How to read like an English teacher - Part 3

What is the best way to make it very likely that a child will become a teenager who is good at English? Encouraging a love of reading and good reading habits would be at the top of my list. Think about the students who excel at English in your class - it’s very probable that they have had positive experiences with reading from a very young age.

These students are often very easy to teach. They can understand and use many words. They get that texts are deliberately constructed to create effects. They have more powerful knowledge and cultural capital than their peers.

But let’s face it, this isn’t what most of your students are like. If your students are anything like mine (I currently work in a larger-than-average comprehensive secondary school in Derbyshire), most of them will not read anywhere near the amount that you would like them to. Let me be clear; this isn’t the fault of schools. Many schools - like mine - have an excellent library and library staff, and teachers who care passionately about reading. Good reading habits and a positive attitude towards books should start at home long before our students begin secondary school.

 Lots of reasons to despair, right? Paper 1 of the AQA GCSE English Language exam focuses on an extract from a fictional text, and then asks students to analyse and evaluate the choices the writer has made. How are they supposed to do this if they don’t read any books? I used to say things to my KS4 students at parents/carers evenings like “you should aim to read more”, but if the student has not been a reader up to this point, this advice feels like putting a measly little plaster over a gaping wound.

You cannot go back in time and force children to read books. I think there is little point feeling hopeless because your students aren’t good readers; instead, spend your time thinking of strategies, short-cuts, tricks (anything!) that will help them to have a decent go at the exam. That is what led me to come up with the following strategy.

Imagine it’s a film

Of all the questions on Paper 1 of the AQA GCSE English Language exam, I think Q3 punishes those who do not have good reading habits the most. It is fairly easy to train students to identify and comment on interesting language features in isolation, but to understand how texts have been structured to interest a reader, a student really needs to have read lots of texts. Imagine that I played you a piece of music and asked you to tell me how it had been structured to interest the listener, but you haven’t actually listened to a piece of music since primary school. You wouldn’t know where to begin, and you’d likely come out with a load of vague nonsense like “err… it has instruments… and they’re playing things.” Think about some of the worst answers you’ve seen to this question, and take a moment to feel sorry for the students who wrote them; it’s not their fault that the importance of reading wasn’t drilled into them from a young age. You’d feel sorry for them if they hadn’t been made to do other important things, like brushing their teeth or not eating junk food all the time.

However, I’m willing to bet that most of your students have had positive experiences with another type of text - films. They have probably watched hundreds of them, starting from a very young age. They probably even have a favourite, that they have watched again and again. You can help your students to understand narrative choices by using this as a frame of reference.

A text that I like to use at GCSE is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which is a post-apocalyptic horror novel from the 1950s about the sole survivor of a pandemic that has turned most of the human population into vampires. The opening to the book provides a masterclass in how to create tension. Have a look at the opening line:

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.

The pronoun ‘they’ is a cataphoric reference, meaning that it refers to or stands for a later word or phrase (in this case, the vampires). This is in contrast to the pronoun ‘he’, which is an anaphoric reference to the previously named character Robert Neville. Throughout the text, we are waiting for the word ‘vampires’, but it never appears - Matheson continues to withhold information, and hints at the antagonists using pronouns, possessive determiners, and intertextual references to things that we associate with vampires, such as garlic and mirrors.

People who read books will be used to this, and know why the author is doing it. I really like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. Look at this excerpt from the opening of One Shot:

The man with the rifle drove north. Not fast, not slow. Not drawing attention. Not standing out. He was in a light-coloured minivan that had seen better days.

Lee Child could name ‘the man with the rifle’, and provide detailed description of what he looks like, but it would be rubbish. Withholding information and details helps to create tension and mystery, and as an audience, we question who these characters are and what is going on.

A film adaptation was made of this book (it was simply called Jack Reacher and starred Tom Cruise as the 6ft 5 military policeman…). The opening scene can be found on YouTube. If you watch it, you will notice that in the first two minutes, the filmmaker only shows us the man with the rifle from behind, and provides close-ups of just his hands and feet. The filmmaker cleverly uses cinematography to withhold information from the audience.

I think that many students would be unable to identify and explain the effect of a cataphoric or intertextual reference in a text, but would be perfectly capable of discussing why filmmakers have made deliberate choices when it comes to cinematography, sound, and mise-en-scène. So, you might get your students to think about literary texts in more cinematic terms, like this:

• Imagine you were adapting this story into a film. Would you copy what Matheson does, and not show or mention the vampires? How would your choice interest the audience, and keep them entertained?

This isn’t a silver bullet, but it might allow students to think more meaningfully about authorial intent, as they can rely on their prior knowledge of what filmmakers tend to do.

If you don’t feel confident using this strategy, because you aren’t familiar with techniques that filmmakers use, chat to a Film Studies teacher in your school. If your school doesn’t have a Film Studies teacher, tell them to get one. In the mean time, you can ask people on Twitter (or me) for advice.

So, focus on what your students do have available to them, rather than worrying about what they don’t. When reading a literary text, help them to imagine it’s a film, so that they can discuss deliberate choices in a way that is familiar to them.

The views in this blog are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the centre that I currently work at.

Photo at the top of the page by Alfons Morales on Unsplash