental skills of their freshmen students. This report, highlighting the complaint among many universities of the low levels in communication and computational skills, implicated the childcentred public school system as the source of the problem. Schools were accused of failing to emphasise the teaching of basic skills, of avoiding drills, practice, repetition, and other forms of dull learning, and of weakening the curriculum by adding a wide range of alternative courses. On July 24, 1986, the popular national radio programme, CBC's Morningside, broadcast a discussion about the literacy standards of Canadian university students. When told by one student that she had not studied English grammar in public school, Peter Gzowski, the otherwise erudite and humane host, expressed his indignation with the rhetorical questions: 'How can you get through school without taking any grammar? What did you study in English if you didn't study grammar?' Examples such as these suggest a public consciousness: a belief that grammar represents an ancient virtue to which students have some unalienable right either as a prerequisite to literacy or as a penance visited by one generation of Canadians on the next. In any case, many teachers who are sympathetic to this larger public consciousness are sustained in their allegiance to the traditional, information approach to English teaching. New Ideas About Language By the 1960s, documents such as provincial guidelines had officially disenfranchised information about language in the form of analytical grammar with all its definitions and complex, Latin-based classifications as a prerequisite for effective speaking and writing. On the other hand, some educators at that time believed that the literacy problem was attributed to the teaching of the wrong kind of linguistic information. They suggested that if the right grammar could be taught, one based on accurate descriptions of how English worked, students would write better. As a result, the information language curriculum was resurrected as structural grammar. Patterns of Writing (Dashwood-Jones, 1966-67), a new set of structural grammar texts approved for use in Alberta junior-high schools in the mid 1960s, gave a confident answer to the question of what information do children need to use language effectively: the abstract principles that motivate the construction of sentences. DashwoodJones suggested that linguistic structure refers to the arrangement of basic units, morphemes and

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words. To understand structural principles, it is necessary to learn to recognise and produce these units. Hence, parts of speech, or class words, and their inflections had to be learned as prerequisite knowledge. The 1969 Alberta curriculum guide for junior-high school English acknowledged the confusion and even annoyance of teachers with the new structural grammar programme. It included a list of references to help teachers and they were advised to seek university courses to 'decide what to keep of traditional grammar and what to adopt from more recent grammars' (Alberta Department of Education, 1969: 12). There was more than a hint of teacher dissatisfaction with the new grammar in Saskatchewan's 1975 English curriculum guide for Division IV (secondary schools). Teachers were urged to consider the benefits of traditional, structural, and transformational-generative grammars. They were encouraged to be open-minded on this controversial issue. 'It is a disgrace,' the guide said, if a secondary teacher tells students that 'the man or woman who taught them traditional grammar in Division III [junior-high school] was talking nonsense' (Saskatchewan Education, 1975: 93). It was also a disgrace, the guide went on to say, if the same charge were made about the teaching of transformational-generative grammar in the secondary grades. In 1978 the Saskatchewan guide for Division III (junior-high) English (Saskatchewan Education, 1978) included three types of grammar. Grade seven and eight students were to learn the traditional definitions of parts of speech and the traditional concepts of sentence analysis. In addition structural grammar, including the 1968 S-V-O-Q system (see Scott, 1972), and concepts about sentence patterns and inflections were to be learned in all three grades. Grade-nine teachers had an option to introduce transformational-generative grammar. The Nova Scotia Department of Education restored a substantial grammar component to the junior-high school curriculum in 1972, after a short period in which grammar had been in official disfavour 'chiefly a waste of time', a 1969 department publication had asserted (Nova Scotia Department of Education, 1969: 5). This new component was an amalgam of structural and transformational-generative grammar. This same pluralistic approach was evident in the 1977 Ontario curriculum guide for the intermediate division (grades seven to ten). After noting that several descriptive systems of grammar were available, the guide stated that 'a study of grammar, drawing on the strengths of several of these grammars and undertaken at some appropriate point in the students' development, will prove a useful complement to the more practical activi-

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ties of the English program' (Ontario Ministry of Education, 1977b: 57). Initially, the study of grammar was to be on an ad hoc basis. The term communication became popular in the 1970s. For a time it was the official title for what was studied as English in the provinces of Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador (Meeson, 1975: 73). In Alberta it brought a new kind of information to the junior-high school curriculum. The 1978 curriculum guide presented language as a code operating within a larger communication context and interacting with other aspects of that context to achieve an exchange of information and a sharing of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. In one sense, this communication emphasis had something in common with the progressive language arts curricula in Alberta in the 1930s and 1940s in which language served social purposes and was studied from the point of view of those purposes. The difference was that whereas Junior English Activities (Hatfield et al., 1937) taught the uses of language to achieve such social purposes as the effective use of the telephone, the 1978 Alberta communication curriculum introduced a more technical and abstract vocabulary to explain communication in a theoretical way. Students learned terms such as sender or encoder, channel, and feedback. They analysed and described casual communication situations in grade seven, informal ones in grade eight, and formal ones in grade nine. They identified and analysed different kinds of communication and the elements that went into them. Thus a new kind of information about language entered the Alberta junior-high school English programmes in the late 1970s. In addition, the 1978 Alberta programme retained certain structural grammar concepts that were broadened to include transformational-generative ideas, permitting the inclusion of fashionable sentence-combining activities, also popular at the same time in other provinces. Students studied language variation in its historical, geographical, and social dimensions. In short, among all provinces, language information was conceived of much more broadly in the English language arts curriculum by the end of the 1970s. This same breadth is shown in the 1983 Quebec English language arts guide for secondary schools (Gouvernement du Quebec, 1982). The distinction between knowledge about language and the ability to use it effectively as well as the lack of any necessary causal connection between the two was made very clear. Yet, at the secondary level, the information curriculum was not abandoned because of its assumed failure to transfer to performance. Instead, the guide provided a series of model units for teacher use to help students explore the world of language and to develop sophisticated

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and contemporary understandings about the structure and use of language in society. The goals included the development of conscious awareness by students not only of their own assumptions and intuitions about language as they used it but also those of the wider community. Other topics for exploration included units on the origins and development of the English language, language variation, including dialect and register, and semantics. These units demonstrated the use of data from foreign languages from which students drew generalisations about language, following a method popular in university linguistics courses. This Quebec curriculum represents one solution to the epistemological dilemma surrounding propositional knowledge about language. The information curriculum in English is now separated from the performance curriculum without any claims of mutual benefit. The goals of English language arts education are to develop performance abilities and to foster awareness of and interest in language as a human and social phenomenon. In recognition of the abstract nature of language as a field of enquiry, and in acknowledgement of the principles of cognitive development, the information curriculum is deferred until the secondary grades. Canadian teachers of English language arts have not found complete comfort in a performance approach to the subject. While integration of the components of language arts through the use of thematic units has officially replaced the scope and sequence charts of the skills approach, the perception survives of a need for a more tangible structure on which to build programmes. Propositional knowledge about language in its traditional nineteenthcentury form, which provided the most tangible sequence for language learning, has given place throughout the last four decades to various alternatives from the disciplines of linguistics and communication theory: structural grammar, transformational-generative grammar, and the study of communication. None of these seems to have gained the confidence of teachers of English. As a result, with this issue of a theoretical base for the teaching of English language arts unresolved, the whole-language movement, with its emphasis on an experiential epistemology of language development, squarely challenges the value of language study in its pro-positional sense. The advocates of at least some propositional component for the language arts curriculum are in some disarray over what theories of language provide the best propositions. Consequently, the visible debate in Canada between the advocates of an experiential approach to language teaching and the defenders of a more conservative theory-intopractice position tends to be rather one-sided. In Canada, the experiential approach has been popularised as the idea of whole language, an effective banner that is attracting the allegiance of many elementary teachers. It will be interest-

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ing to see, over the next 20 years, how this debate will be resolved in the classroom, where the questions of theory and approach really matter. The Teaching Of Writing Since the development of the 'growth through English' movement in the late 1960s. James Britton, Nancy Martin, and other influential spokespersons have urged English teachers to re-evaluate and refurbish sterile pedagogies with a socially critical approach to language education. Mottos evolving from the post-Dartmouth years are found in contemporary theory and practice: the 'interactional classroom', the 'negotiable curriculum', 'literacy for a purpose'. In Canada, the impact on the teaching of writing of what J.S. Mayher has recently described as 'the progressive personal growth position in English education' (Mayher, 1986) is clearly evidenced in the concerted attempt being made to modify the traditional model for composition instruction in favour of teaching writing as a personal and social process. The traditional pedagogical model for writing instruction, with its emphasis on grammatical and formal control and its conservative view of the significance of written literacy, is still an exceedingly powerful instructional force in composition instruction in Canada. Finding its most influential format in post-secondary and secondary courses of study, the notion that writing correctly is synonymous with control over grammar and mastery over form continues to have an influential voice in the classroom. Motivated by the conviction that developing the ability to write relies, at least initially, upon the understanding of certain principles of form and style, many writing teachers continue to offer students a course of study based on sequenced lessons on grammar and form. This highly pragmatic approach to writing instruction defines the basics about grammar, style, organisation, and conventional prose formats. As a result, exercises to teach writing tend to be tightly structured and rigorous. The recently published secondary handbook, The Communications Handbook (Goepfert, 1982) is a representative example of the type and range of coverage of the traditional approach to writing, stressing technique and its application. Standard topics in this type of course of study are represented by a reference-text approach to issues such as 'Study Skills', 'Paragraphs and Essays', 'Research Papers', 'Formats', 'Mechanics', 'Letters', and a short outline of the organisational keys to public speaking. This type of basic skills approach to writing treats communication as an umbrella term for everyday academic and potentially professional writing

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activities. A strong continuity exists between this approach to composition teaching and earlier models of the traditional pedagogy which stressed the importance of literacy for social and professional success. An accurate assessment of the state of writing instruction in Canada in the 1980s would be that emphasis on technique and pragmatism of this traditional model for writing instruction is gradually being transformed, rather than dislodged, by 'growth through English' advocates. Alternative pedagogies, inspired by post-Dartmouth consciousness, are challenging accepted notions about what constitutes the curriculum in writing instruction. These new pedagogies realign the aims of the teaching of writing along a distinctly different continuum of aims. The curricular consequences of this transformation place less emphasis on technique and more stress on individual creativity. The theoretical consequences are obvious in the tendency of textbooks and courses of study to foreground the relationship between the development of writing abilities and the discovery of self-expression more dramatically than the pragmatic relationship between the acquisition of writing skills and the attainment of social or professional success. The modification of the traditional technique-centred pedagogy with an emphasis on creativity and individualisation in the development of writing abilities is on the increase and can be found in the majority of authorised textbooks. More and more authors of writing texts are realigning the traditional format for writing instruction in order to balance a student-centred course of study with less pedantic, but still necessary, attention to an understanding of language forms. The founding assumptions of this type of instruction are distinctly different from those of the traditional model which assumes that students learn about writing and then learn to write. The Writer's Voice (Boswell et al., 1984), typical of contemporary textbooks, self-consciously advances postDartmouth philosophies: (a) Language plays a key role in the learning process; (b) Writing is thinking. It does not occur in isolation, but is closely integrated with speaking, listening, reading, and viewing: (c) Writing grows out of personal experience and helps to clarify this experience; (d) Writing is learned by writing, not by explanation and isolated exercises; (e) Writing improves when the writing situations (purpose and audience) are real. (Boswell et al., 1984: 5-6) This approach to composing defines writing as exploring and communication. Although many of the traditional elements of composition instruction are covered in a textbook such as this one essays, descriptive paragraphs,

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coherence, clarity, form the student and the writing process are centre stage. Traditional topics are discussed under the general rubric of 'writer's voice', 'exploring', and 'writing for a purpose', not within the normative configuration of a sequenced study of techniques that eventually enable the student to produce conventional compositions. Strong reinforcement for such provocative transformation of writing pedagogy has been advanced from a determined legion of college English teachers who have invigorated a largely traditional post-secondary curriculum with pedagogical principles from traditional rhetoric. Following the example of such rhetoricians as W. Ross Winterowd, Edward P.J. Corbett, and James Kinneavy, college and university writing teachers have supplemented traditional preoccupation with the technique of writing with the concerns of a rhetorical approach to writing and speaking instruction that emphasises purpose, invention, and audience. This rhetorical approach has proved to be extremely compatible with the aims and methods of the 'growth through English' movement. The increased rhetorisation of composition teaching has conspired successfully with the 'personal growth position' of English education to provide alternatives to the traditional model for writing instruction. While the 'growth through English' movement has redirected pedagogical considerations toward the developmental and creative needs of the learner, the rhetorical approach to composing has shifted the weight of traditional pedagogy away from an overwhelming emphasis on technique toward a central focus on communication purpose and the function of writing as social discourse. In combination, these two perspectives dilute the compelling attention to grammatical and organisational skills so typical of traditional writing pedagogy. While the changes in writing pedagogy over the last two decades are dramatic, it would be inaccurate to describe this change as a radical displacement of the old order. However, if the primary concern is that students hear less about correctness and more about creativity, less about writing for success and more about writing for discovery and communication, Canadian teachers should feel satisfied that there is more than ample evidence to confirm that these emerging pedagogical creeds are reshaping writing instruction in Canada. Teaching Literature This section on teaching literature during the 1965 to 1985 period has been organised by decade, with each decade indicating a distinct shift of

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thinking about education and hence literature. The 1960s was an era of enthusiasm, the 1970s, an era of nationalism, and the 1980s, an era of conservatism. The 1960s were interesting, fast-paced, and vibrant, not only in Canada but throughout the Western world. As the result of a successful economy, a sense of optimism and freedom permeated society, an attitude that was also expressed in curricula for English language arts. Literature teaching enjoyed a sense of freedom both in pedagogy and in the expression of the literary canon. Northrop Frye of the University of Toronto was the major figure of the decade. Frye had some influence on the direction of literary criticism in Canada and indeed North America, and indirectly on literature curriculum development. His archetypal approach to literary criticism lent itself to the division of literature into themes and patterns; hence, the thematic approach to curriculum and pedagogy became common in literature curricula. Frye, in works such as The Developing Imagination (1963a) and The Educated Imagination (1963b), argued that the power of literature was in the education and development of creative thought: The ultimate purpose of teaching literature is not understanding, but the transferring of the imaginative habit of mind, the instinct to create a new form instead of idolizing an old one, from the laboratory of literature to the life of mankind. Society depends heavily for its well-being on the handful of people who are imaginative in this sense. (Frye, 1963a: 58) Although a certain elitism exists in this quotation, the imaginative and creative power of literature certainly fitted well with the sense of creativity that permeated education at the time. The 1960s also saw the introduction of general or non-academic courses, providing students with greater freedom to select the appropriate literature course. This movement prompted a considerable broadening of the literary canon. Many curriculum guides of the decade provided a more varied and flexible programme for the nonacademic students than for those students in the matriculation pattern. In such provinces as Nova Scotia, general courses had a profound influence on the provincial examination systems. Where the literature component of the English examinations had asked students to critically analyse specific works that all students had studied, the new freer selection of content prompted educators to rethink the role and structure of provincial examinations. Examinations were opened up to permit more personal responses and to allow the use of original selections as part of the examinations (Carney, 1986).

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This change in assessment from literary criticism to a recognition of personal response can also be attributed to the influence of the 1966 Dartmouth conference (Dixon, 1967, rev. 1975). Curriculum guides after 1966 placed more emphasis on personal response to literature than they had in the previous decade, moving away from the rigidities of former notions of grammar, composition, literature, and examinations. This interest in more authentic, personal responses to literature continued throughout the 1970s. Curriculum development became more decentralised, book lists of literature continued to grow, and teachers and students could choose from a number of possible titles, particularly novels, short stories, and poetry. Curriculum documents became guidelines, more descriptive than prescriptive. The 1970s in Canada saw a surging of interest in national identity. Many educators were asking a simple question: what does it mean to be Canadian? Some looked to literature for guidance and answers. In this search, the gaps in Canadian literature became obvious, particularly literature for young children and adolescents. It also became apparent that literature and culture were inextricably intertwined. As an introduction to a series for high-school literature, Northrop Frye wrote: It is obvious that Canadian literature, whatever its inherent merits, is an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada. It records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to, and it tells things about this environment that nothing else will tell us. (Frye, 1971: 215) Frye echoes the thoughts of such writers as Eli Mandel (1971) and the historian Ramsay Cook (1971) who strongly advocated a cultural heritage model of literature. They presented this argument: Because Canadian literature is rooted in the social and political and historical setting, students will better understand their national identity through the reading of Canadian literature. The power of this interest in Canadian literature can be seen in the move taken by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1974 to require all graduates of secondary schools to complete two credits in Canadian studies. Such requirement opened the door for curriculum development in Canadian literature at the secondary level. For example, Sheila Brooks and Alice Hale, secondary teachers in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, were instrumental in developing Canadian literature courses and materials. Ian Underhill, an Ontario secondary English teacher, developed Starting the Ark in the Dark (1977), as part of an integrated Canadian studies programme incorporating units of regional literature. Don Gutteridge (1978) followed with The Country of the Young.

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The fervent advocacy of Canadian literature as cultural heritage led to a more structured interpretation of literature curricula. The means to ensure that Canadian literature was a part of secondary English curricula was to structure the curriculum in terms of national literature. Hence, English curricula developed during the 1970s tended to group content in terms of British, American, and Canadian literature, giving prominence to the cultural heritage model for teaching literature. Interestingly, this model, which started in a concern for freedom and relevance, ended up as a rational, academic approach to literature as noted particularly in the guides for Saskatchewan (Saskatchewan Education, 1975) and Ontario (Ontario Ministry of Education, 1977). The story of the teaching of literature in the 1980s is that of problems and issues, not the development of programmes. The theme of the annual conference of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English in 1984, 'Progress in Hard Times', succinctly states the situation that English and literature face in this decade. Beginning in the latter half of the 1970s, censorship became an issue in Canadian schools, led in Ontario by the Renaissance International movement. Works by well-known Canadian writers, whom teachers had struggled to introduce into the curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s, faced the censors' wrath. Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and W.O. Mitchell established Canadian writers were branded as obscene if not downright blasphemous. In several incidents, censorship drives became national news items. School districts reacted with procedures and policies to handle challenged materials. In a sense, the censorship movement demonstrates a growing public awareness of the interrelationship among literature, language, and values. The 1980s in Canada continues to see a curriculum focus on Canadian literature, with a growing interest in modern literature in place of older, traditional literature and the classics. Teachers tend to stress critical analysis as their dominant methodology, and reader response theory makes slow progress. The large numbers of students for whom English is a second language has prompted a change in the selection of literature. Departments of multiculturalism, both at the provincial and federal level, have encouraged multicultural literature, with changes in school practice to incorporate literature in translations from other cultures and countries. In 1981, the Council of Ministers of Education, a national organisation among ministries of education, released its study of English language arts curricula. This study examined those curricula in place at the turn of the decade and which have continued to guide instruction in literature throughout the 1980s (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, 1981). This report notes that literature at the elementary school level is introduced

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through published programmes, with additional materials selected by the teachers, and student-selected recreational reading. As a result literature in the elementary school, at least in the basal series, often consisted of sterile, rewritten excerpts in reading programmes rather than trade books for children. In contrast to this approach to the teaching of literature, curriculum guides published in Nova Scotia (Nova Scotia Department of Education, 1978, 1982) and Quebec (Ministere de l'Education, 1984, 1985) made the case for real children's literature in elementary classrooms. The report has influenced guides among all provinces to promote the reading of a variety of literature. The Council of Ministers' report notes that all curricula for the early adolescent years included a literature programme and at least referred to the desirability of including non-print media. Grouping literature in terms of genre was the most common organisational pattern, but thematic organisation was becoming more evident. At the senior-high school level, there was generally an increased interest in Canadian literature, with several provinces including a unit of Canadian literature directly in the core programme. The report also noted a trend wherein 'the teaching of literature is changing from the placing of heavy emphasis on form and structure to a greater consideration of life experience, emotional impact, and as a model of effective language' (p. 7). It noted, too, that Canadian literature had achieved a secure place within the curriculum: Canadian nationalism is reflected in a preference for Canadian materials. Provincial literature is also favoured. There has been a definite improvement in quality and quantity of Canadian adolescent material. (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, 1981: 7) A myriad of issues affecting the teaching of literature appeared during the 1980s. Back-to-the-basics, an illdefined demand, was supported by many diverse elements in society. In Saskatchewan, for example, the School Trustees Association, in 1984, passed a resolution to reduce the time spent on literature and to increase the time for the teaching of grammar and composition. Saskatchewan English teachers, along with their colleagues in other parts of Canada, have been caught in a public debate in which they have to explain what an integrated English programme is and how all aspects of the language arts are essential. Reading Education In 1965, reading education was pre-eminent among the language arts. Teacher education courses in reading were separate from courses in the

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teaching of the other language arts, if the latter existed. By the end of the 1960s, reading courses were a compulsory component of the professional education of elementary school teachers. Through the 1970s candidates for secondary teaching positions found themselves more and more taking such courses as reading in the content areas. Indeed, there was incentive to do so because school administrators, recognising the importance of reading skills, wanted to ensure that their new teachers were equipped to teach them. By the end of the 1970s, all of this had changed. In the 1960s and early 1970s, teachers obtained masters degrees in reading education to qualify for the growing number of positions for remedial reading teachers, clinical reading teachers, and reading consultants and supervisors. Residing was the dominant curriculum area in many school systems. By the late 1970s, special education took over reading's funding priorities. By the mid-1980s, gifted education stepped into the limelight. In 1967 the reading curriculum was concerned with teaching reading as a set of skills. A major influence on this model had been Chicago's William S. Gray whose students went on to be leaders in reading education in both the United States and Canada. The major issue was whether it was better to teach reading by a decoding method such as phonics or the newly touted linguistic spelling patterns, or by a whole-word method. Jeanne Chall's (1967) Learning to Read: The Great Debate attempted to resolve this issue by a review of extant research and came down on the side of the decoding approach. No sooner had Jeanne Chall resolved the great debate than the phonics versus whole-word controversy was fossilised by the emergence of psycho-linguistics. One of the first names to become a household word for Canadian reading educators was that of Kenneth Goodman. Reading was now a 'psycholinguistic guessing game'. It was no longer a set of skills encountered by first graders as the rules of a brand new cognitive activity which they were only ready to start mastering when they reached the magic mental age of 6.5 years. Frank Smith, who came to Canada from Britain via Australia and the United States, achieved international recognition for his promotion of a psycholinguistic argument to the teaching of reading. At the beginning of the 1970s, Smith's Understanding Reading (Smith, 1971) was read by graduate students in reading programmes that still reflected a traditional view of the reading process. They waited for their professors to pronounce the verdict, but the professors were cautious. It was not until the mid-1970s that these reading programmes began to reflect a psycholinguistic orien-

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tation. By the end of that decade, Smith's (1971) book, in one of its later editions, was frequently a textbook in new teacher-education courses on the reading process. By the mid-1970s, the psycholinguistic approach to reading began to influence school reading programmes and more teachers became aware of the new ideas through university courses and through the conference presentations and writings of Smith and his American psycholinguist colleagues, and as provincial curriculum guides began to reflect the same influence. This new approach, especially as it became associated with socio-linguistics in the 1980s, moved the English language arts curriculum toward integration. With reading no longer regarded as a unique visual-perceptual process, having instead a firm basis in language, there was no longer any justification for separating it from the other components of language. Research interest shifted in the late 1970s to the writing process, and more teachers discovered excitement in allowing and encouraging their children to explore their own experiences through expressive writing without the prior achievement of conventional spelling. The term emergent literacy replaced beginning reading, as the roots of both reading and writing were discovered in the print-rich activities of preschool children participating in the normal day-to-day agendas of their families. These ideas suggesting an integrated approach to the language arts entered the classroom under the banner of whole language teaching. And so Voltaire's 'few acres of ice and snow' moves toward the twenty-first century. The teachers of English language arts will have to be alert to the nature of impending changes. During the last 20 years, we have come to grips with the Canadianness of what it means to teach English language arts in Canada. During the next 20 years, we will have to come to grips with the basic philosophical question involved in teaching English language arts. This will be hard progress in exciting times. Note To Chapter 5 1. The section on language was written by Laurence Walker; the section on writing by Nan Johnson. Trevor Gambell prepared the section on literature. This project was co-ordinated and edited by Sam Robinson. References ALBERTA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 1969, Junior-High School Curriculum Guide for Language Arts. Edmonton: Alberta Department of Education.

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BOSWELL, WILLIAM, et al. 1984, The Writers Voice: Reading into Writing. Toronto: Methuen Publications. CANADIAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE 1975, Basic Educational Skills. Ottawa: Canadian Chamber of Commerce. CARNEY, JANET 1986, Personal communication. Halifax: Nova Scotia School Boards Association. CHALL, JEANNE 1967, Learning to Read: The Great Debate. New York: The McGraw-Hill Book Company. CHORNY, MERRON 1968, The genesis of a profession. Address to the annual conference of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English. Calgary, Alberta. COOK, RAMSAY 1971, The uses of literature in cultural history. The English Quarterly, 4 (3), 25-30. COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF EDUCATION, CANADA 1981, English Language Arts: A Survey of Provincial Curricula at the Elementary and Secondary Levels. Report to Curriculum Committee, Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. DASHWOOD-JONES, DONALD 1966-67, Patterns for Writing, 1-3. Toronto: W.J. Gage. DIXON, JOHN 1967, 1975 Growth through English: Set in the Perspective of the Seventies. London: National Association for the Teaching of English/Oxford University Press. EVANS, PETER J.A. 1984, Evaluation Policy. Canadian Council of Teachers of English. FRYE, NORTHROP 1963a. The Developing Imagination. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1963b, The Educated Imagination. The Massey Lectures Second series. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 1971. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi. GOEPFERT, PAULA S. (ed.) 1982, The Communication Handbook. Toronto: Nelson. GOODMAN, KENNETH S. 1982, Language and Literacy: The Selected Writings of Kenneth S. Goodman. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. GOUVERNEMENT DU QUEBEC 1982, Secondary School Curriculum: English Language Arts I-V. Québec QUE: Ministère de l'Education. GUTTERIDGE, DON 1978, The Country of the Young: Units in Canadian Literature for Elementary and Secondary School. Monograph Number Two, Faculty of Education Monograph Series. London, Ontario: The University of Western Ontario. HAMILTON, L.D. 1954, Some facts and fictions about the teaching of English. Educational Record of the Province of Quebec 70, 2, pp. 75-78. HATFIELD, WILBUR et al. 1937, Junior English Activities, 1-3. New York: American Book Co. HODGETTS, A.B. 1968, What Culture? What Heritage? Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. LEACOCK, STEPHEN 1939, Too Much College: or Education Eating up Life: With Kindred Essays in Education and Humour. New York: Dodd, Mead. MANDEL, ELI 1971, The study of Canadian culture. The English Quarterly, 4 (3), 15-24. MAYHER, J.S. 1986, Growth through English revisited, Issues that Divide Us: Papers. The International Federation for the Teaching of English.

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MEESON, BRIAN 1975, English, Canada. The English Quarterly 8, 2, pp. 69-76. MINISTERE DE L'EDUCATION 1984, Elementary School Curriculum Guide: English Language Arts Sample Literature Units, Level V: Elementary V Gouvernement du Quebec. 1985, Elementary School Curriculum Guide: English Language Arts Sample Literature Units, Level IV: Elementary V. Gouvernement du Quebec. NEATBY, HILDA M. 1953, So Little for the Mind. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. NOVA SCOTIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 1969, Notes and Suggestions for High School Teachers of English. Halifax: Department of Education. Government of Nova Scotia. 1978, Literature in the Elementary School. Youth education teaching guide No. 24. Halifax: Department of Education, Government of Nova Scotia. 1982, Guidelines for the Teaching of Canadian Literature (English 442). Curriculum Development Teaching Guide No. 78. Halifax: Department of Education, Government of Nova Scotia. ONTARIO MINISTRY OF EDUCATION 1977a, Curriculum Guideline for the Senior Division: English. Toronto: Ministry of Education, Government of Ontario. 1977b, English: Curriculum Guide for the Intermediate Division. Ontario: Ministry of Education. SASKATCHEWAN EDUCATION 1975, Curriculum Guide: Division IV, English 10, 20, 30. Regina: Saskatchewan Education. 1978, A Curriculum Guide for Division III: English. Regina: Saskatchewan Education. SCOTT, ROBERT IAN 1972, The Writer's Self-starter. Collier-Macmillan Canada, Ltd. SMITH, FRANK 1971, Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. UNDERHILL, IAN 1977, Starting the Ark in the Dark: Teaching Canadian Literature in High School. Monograph Number One, Faculty of Education Monograph Series. London, Ontario: The University of Western Ontario.

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6 Teaching English In Australia: A Personal View Diana Davis and Ken Watson This is, in both senses of the word, a partial account: partial in that it reflects the perceptions and (though not too strongly, we trust) inevitable biases of the authors, and partial too because no single chapter can hope to portray fully the diversity of educational approach and endeavour which must exist when six States and two Territories all operate their own educational systems. In this chapter we have concentrated on the last 20 years or so, giving as brief a picture of the first two post-war decades as possible, commensurate with the need to provide the reader with some sense of the background political, cultural, social against which the major shifts in English teaching that have characterised the period from about 1965 have occurred. The Cultural And Political Context In Australia we have a phrase, 'the cultural cringe', which denotes what many see as an excessive deference to ideas and movements emanating from overseas, particularly from Britain and the USA. And it is sometimes argued that the cultural cringe is especially evident in the teaching of English, that the changes that have occurred in English teaching have simply been an acceptance of overseas influences. Whilst there is no doubt that, in the period since World War II, the forms that English teaching has taken have been shaped in part by reports of such overseas events as the Dartmouth Seminar, they have also been shaped by a number of local pressures and local initiatives. Hence it is possible to see Australian English teaching in 1988 as having some unique features, whilst at the same time having a significant amount in common with English teaching in New Zealand, in Britain, in North America. What are these local problems and pressures with which English

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teaching in Australia has had to come to terms? First and foremost, there is the post-war migration, which has made Australia, after Israel, the most multicultural nation on earth. Allied with this has been an intensified search for a national identity as the sense of a common British heritage has weakened. There has been a burgeoning concern with Aboriginal Australians, their culture and their needs. Economic pressures have also played their part, both in attempts to influence the curriculum, particularly during periods of recession and unemployment, and in the effects of a growing affluence upon the class structure. A complicating factor for the English-teaching profession has been the lack of support even hostilityin some States of a significant number of those who might have been seen as its natural allies the members of English Departments in the universities. At the national level, political power since 1949 has, with the exception of the period 1972-75, when a radically reformist Labor Party assumed Government, been the preserve of conservative parties. (At time of writing, the Labor Party is again in power, but it is generally conceded that this is a much more conservative party than the one headed by Gough Whitlam in 1972-75.) And while the Federal Constitution, promulgated in 1901, left education in the hands of the States, there has been, in the period under review, a growing Federal involvement in education. Inevitably, the character of this involvement has been shaped by the philosophy of the particular party in power, and perhaps even more by its perception of what will win votes. Despite recent initiatives at the national level, there remain clear differences between the various States, arising from the fact that each State's educational system was well established before Federation. Thus in New South Wales, for example, public education had until relatively recently a much higher status than it did in some of the southern States. In Victoria, a two-tiered system of public secondary education (high schools and technical schools) still exists, although a single post-primary division has at last been created, and children in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory enter the secondary school a year later than those in the other States. Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have developed systems of junior high schools and senior colleges. (The Tasmanian colleges are known as matriculation colleges and until recently their curriculum has been conceived almost exclusively in terms of preparation for university.) A very large Catholic education system parallels, but is independent of, each State's public school system. In all States there are also many private/independent schools, particularly at secondary level, with Victoria having the highest percentage of students in private secondary schools.

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Each State, then, has had, historically, its own, fairly centralised education system. At both primary and secondary level most States produce (or did produce until recently) syllabus statements to which teachers are expected to adhere. Thus change, when it comes, has to be 'top down' as well as 'bottom up': any change at the grassroots has to be matched by changes at the level of the syllabus committees (not to mention parents, employer groups and the like). This probably means that change comes a little more slowly, but once it has been enshrined in syllabus documents it becomes widespread. New South Wales, for example, had, until the early 1970s, very prescriptive syllabuses (or, if not prescriptive syllabus statements, then an examination system and list of set texts which forced English teaching into a fairly restrictive mould). It still produces syllabuses which, while conferring considerable professional responsibility upon teachers, nevertheless embody the requirement that the State's teachers, whether they are in public or private schools, adhere to syllabus aims and objectives. South Australia has travelled further along a similar road: schools today are simply required to take account of, not necessarily to use, the official guidelines. A system of moderation of the work of the schools at the senior level preserves, however, a degree of accountability. As already noted, the last 30 or so years has seen the gradual intrusion of the Federal Government into education, notably in the introduction of financial aid to private schools. While one of the aims of this financial aid was ostensibly that of improving the facilities of the poorer private, mainly Catholic schools, it has led to a widening of the gap between wealthy private schools and those in the public sector, and has had its impact upon the class structure. Other Federal initiatives, notably in the 1970s and 1980s, have had much more positive effects upon the teaching of English in schools: the establishment of the National Curriculum Development Centre and of the National Committee on English Teaching; the setting up of a National Working Party on the Role of Language in Learning; the National Language Development Project (LDP); the Participation and Equity Program (PEP); and Basic Learning in Primary Schools (BLIPS). (Like the rest of the English-speaking world, Australia is afflicted with acronymophilia.) Apart from the Curriculum Development Centre itself, PEP, established in 1984, and BLIPS, launched in 1985, are, at the time of writing, the only surviving programmes. PEP has as one of its aims to encourage pupils to continue their education beyond the years of compulsory schooling, and has been notable in fostering in-service programmes within individual schools; BLIPS has spawned ELIC (Early Literacy

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In-Service Course), a staff development package developed in South Australia which is proving very effective at the lower primary level in several States. The fact that these initiatives date from 1984 and 1985 suggests that, despite the marked shift of the governing Labor Party to the right, there survives a stronger belief that education can promote essentially egalitarian aims of equity and opportunity than seems to be the case in some other English-speaking countries. In attempting a global picture of developments in English teaching in Australia, we have ignored most of the regional differences, which seem relatively minor, and have concentrated as far as possible on national trends. Once or twice we have found it necessary to point to significant differences between States, but any reader who wishes to explore trends in a particular State would be advised to consult the journal produced by that State's English teachers' association 1 and, for differences at the senior secondary level, Paul Nay-Brock's recent book, Who's Doing What? The Senior English Curriculum in Australian Education (1987). English Teaching In Australia, 1945-1960: An Overview If one were to consult George Mackaness's Inspirational Teaching, first published in 1928 and until 1967 the only significant Australian book on the teaching of English (the works of E.G. Biaggini fall into a rather different category2), one would build up a picture of lively, imaginative English teaching which emphasised drama, versewriting and the importance of having 'pupils talk, argue, debate, question' (Mackaness, 1928:30). But Mackaness's book, while based on his own teaching practice, had its genesis, not in what was going on in his own State of New South Wales, but in Caldwell Cook's The Play Way, published in Britain in 1917. The reality, in New South Wales and elsewhere in Australia, was unfortunately very different, as, indeed, it was in Britain, where The Play Way seems to have had little impact upon teaching practice. Until the early 1960s the various Australian state education systems operated around sets of readers, spelling lists, dictation and transcription passages which became, theoretically, more comprehensive and complex as the child moved up through the primary school and into the secondary school. From the third year of the secondary school onwards, English was bound by a centralised set of prescriptions and a related examinations spiral. At the primary level each child was issued with a class reader, supplemented from time to time by a school magazine published by the

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particular State's Education Department. (As time went on, the school magazines improved dramatically in quality, and their contribution to literacy should not be underestimated. Similar publications are still being produced, such as the Victorian Education Department's 'Pursuit'.) There was usually a staple spelling list which, from the third or fourth grade onwards, was typically supplemented by word books of exercises on punctuation and grammar. These were apparently predicated on what might be called the 'vigour from rigour' concept of the teaching of English. Children completed numerous exercises of a fill-in, mechanical variety, as can be seen from this example, taken from a book intended for the sixth grade: 1. Fill in the right word, from those supplied, in each of the following sentences: where, wear: The carpet shows signs of ...... in places ...... people most often walked. as, has: Tom ...... just ...... good a chance of winning ...... Jack. to, too, two:...... parcels are ...... much for me ...... carry. 2. Give words opposite in meaning to each of the following: rigid, victory, spendthrift, virtue, roguery. 3. Write sentences to show the difference between: boy's and boys'; man's and men's; a dog's home and a dogs' home. The same textbook offers topics for composition ('Write an account of any picnic or outing you have had in a park or woods' and 'A cuckoo lays an egg in a thrush's nest. The two birds meet. Write the conversation they might have.') which reveal its UK origin, and under the heading 'Reading for Appreciation' presents a series of poems with comprehension questions underneath. This book (and almost all the other textbooks in use at the time) reflects the belief that students who are able satisfactorily to complete exercises like these would also be able to produce these structures and vocabulary items in their writing speaking not being mentioned, and listening ignored. A similar pattern obtained in the secondary school years, though with an increasing emphasis on a body of prescribed literature, normally constituting a gradual introduction to the range of forms in the great tradition of English Literature. This led to the production of school literature texts, such as Foster & Bryant's Gateway to Shakespeare, with its excerpts from Shakespearian plays, anthologies of poetry like Mackaness's The Wide Brown Land (an attempt to acquaint children with Australian literature) and collections of short stories and one-act plays. The secondary school, too, saw an increasing emphasis on comprehension, with weekly

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exercises involving the reading of passages and the answering of questions on them, and much work on parsing and analysis and sentence correction. The typical junior secondary English class, then proceeded somewhat in the following fashion: a poetry lesson on Monday (because a lot of Mondays were missed owing to public and school holidays); a comprehension period on Tuesday (with a spelling list thrown in for good measure); a novel period on Wednesday (with reading round the class and the summarising of the latest chapter in the pupils notebooks). On Thursday there were perhaps two periods: the morning one given over to the writing of a composition on a topic provided by the teacher, the afternoon devoted to the mysteries of adverbial clauses of concession. On Friday, once the test of the spelling list given on Tuesday had been disposed of, there was likely to be a desk-bound reading from a collection of one-act plays. (One variation from this pattern was that in many Catholic and State boys schools almost no poetry was taught.) The specific needs of ESL children, from 1945 onwards entering the schools in ever-increasing numbers, were largely ignored, though some States included reference to them in those sections of syllabus statements dealing with slower learners. No special provision was made for Aboriginal children, who almost always found themselves in slow-learner classes because of their failure to perform well in IQ tests. The cultural bias of such tests was not recognised, and indeed the myth that all Aboriginal children had below-average intelligence had a large following perhaps not surprisingly in a society grounded in White Australia mythology. Winds Of Change It may still be possible, in 1988, to find a few English classrooms similar to that described in the previous section, but most English classrooms, both primary and secondary, differ radically from those commonly found in the 1950s. The change began in the 1960s as leaders in the profession began to question the assumptions on which 'English through exercises' was based. It is tempting to ascribe these changes to the impact of the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 on the leaders of the profession. This would be, however, to ignore a number of local influences. It needs to be remembered that while John Dixon's account of the Dartmouth Seminar, Growth through English, was first published in 1967, it was the second edition, published in 1969, that made at least some Australian teachers aware of what had happened at that

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seminal gathering. And by 1969 the winds of change had already begun to blow with some strength. The early 1960s saw the foundation of the English Teachers' Associations in the various States and the establishment of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. Through their journals and conferences, these associations had begun to influence teaching practice even before Dartmouth. The extent of such influence is, of course, difficult to gauge: most teachers do not read journals or go to conferences, and acknowledge that they gain far more from interchange with their colleagues. Nevertheless, the professional journals of the period do testify to a vigorous interchange amongst the leaders of the profession teacher-educators, members of syllabus committees, the more thoughtful heads of English departments which must have affected practice in at least a significant minority of classrooms. In an early issue of English in Australia we find Tony Delves reminding English teachers of David Holbrook's insistence that English has to do with the growth of the whole person and arguing that 'To the English teacher, what the child says or writes, as well as what he reads, ought to be literature' (Delves, 1966:36). He noted the positive influence of some of the newer textbooks: Reflections from England, and Chatfield & Russell's Poetry Workshop and Junior Poetry Workshop produced locally. In the same journal a few months later, Bill Hannan pointed out that an 'unvaried diet of full-class instruction and solitary writing would seem to provide the least opportunity for use of the spoken language' and pressed for small-group work as well as whole-class, teacher-directed approaches (Hannan, 1967:50). In 1968, in the Newsletter of the N.S.W. English Teachers' Association, Ken Watson attacked the grammar content of a new Syllabus in English for Primary Schools and listed, to the astonishment of many N.S.W. English teachers, the research evidence undermining the view that a knowledge of formal grammar has a positive effect on the ability to write (Watson, 1968:5-6). It was at this point that there was a move away from the traditional English textbook to ones produced with a concern to select material which had both a general focus and a real (or ideal) relevance to the intended audience. Thus the thematic movement was initiated. Perhaps the first local example of the genre was Delves & Tickell's Themes and Responses, Book 1 of which was published in 1967. This series presented students with extracts from literature organised thematically and provided guided opportunities for them to respond imaginatively to the material rather than simply comprehend it. Themes and Responses provided the impetus for the Australian thematic text or resource book galaxy which exploded onto the market and into the schools in the first half of the next decade. Themes and

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units like 'Belonging', 'Fears', 'Witches', 'Endurance', 'Loneliness' represented a dramatic departure from texts which very convergently and solemnly waded through series after series of language exercises and comprehension passages. The initial popularity of such texts argues that significant numbers of teachers were dissatisfied with the traditional patterns of English teaching and were searching for ways of making English more vital and relevant. This suggests a major shift in teachers' attitudes to 'subject English', the causes of which may, with some tentativeness, be ascribed partly to the work of the professional associations, but perhaps more strongly to changes initiated at the level of centralised curriculum development, where the prescriptive syllabuses of the 1950s and early 1960s were giving way to broad statements of aims, with the details of implementation left in the hands of the schools. The Impact Of Dartmouth Growth through English, John Dixon's report for the profession of the Anglo-American Dartmouth Seminar of 1966, came just at the right time to encourage those who were groping towards a new model of English teaching. It directly challenged notions of language learning that were to be found in many official documents and in most of the textbooks in use in schools until Themes and Responses began to have an impact. 'Language', wrote Dixon, 'is learnt in operation, not by dummy runs' (Dixon, 1969:13). The English classroom should be . . . a place where pupils meet to share experience of some importance, to talk about people and situations in the world as they know it, gathering experience into new wholes and enjoying the satisfaction and power that this gives. But in doing so each individual takes what he can from this shared store of experience and builds it into a world of his own. (Dixon, 1969:6-7) With the old patterns under challenge from within and without, it is not surprising that the syllabuses that emerged in the 1970s were not only less prescriptive but also radically different from their predecessors. In New South Wales, for example, the Syllabus Committee for Years (i.e. Grades) 7-10 produced, in 1971, a new English Syllabus which stressed 'the language in use in context' and which embodied 'a deliberate shift from English as information to English as activity'. It no longer specified a body of knowledge to be imparted. It suggested that one of the main aims of English teaching was 'to help [pupils] explore their own and other people's values, in the context of language in all its uses'. Similar syllabus statements were

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produced in Victoria (1970), South Australia (1971) and Queensland (1973). Dixon's personal growth model had received official endorsement. And for those who needed them, new textbooks to fit the 'new English' were already at hand. Of particular importance in the process of spreading new ideas and new understandings were the consultancy services established in each State. In 1968, South Australia appointed consultants in English, Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry. Garth Boomer was the English Consultant. By 1970 there were two English Consultants in South Australia and appointments had also been made in Western Australia and Victoria. Gradually the other States followed the South Australian lead; by the mid-1970s most States had regional consultants as well as consultants with a state-wide brief working closely with teachers. These consultants were potent 'change agents', charged with helping teachers adjust to the new philosophy of English teaching, and also with making teachers aware of overseas research. As they moved around the schools, they also began to collect examples of good practice which they disseminated to schools through newsletters, school-based seminars and conferences. And perhaps at this point it needs to be emphasised that throughout this period there were many dedicated, innovative teachers doing exciting things in their classrooms: the networks established by the consultants facilitated the sharing of such ideas to a greater extent than had been previously achieved. Consultants were able to ensure that the views and practices of such teachers were institutionalised in official guidelines; they also played an active role in the English Teachers' and Reading Associations. Garth Boomer has written: There is no doubt that the consultant as mediator, catalyst, supporter of networks and inquiry, and as critical interpreter of 'big R' research has played a key role in the reform of English teaching since 1968. Where the consultancy has worked best it has eschewed the model of expert, and worked towards the enfranchisement of teachers. (personal communication) The process of consolidation was further helped by a national Curriculum Officers Conference on Primary School English in 1971, with Paula Menyuk from the USA and Bernard Newsome from the UK as invited consultants. It must be acknowledged, however, that for most of the 1970s English at the primary school level lagged behind secondary English. The balance was ultimately redressed largely through the growth in influence of the Primary English Teaching Association, founded in 1972, and through the appointment of primary advisers/consultants and project teams.

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A more powerful influence initially was the 1972 UNESCO Seminar, held in Sydney, and attended by 80 invited delegates from around Australia. It was the first such meeting of the profession in Australia and the first opportunity for genuine dialogue bridging the vastness of the continent and its different systems of education. There were two overseas consultants, James Britton (UK) and Roger Shuy (USA), with the specific brief of providing input on the state of the art in language development, theory, research and practice. In retrospect, it may be said that the greatest single gain of the Seminar was a realisation of the extent of the profession's fundamental ignorance about areas central to its work. Not only did the 80 participants discover, for example, that they knew of virtually no Australian research relevant to their concerns, but also that the findings of such research from overseas rarely filtered through and hence could have little impact upon teaching practice. Moreover, it was clear that the very considerable corpus of theory about the way in which a child acquires his or her native tongue was familiar to all too few, and utilised in practice by even fewer. As a direct result of the Seminar, the National Committee on English Teaching (N.C.E.T.) was established in Canberra under the auspices of the Commonwealth Department of Education, its purposes being to gather and disseminate information about English teaching and to promote research in the field. While N.C.E.T. became a victim of a government economy drive a few years later, it did manage to launch one important curriculum initiative, the Language Development Project (LDP), with Professor M.A.K. Halliday as consultant and first Nea Stewart and then Frances Christie as Project Officer. The Project sought: 1. to identify and document good practice in fostering language development in the upper primary and junior secondary years; 2. to investigate the problems encountered by children in this age group in meeting the language demands of school learning; 3. to bring theory, research and practice together. As Garth Boomer (1985:198), one of the most influential figures in English teaching in this period, has written, the LDP provided a good example of a potentially 'top down' curriculum initiative which, because it was based on a belief that 'a crucial aspect of teacher growth was the building of a personal theory of learning that could then be tested by teachers in their practice in schools' managed to incorporate many of the strengths of 'bottom up' initiatives by setting out to negotiate with teachers and with systems. Each State undertook a particular task within the general theoretical framework provided by the Project: for example, New South Wales and South

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Australia investigated writing development in Years 5-8, Tasmania concentrated on reading in Years 6 and 7, and Victoria on English as a second language in Years 6 and 7. Each State held conferences, circulated working papers, and sought to make its findings accessible, not only to the teaching profession, but to the wider community, particularly parents. N.C.E.T. also carried out a survey on teacher education, the report of which, published in 1980, highlighted the fragmentation of much of the training provided, the lack of courses on children's language development and (for secondary teachers) on reading. A series of films, designed to highlight current thinking on language and pedagogy, was commissioned by N.C.E.T. as one means of improving the quality of teacher education. At much the same time the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) set up a National Working Party on the Role of Language in Learning, which established a network, Australia-wide, of enquiring teachers and schools. Many teachers were inspired to undertake action research projects in their own classrooms and schools; the fruits of their efforts were widely circulated within most States. Negotiating the Curriculum, edited by Garth Boomer (1982), documents some of the exciting experiments in negotiated learning that were promoted by the National Working Party, experiments which had their genesis in the British 'language across the curriculum' movement but which [at least in our view] went far beyond it in encouraging the development of a model of learning which 'meant bringing children over to the teacher side of the teacher-learner fence' (Boomer, 1982:7). Back To Basics Of course, the production of syllabus documents and the efforts of official bodies cannot of themselves ensure change. There needs to be both a willingness on the part of the profession to entertain new ideas and a social climate in which they can be implemented. Nay-Brock (1987) notes that in Queensland, for example, the 1973 English Syllabus for Years 8-10 received scant attention from traditionalists until the Board of Secondary Education introduced procedures which required all schools to have their programmes accredited by review panels. And three studies undertaken in the period 1976-83 indicated that despite the urgings of state syllabus documents, the dedicated efforts of a growing band of English consultants, the example of enthusiastic and able teachers and the support provided by the establishment of teachers' centres in all States, there was still no unanimity of purpose and methods in the classrooms of the nation. In a study of English in New South Wales schools, Watson (1979) found that implementation of the 1971 Syllabus (Years 7-10) had been at best partial;

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in Western Australia, Martin (1980:258) found 'a great deal of what can only be described as ''busy work" quite unrelated to the "actual functions" of language or what is known about its development'. Piper (1983), in a study of schools in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, noted a neglect of oral language development and described much English teaching as boring and relying heavily on commercially produced textbooks. Why was this so? At least part of the answer is to be found in the 'back to basics' movement of the mid-1970s. No sooner had the 'new English' become enshrined in State syllabuses than it came under attack as the cause of an alleged decline in standards of literacy. (Interestingly, similar claims had been made about the 'old English' in the 1950s and early 1960s.) A call for a return to 'the basics' paralleled similar claims of falling standards in the UK, claims which led there to the setting up of the Bullock Committee. Britain had its Black Papers; Australia followed suit (another example of cultural cringe?) with the establishment of the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES). The main thrust of the ACES attack, as far as English was concerned, rested on unsupported claims that young Australians did not read and write as well as the young people of 30 years ago; there was a strong push for re-establishment of phonics as the only means of teaching reading, and for a return to old methods of teaching writing and spelling, and an attack on the choice of literature, especially adolescent literature. Much of the criticism came from academics who failed to recognise that with the growth in educational opportunity (for example, the abolition of tertiary fees by the Labor Government of 1972-75) a new clientele was coming into the senior school and into tertiary education. One product of 'back to basics' was a resurgence of the kinds of English texts that had been popular in the 1950s. The source books of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to books like the 'Language' series of Sadler, Hayllar & Powell (1977), all packed with fill-in-the-blank exercises, sentence correction, and writing assignments like the following: Write twenty-five lines on one of the following: a. My ideal school b. People I dislike . . . Why did so many teachers turn to such books, thus abandoning the teaching approaches that they had adopted with enthusiasm only a few years previously? The answer seems to lie in their lack of a properly articulated theory of English teaching. Lacking a clear rationale for their teaching practices, English teachers were particularly susceptible to media attacks

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and publishers' promotional efforts. For a time, 'the basics' of English were seemingly determined, not by professional English teachers, but by a handful of journalists and by publishers with an eye to the main financial chance. A particularly distressing feature of the 'back to basics' movement was a concerted attack on public education in the media. There are signs that the undermining of public confidence in state education that resulted from this is causing the Australian class system to become less fluid, with (at least for those not going on to university) the 'right' secondary school becoming the badge of entry to the more privileged groups. 3 Fortunately, at least as far as English is concerned, there are signs that the position is now much healthier. At the time of writing (1988), the bestselling junior secondary textbook series is no longer the 'Language' series but 'English Workshop' (Forrestal & Reid, 1983) which is not only based upon sound language-learning theory but has sought to tackle the great unsolved problem in English teaching, that of sequence and continuity. This shift may be ascribed to a much more widespread understanding of the principles of language growth, an understanding achieved, at least in part, by the efforts of the consultancy services and by initiatives like the Language Development Program. English At The Senior Secondary Level By the end of World War II, all States had abolished public examinations at the termination of primary schooling, but such examinations lingered on into the 1960s at two points in secondary education: the end of the years of compulsory schooling and at the matriculation level. As far as English was concerned, the senior examination syllabuses in the 1960s were either Leavisite in emphasis or offered no philosophy at all and, as Warwick Goodenough noted, simply listed books for study according to a tired old formula: Something old, something new, Something borrowed, but nothing blue. (Goodenough, 1967:14) Gradually, public examinations at the end of Year 9 or Year 10 were phased out, and Queensland and later the Australian Capital Territory took the bold step of abolishing public examinations at Year 12. To date, no other State has felt able to follow Queensland's lead, and it is probably this factor as much as any other which has preserved a distressing fracture in English courses at the end of Year 10. While every State has syllabus statements or

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curriculum guidelines for the junior secondary years which embody the personal growth model of English, only Queensland carries this definition of English into the senior years. In other States, to a greater (e.g. New South Wales) or lesser (e.g. Victoria and South Australia) extent, the demands of the universities and the Year 12 examination (generally known as the Higher School Certificate) create a situation whereby the goals of English are narrowed, one kind of writing the literary-critical essay is elevated to prime importance, and lists of set texts shape the curriculum. Lest this picture of senior English seem too gloomy, it must be stressed that the last few years have seen some exciting initiatives. In Victoria, for example, there has been the development of an alternative Higher School Certificate course, English B, the brainchild of Bill Hannan and David McRae. This is important not only as an example of school-based assessment at the senior level, but as an example of goal-based assessment. Students are judged in terms of their progress towards specific, definable goals, such as the presentation of a piece of writing of some 2,500 words which has been drafted, redrafted, edited and brought to finished copy stage. Another Victorian initiative, Group I English, taken by the majority of candidates, encompasses a range of writing in the external examination, and offers teacher-assessed options, such as 'Writing Workshop' and 'Oral English'. In South Australia SAS English (School-Assessed Subject as against PES Publicly-Examined Subject) has been launched. A 'template' syllabus for Year 12 sets minimum requirements: in poetry, for example, students must read, share, perform and write a minimum of 30 poems. There are no set texts, the choice being left to the teacher and pupils. Regional moderating groups examining folders of work at two points during the year ensure the maintenance of standards. English And The ESL Child At the same time that the old model of teaching English to the native speaker was being challenged, educators at last began to make concerted efforts to help the ESL child. Until the late 1960s, there were very few ESL-trained teachers in the schools, but by the mid-1970s the position had changed radically, with ESL specialists available in most schools with a significant migrant intake. At first, ESL teaching was narrowly structural in its approach, but one of the most dramatic developments of the last decade has been the rapidity with which ESL teaching has shifted, both in theory and in pedagogy, to a position which is very close to that of the 'new

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English'. Intensive Language Centres cater for new arrivals from non-English-speaking countries; thereafter, the emphasis is on 'mainstreaming' the ESL pupils, with the specialist ESL teacher coming into their ordinary classes to assist them. Some schools with a high migrant intake prefer, however, the concept of 'parallel English' classes, where classes composed of ESL pupils follow the same course as the native speakers, but in a more structured way under the guidance of an ESL specialist. The merits of the two approaches remain the subject of controversy; current government policy generally favours mainstreaming, but recognises that the teachers on the spot are in the best position to judge the needs of particular groups of pupils. English And The Aboriginal Child Regrettably, recognition of the special needs of Aboriginal children has been very slow in coming about, for such children form only a small minority of the total school population. It is only recently that the belief that urban Aboriginals speak a different dialect has been questioned: a study by Eagleson et al. (1982) suggests that the nonstandard social dialect spoken by the majority of urban Aborigines is the same as that spoken by a section of urban white Australians. In rural areas where there is a high concentration of Aboriginal people, the first steps are being taken towards providing bilingual education (it is estimated that at the time of earliest European contact there were between 200 and 250 Aboriginal languages), and efforts are being made to alert teachers everywhere to the problems faced by their Aboriginal pupils when trying to make sense of western-style schooling. The major barriers to effective communication between white teachers and the Aboriginal children in their classroom would seem to arise, at least in part, from the differences in world view between the Aboriginal peoples and westerners, and the different modes of learning operating in the two cultures. Michael Christie (1985:68) has pointed out . . . the fundamental difference between the Aboriginal mode of informal and largely non-verbal learning which the children know so well, and the complex, purposeful, and verbal learning behaviours required of classroom instruction. Teachers wrongly assume that their Aboriginal pupils are purposefully disposed towards their academic careers, and the pupils wrongly assume that academic learning can be effected through faithful performance of ritual behaviours. The ritual reader, for example, sees teacher approval as a major goal of

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reading, and, if the teachers simply praise his/her oral reading, is likely to remain unaware that the true goals are enjoyment and information. Thus teachers of Aboriginal children have to make some fundamental adjustments of teaching method if they are to communicate successfully with their pupils. The appointment of Aboriginal teaching aides and of consultants whose task it is to make teachers aware of Aboriginal culture and traditions are steps in the right direction, and the Curriculum Development Centre is embarking on a major project on Aboriginal Pedagogy. Research In English Education One of the tasks undertaken by the N.C.E.T. was the production of a Bibliography of Research in English Teaching (Davis & Spearritt, 1979). Initial interest in research can be traced back to the mid-1960s, but there has not been in Australia the long tradition of research into composition teaching and assessment methods that characterises the first six decades of the century in North America and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. The 1970s did see some improvement in the amount of research. When Davis & Spearritt called for details of relevant research completed between 1960 and 1979, 204 individual studies were submitted. Studies by teachers were very much the exception, and in an earlier paper Davis (1972) had identified some of the reasons, chief of which was the paucity of post-experience/post-graduate programmes offering English Education and, as a corollary, the difficulty of obtaining appropriate supervision of thesis-type degrees in the area. That in 1988 the position is much healthier cannot be doubted. Not only is there a much greater body of research, but research activity is increasingly seen as the active responsibility of classroom teachers as well as of academics. As illustrations of the research being done, we should like to instance the work of two of the researchers who have made a positive contribution to English teaching in recent years. Brian Cambourne has spent many years studying the language development of young children, from pre-schoolers to middle primary. He has demonstrated, for example, that children from non-English-speaking backgrounds who enter reading-writing classrooms on the first day of enrolment in kindergarten use precisely the same strategies for making sense of the 'written language puzzle' as do English-speaking children (Cambourne et al., n.d.). Cambourne's studies have led him to enunciate seven major conditions for language learning which, he argues, can be applied not only to learning to talk but also to the learning of reading and writing and to the learning of a second language. These are:

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Immersion from the moment they are born, children are immersed in a 'language flood' which is meaningful, purposeful and whole. Demonstration