Reinventing English Class
How to engage students through a deeper connection to language, words, books
The award for the best students of English — the best English class — goes to … Thailand!
Here’s why. Years ago, my friend Marty interrupted a career in the sciences to join the Peace Corps and teach English in Europe: an experience he found fulfilling, notwithstanding his students’ lack of enthusiasm to learn English. Then one day, Marty met a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who was also teaching English but in Thailand, and her students, she said, couldn’t learn English fast enough. They loved it!
What was the difference?
My friend Marty was in Hungary in 1992, shortly after that country transitioned to democracy from Communism. Marty’s students had gone through elementary school compelled to learn Russian, so English was just another Superpower Language they were told they had to learn. The students in Thailand, however, were citizens of a country eager to join a global economy. The Thai boys and girls absolutely understood that in order to advance their own fortunes and that of their nation, fluency in English was not only a boon: it was a necessity. So they learned English with a passion.
Now cut away to present-day United States: it’s spring, and a fresh wave of college graduates breaks on the shore of the job market. Among the hiring managers of the white-collar workplace arises a shared complaint:
Is it that Young People Today don’t know anything about computers? No.
Is it that Young People Today don’t understand social media? No.
It’s this: Young People Today don’t know how to write. They don’t know how to put a sentence together, in writing or in speech. They can’t tell a story. They don’t read! They scan. They don’t write! They text.
Who’s to blame? Take your pick: social media, gadgets, declining standards, what have you. The situation would be improved, however, if the connection that American students made between skills in English and a successful future for themselves were stronger and more vital.
So how do we create that connection? How we strengthen it?
The solution is not in English class: at least, not in the English class most people know, or that I knew, or perhaps that you knew.
The answer is in a reinvented English class.
All across the United States, hundreds and thousands of schools — public, private, and parochial — offer a class in English. Each one of those English classes is unique, but safe to say, the classes are built on a traditional model, with three components:
- Have students read literature: novels, short stories, plays, and poems (most of which were not written for a teenage audience)
- Have students learn grammar and usage so that they can write essays
- Have students write essays about literature
The traditional English class is an English major preparing young people to become English majors: writers of essays about literature.
I myself majored in English, and I have no regrets. Not every student, though, wants to major in English. Not every student wants to become an author or a literary critic, or will go on to be an avid reader or professional writer.
Teachers know this, but the English class curriculum should reflect this fact. I argue further that there is a way for a reinvented English class to reflect that fact and still help American students become as dedicated to developing their skills in English as their storied counterparts in Thailand.
Let’s start with the end in mind: What kind of people might we want to produce, with English class?
English class should produce people who can and want to write in a variety of forms — not just book reports. Teaching people to fish may help them feed themselves for a lifetime, but only on fish. The reinvented English class should teach students to become chefs in their own home, writing with versatility, flexibility, and creativity.
English class should produce people who realize that writing is thinking on paper: that is, writing is both an aid to and a product of cognition. Writing is a cognitive practice for life, a tool for life — not something just for writing about Moby-Dick.
English class should produce people whose investment in language inspires them to take care when they speak and when they write: not to obsess about the serial comma or whether or not to end a sentence with a preposition, but to take care to find and use the correct or most appropriate word, and even to aim for eloquence.
English class should reinforce with students that writing, speaking, thinking, and reading are interdependent, each skill helping the other. Developing one skill helps elevate the others.
And of course, English class should also produce people with a knowledge of and appreciation for literature. “Appreciation,” however, shouldn’t mean genuflecting to the so-called classics. It should mean bearing witness to what language can do. There is nothing in the human condition that is not expressed, explored, and chronicled in novels, short stories, poems, and plays. Literature builds connections between people, and those connections are accomplished through words — words written and strung together by people who, once upon a time, did not write terribly well, just like kids in English class. Let us teach not only what writers have done but how they did it: expose and explore their creative decisions so that those decisions can be replicated in students’ own writing.
All these goals have one fundamental thing in common. They require — they insist on — a deep and abiding connection to language itself.
The connection that students make to language must be vital and strong.
Let us begin by demonstrating to students that language is alive. Language is organic and in a continuous state of evolution: growing in some places, contracting in others. New words and phrases spring up, old words become obsolete, and some words even change meaning entirely. This is the life cycle of language, and young people participate in it every day.
“My bad”; “I totally ship them”; “swag”; “Yolo!”; “I can’t even”
If this were just young people slang, only the young would talk this way. But adults talk this way, too. And when too many adults end up using the language of young people, the young go and invent new words and phrases.
This is a quotidian example of a historic principle: changes in language are driven by people in power. Language is alive, and young people have a role in feeding and shaping its life.
Example: The more that people use the word “presently” to mean “at the present time,” the more its true definition — to mean “soon” — falls by the wayside. The word “queer” was once used to mean odd or unusual; then it became a pejorative term for homosexuals; and then the word was “reclaimed” in an attempt to strip it of its pejorative power. Unfortunately, a similar thing happened to the word “bitch”: it went from meaning a female dog to being an insult to a woman and finally as a form of address to a person of either gender: “Bitch, please.”
The point is this: we should be helping young people see themselves not as passive learners of language, but rather as active participants and influencers in language. The future of the English language is with them.
When we feel invested in something, we care about it more. Then we want to invest in it more, for a bigger return on our investment.
Next, let us present the English language to students in ways that they not only can understand but also appreciate and value.
Young people celebrate diversity. Young people are perennially online and out in the street, calling for greater recognition and respect for diversity in culture and ethnicity.
You want cultural and ethnic diversity? Look no farther than the English language. It is the true American “melting pot.” The frontiers of the English language are expanded and explored most in America. The English language may not have been invented in America, but it is distinctly American: in its influences, it is democratic; in its origins, it is diverse.
Open a dictionary of English to any page, and look at the etymology of words. One word after another, you’ll see: “from the French,” “from the German,” “from the Latin,” “from the Greek,” “from the Spanish,” “from the Hindu,” and on and on.
The English language takes, borrows, adapts, and adopts words from languages all over the world. Throughout its history, the English language has been a giant sponge, constantly assimilating new words. Indeed, after the Norman conquest of England, when French became the official language of England, English may not have survived if it hadn’t adapted and adopted other words and influences.
Let us show young people that the history of the English is miscegenation. This should be a source of pride, celebration, and wonder.
Teach young people that the English language is like them: culturally diverse, highly adaptable, highly mimetic, borrowing from other cultures, inventive, playful, mixing and mashing, and always growing with the times.
Teach students about the development of the English language. We’re not talking about millennia of history: what we know as “modern English” dates back only 500 years ago.
We needn’t teach teenagers the minutiae of linguistics and phonetics. In addition to teaching them English, teach them about English. Show them that the history of the English language comprises politics, the arts, technology, and virtually every aspect of our culture.
Teach students to question why things are called what they’re called. Thus, language can help young people connect to the world around them. Help young people see why there is a reason why their sneakers are named after a Greek goddess (Nike). There is a reason why the fairy tales they grew up on contain so many apples, because as late as the 17th century, the word “apple” referred to “any kind of fruit.”
One of the most basic exercises I’ve done with students is to ask them what their name means, and why they were given that name.
All this is demonstrative evidence to young people, through words and language, that their world contains meaning and purpose.
Help students see that they should expand our vocabulary not to show off how “big words” they know but to have more words to choose from.
Young people should have as broad a palette of color as possible to paint a mural in their room. They should have as fully stocked a pantry as possible for their kitchen, to whip up a feast. They should have as many tools as possible for their workshop.
Of course, we should teach young people the rules of grammar, but no so they can become rigid pedants. Language has rules as games have rules or different social situations have rules. The laws of language vary from state to state. Those rules can be bent, stretched, relaxed, or disposed of altogether given the intent, context, and audience of language.
Young people don’t respond well to rigidity: they do respond to opportunities afforded by freedom, and there is plenty of that in the English language.
Young people love a good cause. They love heroes and heroines, champions and crusaders of a good cause.
Teach them about William Tyndale. Bill here was born more than 500 years ago, and he died at the age of 42 — not from the Bubonic Plague, and not from being 42, which in the time that he lived, the 16th century, was considered “old age.” No: William Tyndale died for a book.
William Tyndale translated the Holy Bible from Hebrew and Greek into a relatively new language: English. For this, he was convicted of heresy and condemned. He was strangled to death, then burned at the stake.
For a book.
The translation of the Bible into English fuels the Protestant Reformation, the development of the King James Bible, and politically, culturally, intellectually, many elements and events of our modern world. It started with one person who cared about books and about language.
Tyndale is one of many men and women throughout history who sacrificed, risked their professional and personal reputation, or gave the last full of measure of their devotion for a book. Such people fought against censorship, repression, against dictators and a powerful elite, who seek to keep books and printed material — words — out of the hands of people. That struggle continues to this day.
Joshua Hammer’s 2016 book The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu is about how one man, Abdel Kader Haidara, defied Al-Queda to smuggle and save precious manuscripts from people who would destroy them.
Tyndale’s story, Haidara’s story can help students to understand that books matter, writing matters. Not just in English class, but in the world at large.
And if you cannot save or smuggle an important or precious manuscript, you can write one.
Having a command of language helps you defend a cause, promote awareness, and give greater clarity to dialogue, move understanding forward.
Young people love technology.
The book is a form of technology.
Teach students the history of the printed word and the stubborn persistence of the book as a technological product.
The history of the printed word is global, culturally diverse, colorful, exciting. It contains more than one revolution.
If we want to produce not just good writers but people interested in writing, people with a connection to language, let us teach young people that they part of a tradition that goes back to when their ancestors wrote on leaves and bark, on papyrus, and on stone, and which continues through people writing on animal skin and on paper to people writing in digital combinations of zero and one.
Whenever possible or practical, students in English class should be taught how to make their own book: how to collate pages; how to select end papers; how to sew the binding by hand. This connects them to the book as object; to the book as art; to the book as a tactile pleasure.
Students in English class, ideally, should be shown a working printing press, which is not only a revolutionary technology — there is a romance to it. There is art and nuance in fonts. Let students set type. If possible, let them use software to create their own font. Teach students that the font Jensen refers to a person: Nicolas Jensen. Garamond, Baskerville, Didot, Palatino — these fonts that young people see on their computers every day are people, people just like them. People connected to language.
When was the last time you, as an adult, wrote a critical analysis of a literary novel? (PhD students in English, don’t raise your hands.)
When was the last time you wrote a five-paragraph essay on a theme?
Of course, the five-paragraph essay (beginning, middle, end; thesis, examples, conclusion) is an excellent model for students to learn and practice their writing.
But if what we want is for students to leave school to become people who actively write, we also should be teaching young people to write in forms that are most likely to get them published: editorials, letters to the editor, news and feature articles, process and procedural documentation, advertising copy, packaging copy, grant proposals, and more.
I’m not arguing that we stop teaching young people how to write essays or stop using literature to teach young people how to write.
I’m suggesting we not be timid about bridging the skills of English class to the skills of the marketplace. We need to teach the English language in such a way that American students appreciate what the students in Thailand do: that skills in this language have relevance and practical application in the world after school.
To paraphrase the character Auntie Mame, the English language is a banquet and most people are starving to death. They are reading, speaking, writing, and thinking below their capability.
The banquet of the English language is a pot luck, with everyone bringing something to the table: their culture, their history, their personality, their passions, and all the myriad elements and influences that make each individual unique. Each person informs the language as he or she learns it, and through the sharing of language, we learn from each other, about each other.
When individuals have a common language and engage in speaking, writing, and reading together with that common language, they connect with each other. They make connections to and through the language.
By reinventing the English class, we connect what students learn to their future. We engage students in the constant reinvention of the English language itself and, through it, themselves.
TIM LEMIRE is the author of several books, including the career guide I’m An English Major — Now What? (Writer’s Digest Books, 2006). He has taught English composition and literature at the University of Michigan, as well as as a substitute teacher in Rhode Island, where he lives and works as a professional writer and editor.
