ABSTRACT
The job of an English teacher is one of the more high profile and accountable teaching roles in any school. Changes in the educational world are inevitable but what remains static is that English is always going to be the most important subject, along with Mathematics. On one level, it is because schools’ results and reputations rely on the outcomes of the two subjects but more importantly, being literate to a good level and all that entails is the key to success in anyone’s life. Communication, whether reading, writing or speaking, is an essential skill that any young person needs to have in order to be successful in the ever changing twenty-first-century world. Employers state that young people need to be able to work collaboratively; make decisions based on evidence; assimilate a range of information in a short space of time; manage their time; present a clear point of view etc. The list goes on but all of these skills can be explicitly taught within the subject of English. However, the unique feature of teaching English is that not only do we teach skills but we also teach about knowledge. We are able to give our students a rationale to their current world. We can give teenagers an insight into the cultural and social lives that existed in previous centuries. We do this in the hope that it will allow our students to understand the factors that underpin their current world but equally to understand that many of the issues they are grappling with have challenged others for centuries before them. By making these links from the past to the present we can show them how literature is still relevant to their world today. We can help them understand that by developing a love of reading they are engaging with a personal experience and an insight into a range of worlds that are much more compelling than any antics that might take place on Big Brother. We can demonstrate to our students how language has changed and explain the reasons why they speak the words despite the incomprehensible spelling patterns. We can show teenagers that although they use text speak and
emoticons as a tool to create their own language identity, it is not something new. Social groups have been creating their own language as a tool to exclude others for centuries. Teaching English is an opportunity to open minds to ideas and issues that can prick and sometimes penetrate the often self-centred world of the average teenager. As English teachers, we repeatedly use the phrase ‘there is no wrong answer’ and our teaching needs to provide students with the tools and knowledge to enable them to create a case for whatever answer they decide is the right one.
