Effective Teaching Of English

             

INTRODUCTION

                   All of us here today have at some time or other brooded about just how much our instructional activities have affected the teaching behavior of those who come to us to learn to teach English or to learn to teach English better. If not, I think this meeting is a most suitable occasion to begin to brood about these matters. During one such introspective interlude which occurred after my having observed a particularly dismal student teaching performance, I remembered the arguments hurled at me during the many verbal encounters with my liberal arts colleagues and with working secondary school English teachers- heated encounters concerning English teacher education. My liberal arts friends were unanimous in their beliefs that an intelligent teacher who was academically prepared could learn all he had to know about method and practice during the student teaching apprenticeship or from his more experienced colleagues during the first year of professional teaching. When asked where the more experienced colleagues had learned what they knew about method, it was suggested that intelligent people picked these things up from the situation itself. The working English teachers, too, were generally contemptuous of "methods" courses, at least those they had experienced, and felt that the college instructor's distance from the daily battle scene precluded his seriously contributing to tactics or even to strategies that would sway outcomes. My answers to these arguments were the ones that most of you would have given. The academically well-prepared English teacher described by the liberal arts professors is, in the first place, a rarity because of the laissez-faire, contentis-all, devil-take-the-student approach to teaching used by too many of these same liberal arts professors. And such an academically well-prepared teacher, once found, too frequently fails in the secondary school English classroom because he is too busy playing junior-professor to teach adolescents to do all of those things adolescents must do with language. If I become involved in a particularly virulent polemic and am sorely pressed, I usually lose diplomatic aplomb (of which I have precious little in the first place) and suggest that too many English professors having something to say about teacher education have little familiarity with the universe of the high school student; that the last time any of them had entered a secondary school was when they themselves had attended; that it probably was some kind of prep school anyway, and besides, they probably were in advanced English groups and didn't have the vaguest notion of what really went on in typical English classrooms! But, as I say, I only suggest these things when sorely pressed.