Interview
We spoke to Lindsay Gumbrell,director of learning for English at KingEdwardVISchool, Bury St Edwards, Sussex
How has the teaching of English Language changed over the years?
When I was at school, I was taught grammar formally. I remember distinctly sitting there and parsing sentences. I’m afraid I did sneakily quite enjoy it, because it didn’t require much thought. It was quite a clinical exercise, and you got it right or wrong and you never really thought about why people bothered to put words together in particular ways. Then of course the teaching of grammar rather fell from favour in the late sixties, seventies, and into the eighties really as well. So you’ve got a whole tranche of teachers who, when they were at school, were not taught grammar formally, so for those teachers it’s actually quite a scary thing now to be expected to teach about language.
Then in the '90s the whole teaching of English reviewed itself and felt that, we got the balance wrong. It was all ever so touchy feely and there was lots of creative writing, but on the other hand did students really know about the nuts and bolts of how language was working, and why they were using it in particular ways? Were they conscious writers? So what’s happened now is there’s been a much more of a swing towards teaching about language but I think in much more of an interesting way.
I think that’s how teaching about language varies most from when I was taught it; you looked at language in isolation in years gone by, now you look at it in context. So you look at a whole variety of texts and you’re thinking about the purpose and audience, not just whether there’s an adverbial clause. We are trying all the time to stimulate students to be more aware, firstly of how other people use language, and then of course how they use language themselves.
How does the department promote best practice in the teaching of English Language?
At the moment we’ve got 11 full time members of staff and there’s a mix of ages. We’ve been very lucky in recruiting because we’ve trained up a number of people who have remained with us, so I think we get the best of both worlds in that we get the experience, but we also get the tremendous energy and new ideas. They’re very open and supportive of each other as well, so if anything’s causing a problem, people are open enough to talk about it and everybody will chip in with ideas of what you could do, what you could try. So we’ve moved from a position where as a young teacher I felt quite isolated sometimes in the department, and having gone through that experience myself I don’t want young teachers to be in that situation at all. I think it’s really important that ideas are shared. It’s a very difficult process because schools are such busy places.
In faculty meetings we try always to have a training element. Everybody takes a turn and we start off the meeting by saying something that has excited them that they’ve tried this week or, or during the last few weeks, that’s worked really well. All of that helps to share good practice and gets people talking abouthow we teach and the ways that we can approach the different aspects of our subject. It’s just horrendous if you get stale as a teacher, it’s just such a demoralising thing to happen. So that’s why I’m really keen to run a department which is always reflecting on it’s own practice and trying new ideas and pushing things all the time to see whether they work.
We found the Teacher’s Tool Kit by Paul Guinness a few years ago and it’s full of fantastic ideas. Lots and lots of ways of bringing much more active teaching techniques into teaching English. I’ve got a number of people who are very open-minded in the department who are willing to try, and it doesn’t matter if it goes wrong. If it does, we learn from that, and we think about how we could do it better. I think learning English here isquite a good experience!