Sociable English

Photograph: Hermione Hodgson

The Spring issue of English in Education – shortly be published online at http://bit.ly/EIE-current – reminds us of the sociability that is at the heart of English.  

The primary school students in Tom Dobson’s study of collaborative writing produce a publishable fiction text for their imagined ideal reader, a person of their own age.  

Sue Wilson explores the way 10 and 11 year olds in Australian schools discuss picture-books about social, cultural and environmental issues.

Ghazal Kazim Syed and Amanda Naylor set up an online reading community of students in the UK and Norway.   The students discovered ways in which different cultural contexts affected their reading of shared novels.

Lucinda Knight’s paper “Since Feeling is First” describes an experiential workshop approach in which students learn to write paragraphs collaboratively without immediate recourse to formulaic models.

Of course, isolation and silence are also part of student experience.  In his poem “Silent Rambling in an Examination Hall”, Debasish Mishra acutely and ironically observes what is commonly taken to be, in more than one sense, the end of education: terminal examination.  

Shannon Wells and Brian Moon present an analytical model to examine the content of classroom textbooks.  They find that the predominant emphasis is on language and rhetoric, but ethical and social analysis often impinges upon rhetorical study.

In the Reviews section of this issue, Velda Elliott celebrates the multitudinous nature of English Language studies, while I find joy in John Richmond’s compilation of writings by Harold Rosen, who claimed that the social context is the drama of life. 

Do get in touch if you have ideas for an article or poem about teaching English. 

John Hodgson

john.hodgson@uwe.ac.uk