What exactly do you mean?

By Mark Wilson

So one day I walked into my classroom and said to my little Year Sevens You know, the subject we call English is really about Communication through Language. And what do I mean by that? Remember, Im talking to eleven year olds here, so dont expect any jargon. Communication is expressing your thoughts and feelings to somebody, including yourself, and getting through to them. If you dont get through to them, then you have not communicated. However, its good that you tried. Someone might hear, or read your particular combination of words, but if they dont understand what you mean, then you havent communicated. Still, they might, by thinking about your words, communicate something to themselves. That is just fine, as long as they dont then blame you for what they think you said.apparently this happens with religious texts all the time. Therefore, studying any text is certainly about trying to understand what someone else has to say, and analysing how theyve gone about it.

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

How many ways can we communicate? Typically: Facial expressions Music Speech Writing Telepathy Body Language Painting Sculpture Dancing Telepathy is what were really after with communication. Getting something directly from your mind into someone elses mind, and vice versa. Whats the difference between Telepathy and all the others? All the others involve the use of a Medium, to achieve the desired communication. Language is a medium. And theres many a slip twixt cup and lip. Language: My definition of language is simply the words we use be they in English, French, Spanish, Punjabi, or Japanese words, vocabulary, lexis. So, in communication through language, we want to get whats in your head into my head, through the use of words, spoken or written. And dont forget: Question everything! Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free, dont let an egg get laid in it by something you cant see. Bob Dylan.

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

But, what is actually involved in Communication through Language? For me, it breaks down into three main parts, as follows: Intention & Expression Intelligibility & Recognition Understanding & Response (where it all starts again at Intention). Your intention and mode of expression: what you want to say and how you want to express it, are your own personal choices. Similarly, the understanding of your intention and the response to what you have tried to communicate are, ultimately, personal choices for whoever you are trying to communicate with. People can also, and regularly do, choose not to make an effort to understand. Thats life. By personal I mean yours: How you will choose to express yourself, and how well you will try to allow someone else to communicate with you, and how you respond. But Intelligibility on the part of the communicator, and Recognition on the part of the communicatee, both depend upon the use of Conventions: that is, an agreed way of doing things. And the conventions of English are incredibly sturdy and simple, as we shall soon see, but they have been alternately weakened, and complicated, down the centuries by various people. Indeed, it has taken me a whole chapter The (Place) of Grammar to discuss conventions properly, and to rescue them from the grip of various phoney grammatical rules. Phoney grammatical rules are simply a specific version of accurate English which someone would prefer you to use, rather

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

than your own perfectly good version of accurate English. The phoney grammatical rules have been responsible for the petty but pernicious squabbling of the grammar wars over the years and school children have been caught in the middle, like in a custody battle. A good example of phony grammatical rules right here would be the issue of the, now largely forgotten, Parts of Speech, which were thrown out years ago by the curriculum makers in power at the time: subject, predicate, object and so on, which were offered to us by the previous incumbents for the parsing of written down sentences. And those parts of speech did need throwing out, because they were not parts of speech at all, they were much more to do with some pretty sterile analysis of writing. But, disagreeing with someones definition of the parts of speech is no reason for doing away with the entire concept of parts of speech. After all, many people throw out the entire concept of a God, just because they dont like to think about the old man with a long white beard which their minds were bathed in as a child, and so on. But this throwing out of the baby with the bathwater, apart from being a very careless thing to do, is more about problems with politics and authority, than with the calm study of theological beliefs, evolution, or communication through language. But thats sociology. In preparing to teach children, after throwing out the dirty bathwater, I noticed sitting there the actual parts of speech, which are as follows: Intention, Vocabulary, Syntax, Phrasing, Pronunciation, Intonation, and Context; have always been with us, and are far too obvious and integral to our existence to have been anyones invention, or to be replaced, or discarded. More about this in chapter five, and in chapter seven I will discuss how these actual parts of speech have been applied to writing for centuries.

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

For the present, we need to know what the main agreements (conventions) are. We generally agree on the following: Words/Vocabulary/Lexis Pronunciation, to a degree The Alphabet and Punctuation Letter shapes, within limits Spelling To this list of true basics I will now add The Parts of Speech, as outlined above. The rest: having something to say, and how you say it (Speaking and Writing) or being interested in what someone else has to say and how they have said it (Reading and Listening) have more to do with personal desire, involvement, and personal style, than anything else. To recap: Intention: What you want to say. Expression: Getting your idea out into the world in some form or another. Intelligibility: Ways of using the conventions of a language which are recognizable to the person, or people, you want to communicate with. Recognition is where the other person starts to kick in. They at least have to recognize the words you are using, although some meaning can certainly

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

be communicated by tone and context (and to the very young, perhaps most, or even all meaning, is communicated by tone and context at first); Generally, the participants in communication through language have to at least be speaking the same language. Its no use me saying to a pupil: Donnez moi votre cahier, sil vous plais, and getting angry if they dont hand me their exercise book. But, if I say, Please give me your exercise book, I can expect to receive it or an explanation. There is responsibility for intelligibility on both sides, and thats what children readily understand when it is explained to them (see chapter two). Understanding: this is the trickiest element [and at this point I would like to welcome all of our deconstructionist friends aboard]. If the person you are trying to communicate with doesnt get your meaning, but gets a meaning, then they are communicating with themselves, even if they are sitting right in front of you nodding and smiling and making all of the right noises (a rather disconcerting, but all too relevant thought). What is going on in their head still is understanding. And all of this is perfectly fine, as long as they dont then think that what they understand is necessarily what you meant, and start getting stroppy, or making wedding plans. When reading a text, or indeed when hearing words, those words are very likely to illuminate associations within our own minds depending upon who we are and what our life experience is, as distinct from the intentions of their present author. Depending on how much time we are prepared to spend, and on how much critical analysis of our own responses to other peoples words (spoken or written) we are prepared, or encouraged, to do; and depending on where our frame of reference happens to be at the time; we are quite likely to imagine that we know all

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

about an authors, or a speakers, intentions the minute we read or hear their words. We all start out as deconstructionists, and, with regard to texts, no writer Ive ever heard of would deny the reader the right to their own personal interpretations whether or not those interpretations agree with the writers original intention. But, on a less ego-centric level, our own interpretations of texts, priceless in themselves, might also be seen as stages in a journey towards understanding the intentions of, and thereby really communicating with, the original author, should we deem that a worthwhile pursuit. Communicative results are often much easier to gauge with the spoken word than with the written, that is, until things become heated, and I realize that you are simply twisting my words to suit yourself (you bastard!). Response: Once someone understands a meaning, they will think or feel something, and that is their response - which they might then want to express. This response then becomes their Intention. They will be responding to their understanding of what youve expressed, which may well coincide with your intention; when this happens, its very effective when the other person is right there with you, and it might be just as effective if they are twenty four hundred years away in a book, like Sophocles. When all of the above come together, it can lead to all night sessions; text and fax relationships; bitter arguments; pen friends; marriage; diaries; and the art of conversation. I was tempted to throw in the honest settlement of the Middle East Crisis - but hey.

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

When I started teaching, the ideas outlined above began to develop and inform my teaching methods. For a short while, I even attempted to present these ideas as baldly as this to children, as a theory. But gradually I was able to allow these ideas to emerge as and when appropriate; depending on what area of communication through language we were studying at the time. Setting them out like this, twenty years later, these ideas still seem simple and quite obvious; however, I dont think I invented these ideas, but, if I was to develop a coherent syllabus for my teaching, I was left to discover them and to articulate them for myself. I now realize that these ideas are natural and direct developments of the true basics. For example: Often, pupils will tell you that they have no idea what a text is about. But by resurrecting the concept of conventions as agreed ways of doing things, and good personal style as, simply, an accurate individual application of conventions, it has always been reasonable to suggest to pupils that our job is to discover simply how and why a poet has used certain conventional words. What could Keats possibly mean by the faery power of unreflecting love!? The words of a text are generally words that we know and use ourselves all the time, with one or two exceptions which we might need to look up in the dictionary faery for example - thereby naturally expanding our vocabulary. But you could probably get the intended meaning of faery from the context. Studying a poem requires only that all participants in this act of communication be well versed in the conventions, which are few, uncomplicated, and basic. Recognizing the words on the page should be quite easy, if the text is appropriate; I call it a responsibility, but, as such this responsibility deserves to be fully explained to children. Explaining this responsibility motivates pupils to use their powers of concentration and imagination; motivates them to think, and

Copyright 2009 Mark Wilson You Are An English Teacher!

perhaps to engage in some research, in order to allow communication to take place fully. As a mnemonic for the overall concept behind everything that has gone before in this chapter, I keep a poster on the wall which looks like this: COPNEVRESNOTNIAOLNS Because, you can think and say whatever you want and you can respond to what you read or hear however you like. But, if you want to communicate with someone, or be communicated with, you need an agreed way of doing things in order to achieve intelligibility and thats what the conventions of English are: an agreed way of doing things. And this brings us quite naturally to my definition and consideration of the conventional skills of Reading; Writing; Speaking and Listening, which our one minute old child will need, in order to be able deal on an equal footing with King Lear when she meets him at age seventeen or eighteen, and which I will now discuss in the remaining chapters. ***