Learning With Text in English Language Arts

• In Event: Adolescents Learning With Text in the Academic Disciplines

Abstract

In this paper, we will describe the dual, and sometimes competing, nature of what it means for our work as English teachers to help our students become both “literate” (in the sense that they can both comprehend what they read and view as well as create written, oral, and visual texts) and for them to understand both the content and critical approaches in English studies (in the sense that they can analyze and critique existing texts, as well as to imagine new texts in a variety of genres and media). We describe these two approaches to teaching in the English classroom not necessarily as an either/or dichotomy; instead, understanding the dual nature of what it means to teach both literacy (as a multifaceted set of skills) as well as the content of English (in the sense of studying canonical and contemporary literature, genres and approaches to writing, and other types of texts such as film, graphics, and of digital media) brings more to our English classrooms than either approach would alone.
Teaching “English,” and we use the quotes purposefully here, is difficult and contested work. Any discussion of what it means to teach someone to be literate in the sense that they can understand and create texts is both a practical and ideological pursuit. The past thirty years of literacy studies have shown us that we cannot teach students to understand literature, create a written composition, or design a new media text – as well as to use any of the particular literacy skills involved in any of those tasks – without engaging in a socially constructed activity. We all bring our own experiences to these literacy activities and, at any given moment, make numerous decisions about how to gain meaning from texts that we consume, as well as how to infuse meaning into the texts that we create. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to delve fully into the history of literacy studies and examine exactly how and why we have arrived at this point, we will later examine three literacy frameworks as a way to discuss our vision of functional literacy skills and ways to better teach students the content of English. For those of us interested in studying the ways that language works have, in the past thirty years, come to understand the ways in which reading and writing, listening and speaking, viewing and producing visual texts are socially-situated acts. For the reader who would like to trace the emergence of the “social turn” in literacy studies, the following scholars offer a solid foundation from which to start, although there are certainly many others: Barton and Hamilton (1998), Brandt (2001), Gee (1996), Graff (1991), Heath (1983), the New London Group (2000) and Street (1984). In particular, we also rely on the work of Rosenblatt (1994, 1995) who was first to describe the belief that meaning resides in the transaction between the reader and the text.

Author

• Troy W. Hicks, Central Michigan University