Making Meaning in English: Exploring the Role of Knowledge in the English Curriculum

David Didau argues that the content of English is best explored through distinct disciplinary lenses – metaphor, story, argument, pattern, grammar and context – and considers the knowledge that needs to be explicitly taught so students can recognise, transfer, build and extend their knowledge of English. He discusses the principles and tools we can use to make decisions about what to teach and offers a curriculum framework that draws these strands together to allow students to make sense of the knowledge they encounter.

If students are going to enjoy English as a subject and do well in it, they not only need to be knowledgeable, but understand how to use their knowledge to create meaning. This insightful text offers a practical way for teachers to construct a curriculum in which the mastery of English can be planned, taught and assessed.

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
A guide to Making Meaning
1 What is English for?
Has English lost its way?
How did we get here?
The Newbolt Report
The humanising effects of English
The Bullock Report
Back to basics
The National Curriculum
The effects of Ofsted
Gove’s reforms
Where are we now?
Further reading
2 Problems in English
We can’t teach skill; we can only teach knowledge
Problems with reading
Strategies not skills
Problems with writing
Cargo cult writing
Developing stamina
The capital letter problem
The clockwork curriculum
The history lesson problem
The problem with knowledge organisers
Further reading
3 An epistemology of English
The struggle for an epistemology of English
Substantive and disciplinary knowledge
Propositional and procedural knowledge
Tacit knowledge
Chunking procedures
Powerful knowledge
Ways of making meaning in English
Further reading
4 Noticing and analogising
Noticing
Analogising
Noticing and analogising in practice
Grasping the world and changing it
Further reading
5 Metaphor
What makes a metaphor?
Metaphors within words and as words
Systematic metaphors
Noticing metaphor
The ‘major tropes’
Simile
Personification
Metonymy
Irony
Noticing extended metaphors
Conceit
Symbolism
Allegory
Motif
Metaphor and pragmatics
Teaching metaphor
Further reading
6 Story
Causality
Telling it slant
How stories are made
Plot
Unity
Tragedy
Comedy
The basic plot structures
Narrative structure
Character
Characterisation
Flaw and façade
Thought: speech
Internal thought
Theme
Teaching story
Further reading
7 Argument
Rhetoric
Invention
Arrangement
Decorum
Dialogue, dialectic and debate
Conversation
Argument and poetry
Precision, clarity and economy
Teaching argument
The thesis statement
Marking discourse
Nominalisation
Further reading
8 Pattern
Noticing sound
Meaning in sound
Anaphora
Alliteration
Noticing rhyme
Rhyme schemes
End-stopping
Internal rhyme
Slant rhyme
Eye rhyme
Noticing metre
Iambic pentameter
Enjambment and caesura
What’s the stress?
Anapests
Dactyls
Form
The sonnet
Form in fiction
Teaching pattern
Further reading
9 Grammar
Spontaneous grammar
Morphology
Syntax
Noticing grammar
What grammar should we teach?
Prescriptive grammar
Descriptive grammar
Teaching determiners and noun phrases
Teaching conjunctions: and & but
Teaching active and passive sentences
Grammar through content and content through grammar
Further reading
10 Context
Knowledge in action
“There are no wrong answers”
The role of theory
The canon
Critiquing the canon
Decolonising the curriculum
Intertextuality
Further reading
11 Connecting the curriculum
Art is long and time is short
Curriculum as a conversation
Quality (1): Is it powerful?
Quality (2): Is it shared?
Choosing texts
Quantity: breadth versus depth
Manner: critique and conversation
Relatedness: hierarchical and cumulative sequencing
The story of English
Further reading
12 Into action
The map is not the territory
Year 7: The origins of English
Year 8: The development of form
Year 9: Into the world
Assuring the curriculum
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Bibliography
Index