USING ENGLISH IN THE CLASSROOM

Abstract

This of texts of all kinds is a key practice in English. An annotated text can be seen as a direct pedagogic link between the actualisation of English in the classroom and its official (re)production via an examination. In this paper we analyse two examples of annotation in two classrooms, in two schools, in order to describe how the teachers' deployment of annotation constitutes what the text comes to be, through notions of 'textual meaning' developed largely implicitly in that practice. That meaning in its turn positions students (and teachers) to English as a subject. Both examples are from lessons focused on 'wider reading', at the end of which students were asked to write an essay comparing two short stories. These examples allow us to explore issues of student agency and curricular control, and we try to make the link between annotation and examination apparent. In this way 'annotation of texts' becomes one of a number of lenses through which we can view the central question of this paper, and of the project 'How does English come to be as it is in a specific classroom?' The analysis provides a description of what it is that the teachers and students are engaged in when annotating a text. This description enables us to pose the question what sense of literature the teachers are hoping for and attempting to create; and what view of literary study they are attempting to construct. Teachers use annotation to shape their students' responses to a text. In as far as it also elicits their responses, it is a means to bring students' 'private thoughts into public words' (Hackman, 1987: 12) leaving 'a trace on the page of the sense you have been making of the text' (Northedge, 1990:41). In this way annotation is a means for reflection, through which a reader can respond to what she or he find significant and meaningful. The marks that students make on the copy of the text as they work around and with it can be seen as signalling a sense of the text as an object (Hackman, 1987). Annotation, and more general note taking, is seen as one way of making reading an 'active' process and focusing the readers' attention on the text.