ABSTRACT
A key barrier to the highest achievement is the lack of appropriately deep and broad reading experience at a sufficient level of challenge. Literature offers a vision of other lives and other vistas. One of its potential benefits is therefore to enlarge a reader’s sense about the many possible ways to live. But sometimes teachers can unwittingly restrict their students through the tyranny of ‘relevance,’ which at times can seem to suggest that only more advantaged students are capable of looking at material further distanced from their immediate ‘reality.’ Imparting contextual knowledge through literature is significant. Teachers cannot give students shortcuts to cultural capital, but they can teach them how to decode. Unless learners are exposed to a wide variety of reading experiences, they are unlikely to ‘get it’ in a way that influences how they write and think for themselves. Introducing students to texts that require them to become used to dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty, to engage with and experience moral dilemmas is significant in building their ability to situate and understand texts within other texts. Taking our more able students beyond the confines of the syllabus is critically important. This relies on teacher expertise and places an obligation on them to understand the purpose and function of English fully, in order to help their students develop their own clarity and passion. Teaching well is more than the quality and quantity of what teachers know. It is also the more specialised ways of thinking that become the language of instruction that is used and shared. Teachers need to be capable of making references to wider texts, to broader literary contexts, to ‘the big picture’ of textual analysis.
