Reviews

The Best of Language Matters MyraBarrs (ed.) CLPE (2003) London: Centrefor Literacy in Primary EducationISBN: 1 8722 673 43 (pbk) d19.95(d17.95 for CLPE Schools’ Network)

This book delivers exactly what it sayson the box, plus a bit extra. It is aselection of 48 articles published in theCLPE journal Language Matters from the1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Thejournal began publishing half-waythrough 1975 and stopped in 2002, sothe bulk of the articles are from the1980s and 1990s.

This period covers a time of greatchange in English educational policy,and the articles reflect the impact ofthese changes, particularly on howteachers frame their teaching and howthey see learning, teaching and theirprofessionalism in relation to policydevelopment. Yet, reading through thearticles, I was also struck by thepersistent themes that span and unitethe decades; the need to involve chil-dren and ensure that teaching ad-dresses their interests and concerns;learning as a process of knowledgeconstruction that involves both chil-dren and teachers, and the importanceof innovation and emotional commit-ment for teacher development.

CLPE was originally founded as anin-service institution by the Inner Lon-don Education Authority, and onlybecame an independent charity in2002. This means that many of thearticles are London-based, and allspeak particularly to the concerns anddevelopments in English education.The chapter introductions by MyraBarrs, which set the work of eachdecade into the political and policycontext of the time, provide a clear andhelpful frame for readers. For many inEngland, they will provide a helpfulchronology and be useful reminders ofwhat happened; for others, they willserve as a history lesson about whatteaching was like before they joined theprofession. For those outside the Eng-lish system, they provide essentialinformation that helps one to recognisethe significant changes in viewpointand perspective represented in thearticles.

All the articles chosen for this booklink theory and practice, but they do soin different ways. Many were writtenby teachers who were involved in staff-

development courses. Others werewritten by academics, artists, writersand publishers, but all treat children’sideas and understandings seriously ascentral to the educational debate.

Teachers are always interesting whenthey talk about the children they teachand their own practice in schools. Thearticles from the 1970s convey theexcitement of ‘bottom-up’ policy devel-opment in an era when the curriculumdid not come ‘pre-packaged’, teachersdeveloped their own topics and had toensure coherence, depth and breadth.The article by Ruth Crow on ‘Writing ina Thematic Context’ illustrates thatteaching is not just about technicalities,but about the personal involvement ofteachers and pupils in topics of mutualinterest. In this pre-packaged educa-tional world, it serves as a strongreminder of the power and importanceof the teacher’s emotional and intellec-tual commitment to the topic. SusanBugler, on ‘Writing for a Purpose’, alsofrom the 1970s, illustrates how toharness the other key force in everyact of learning that happens in class-rooms: the involvement and interests ofpupils. Both articles provide ‘food forthought’ for policymakers wanting tointroduce and support creative teach-ing and learning. They should also berequired reading for every newly qua-lified teacher.

Many of the articles from the 1980sprovide clear and careful descriptionsof classroom practice and its impact onpupils and teachers. David Bartonwrites powerfully about how his pre-conceptions were challenged by whatchildren actually knew about eachothers’ home cultures, and their will-ingness to connect with each others’cultural roots.

Many of the radical ideas from the1980s are now widespread and havelost their radical edge, as they havebeen accepted as routine pedagogy. Thecareful descriptions of practice pro-vided by Moira McKenzie (‘SharedWriting: Apprenticeship in Writing’)and Nicola Baboneau et al. (‘Develop-ing a Voice of their Own’) serve asimportant reminders of how fresh andinspirational these ideas were, andshould still be. Other articles drivehome to the reader just how conceptscan be reinterpreted and totally changetheir meaning. Home–school links, astrong theme in this collection, are nowseen by policymakers at both nationaland school level as a way of commu-nicating the schools’ agenda to parents,

and enlisting their support for schoolwork. Only education for the under-fives adapts the curriculum to supporthome experiences. Three articles, byHeather Mines, Gillian Lathey andHarriet Proudfoot, all explore the roleof teachers in enabling children’s homelives to impact on school policies andcurriculum. Now there is a radical idea.

The articles by academics and edu-cationalists involved in staff develop-ment written during the 1980s areclassics, as powerful and relevant todayas they were then. Margaret Meek on‘Texts that Teach’, and Myra Barrs andSue Pidgeon on ‘Language and Gender’in particular detail the issues andarguments that continue to underpinmuch current thinking and research.

In the 1990s, successive governmentssought to ‘teacher proof’ educationalstandards by defining the content anddelivery of the curriculum ever moretightly, culminating in the introductionof the National Literacy Strategy. Yetthe articles from this era continue toexplore themes of creative teaching andlearning, and the importance of context,purpose, and intellectual and emo-tional engagement that were estab-lished in previous decades. I enjoyedthe articles by Lesley Fisher (‘Chan-ging the Reading Environment’), SarahHorrocks (‘Animating the Imagination:Using puppets in the classroom’), FionaCollins (‘Storytelling as a Creative Art’)and Anne Thomas (‘Children as Reflec-tive Readers’).

Murial Demwell’s article on ‘Story asLifeline’, describes the sort of sensitiveteacher intervention that must havebeen struggling to survive under thedeluge of paperwork, planning charts,work programmes and targets thatwere hitting teachers in schools. Isuspect that for many teachers, articlessuch as this, and the one by BeverleyFalk on assessment of a reader, musthave provided important and reassur-ing touchstones in the midst of change.

The other articles I loved from thisdecade were Myra Barrs’ clear andmeasured discussion of genre theory;Margaret Mallet on ‘Engaging Mindand Heart in Reading to learn: the roleof Illustrations’; David Lloyd’s articleoffering a publisher’s insight into pic-turebooks, and Quentin Blake’s extractfrom ‘La Vie de la Page’. These, alongwith the articles on new literacies,‘Children and Video Culture’ by HelenBromley, and ‘Media Texts and PopularCulture in the Classroom’ by CathyPompe, speak directly to current issues,

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as does the hard-hitting article onteacher development, written in 2001by Jo Edwards.

This collection of articles conveys theexcitement of the 1970s and early 1980s,the careful description of the 1980s andearly 1990s, and the concerns aboutchanging literacies, creativity and pro-fessionalism voiced towards the end ofthat decade and the early 2000s. Forthose who have been involved inteaching and education for some time,it is a powerful reminder of how thetone and nature of educational debatehave shifted over the years. For others,it will illuminate current thought andpractice by providing important per-spectives from the past.

Susan EllisStrathclyde University

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Lan-guage and Literacy Teresa Grainger(ed.) (2004) London: RoutledgeFalmerISBN: 0 415 32767 9 (pbk) d18.99

For this book Teresa Grainger hasselected readings – articles and chap-ters from books all published within thepast few years – and in her introduc-tion, ‘Travelling Across the Terrain’, sheimagines the reader of the book to be ‘atraveller traversing different domainsas they search for meaning in thecomplex and challenging world oflanguage and literacy’. The book isstructured in five sections: Mappingthe Landscape of Literacy; ExploringLiteracy and Learning; Exploring OralTexts; Exploring Visual Texts; Explor-ing Written Texts. While the title of thebook suggests an attempt to cover themany different areas making up theteaching of language and literacy, thefive sections indicate that her concern isprincipally with texts and the waysthey are read and used.

Many of the contributions focus onthe perceived tension between the factthat ‘‘many children are operating in amultimodal textual environment intheir homes and communities, yet theirteachers are expected to operate in aprint bound frame in school’’ (p. 2). Sothe book is concerned with texts inschool and texts out of school, and theways in which the latter are used incommunities and cultures, but rarelymake it past the school gates. Certainly,

as an introduction to the current inter-est in this area, Teresa Grainger hasproduced an excellent book, with inter-national as well as UK-based contribu-tions, and every chapter providing agreat deal of food for thought. As abook about texts it works well, but thereis nothing here explicitly about otheraspects of ‘language and literacy’ suchas grammar, punctuation, phonics orspelling. I found myself imagining howsome other writers and researchersmight have responded to the task ofselecting readings under the same title!

The view of literacy that emergesfrom the seventeen readings has anumber of facets, all of which haveimportant implications and challengesfor teachers. First, it is complex. Itinvolves having knowledge of a rangeof texts (print based, picture books,television, film, Internet . . .), learningtheory, language development, and theliteracies of different cultures and com-munities. There are chapters focused oneach of these. Second, it is ever chan-ging, with new text types evolving at aseemingly quicker pace than ever (onlya few years ago there were articles onthe potential of the CD-ROM . . .).Third, it is multi-modal, involvingprint, image (moving and still), soundand colour, with different texts beingaccessed in different ways. Fourth, it islearner active. Children arrive at schoolwith knowledge and skills gained fromusing texts in their own homes andcommunities (there is regular referencethroughout the contributions to Bor-dieu’s concept of ‘cultural capital’), andthe teaching approaches discussed insome of the chapters show childrenactively engaging with texts throughdiscussion, response journals, art anddrama – multi-modal responses tomulti-modal texts. In her introduction,Grainger explores the tensions betweenthe view of literacy and its teachingexpounded in the readings and govern-ment-prescribed curricula and high-stakes assessment. However, evenwithout such pressures, the ‘subjectknowledge’ required of non-specialistprimary teachers in terms of the aboveissues is challenging. In chapter 13,Marsh and Millard argue that ‘‘teacherswho are aware of the semiotic processesneeded to decode both television andprint texts are in a better position todraw attention to the parallels betweenthem’’ (p. 222) – and this is just onesmall portion of the professionalknowledge explored in this book.

The process of engagement with thismultiplicity of texts is a thread running

through many of the contributions.In chapter 5, Anne Haas Dyson refersto children’s potential ‘‘to be playful’’as they ‘‘adapt cultural resources inresponse to changing conditions’’(p. 104), and Kress (chapter 4) arguesthat children ‘‘act multimodally . . .there is no separation of body andmind’’ (p. 75). Barrs (chapter 16) drawsour attention to the power of role-playto draw children into texts and thenimpact on their writing. A chapterthat particularly engaged me was thatby Margaret Mackey (chapter 14) inwhich she discusses the different mean-ings of the word ‘play’ (to imagine,perform, engage with rules, strategise,orchestrate, interpret, fool aroundand ‘not work’) to develop a theoryof playfulness in how we processthis range of multi-modal text types.She argues that one feature of engage-ment with the aesthetic is that the‘going on’ (her term) is the purposeitself of the activity: ‘‘we do not doaesthetic text processing simply to be atthe end’’ (p. 42).

In its exploration of issues both insideand outside schools and classrooms,this book questions the role of teachersas teachers of literacy. Bearne andHodges (chapter 15) discuss howteachers might ‘‘build on aspects ofreading with which students alreadyfeel confident, and help them to learnmore about the kinds of reading andtexts with which they are not alreadyfamiliar and confident’’ (p. 259). Inchapter 3, Luke and Carrington arguefor a curriculum characterised by ‘‘areading of the local that connects withthose of other possible worlds’’ (p. 64)in which the ‘local’ literacies of thecommunity are linked to the ‘global’literacies of the wider world (though Iam not sure how much I like their term‘glocalisation’). Throughout the book,contributors argue, at times implicitly,at times explicitly, for schools to recog-nise and value the literacy experiencesof children in their everyday lives;to widen the concept of ‘school literacy’and then to take children ‘‘in directionsthey might not normally go’’ (Barrs,p. 276). Exactly whether and howthe range of multi-modal literaciesbecomes incorporated officially into‘school literacy’ remains to be seen.Teresa Grainger’s book provides uswith a powerful introduction to thearguments.

Tony MartinSt Martin’s College, Lancaster

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