The Significance of Text Choice in English Teaching

David Grant

An exploration of how text choice in English teaching impacts student engagement, skill development, and curriculum design from Key Stage Three to GCSE.

There has been focus in recent months on the alarming decline in the number of students choosing to study English Literature at A level – and a long term and ongoing decline in reading for pleasure.

I wonder if we should consider the extent to which our choice of texts is contributing to this decline. Are we (and I‘ve been accused of this by at least one angry 15 year old) hammering the joy out of reading?

As English teachers, our choice of texts in the classroom is vital. For GCSE and A level English Literature, our options are limited, partly by exam board specifications, but perhaps also by choices made by a long-ago Head of Faculty on a long-ago budget. We teach whatever there’s enough copies of in the stock cupboard.

However, assuming we have the choice, why might we choose to teach, say, A Christmas Carol and not Jekyll and Hyde or even Pride and Prejudice? Are we choosing the texts that will give our students the richest and most productive experience of literature in building their skills as readers and critical thinkers for life? Or are we choosing texts that are most likely to get them through the exam and get them the best possible grade?

Key factors in our GCSE text decisions are frequently to do with reading stamina and engagement. We probably know that we have a better chance of holding our students’ attention over 150 pages than over 400. We perhaps decide that, while our students might be fascinated by the idea of science making monsters of men, they may more readily grasp the simple morality of a miserable miser transformed by Christmas spirit. And so we choose A Christmas Carol.

There has always been an element of self and social development in the teaching of English: we read to widen our understanding of each other and our world. So we might feel drawn to the modernity, diversity and representation of Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry (Edexcel GCSE Lit) or Kit De Waal’s My Name is Leon (AQA GCSE Lit) above  William Golding’s Lord of the Flies because we feel it will be far more relevant and, therefore, engaging and accessible for our students.

Yet it’s cynically arguable that this choice, based on relevance and engagement, is equally driven by the need to get students through the book and to succeed in the exam.

There is a further consideration in our choice of novel or play: does the text have sufficient literary merit, does it have enough linguistic and structural significance for students to analyse meaningfully?

In other words, will my students engage with and absorb enough of the writer’s choices to fill a GCSE exam response? Given the choice, would you rather write 500 words on the author’s presentation of Leon (My Name is Leon), Elizabeth Bennett (Pride and Prejudice) or Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)?

The same considerations broadly apply at Key Stage Three, but the focus of our teaching is different. There is no exam to get through. There are no exam-board-imposed restrictions on text choice. Our aim is not simply to get students through an exam, but to give them the skills they will need to read and analyse any text, whether in an exam or in life.

Arguably any novel or play (if it’s appropriate in its content and is sufficiently accessible, challenging and engaging) will allow us to explore character, structure and, to a lesser or greater extent, language choice.  And therefore that novel or play can support the building of key reading skills in information retrieval, inference and analysis, in turn prompting related writing skills.

But there will be gaps. For example, Chapter One of Animal Farm will enable a highly effective teaching of persuasion and a range of associated rhetorical devices. If, however, you choose to teach Of Mice and Men instead, you’ll need to find another vehicle on another day for developing the skills of persuasive writing. And neither of these texts will prove hugely useful in developing students’ awareness and understanding of figurative language. Again, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Commercial (ie published) teaching resources for Key Stage Three tend to be curriculum and therefore skills-driven. Few publishers produce resources for specific novels or plays – the potential audience is naturally limited by the vast breadth of choice that schools have.

In my work, producing teaching materials for commercial publication, resources usually focus on extracts rather than whole texts: 200-500 words of a novel or short story, newspaper article or non-fiction book. The purpose of those extracts is to focus on specific features of text and on specific skills – potentially filling those gaps that the full-length texts we choose to teach cannot reach.

The choice of extract in this context is vital to the resource’s success. If the objective is to focus on figurative language, the extract will need to feature simile, metaphor and personification. If the objective is to focus on persuasive language, the extract will need to include as many key features as possible: emotive language, a rhetorical question, a list, a triple structure, direct address, and so on. And if any of those are not present in the text, they will either remain untaught or must be awkwardly bolted on.

For teachers, text selection brings the chicken-and-egg decision of whether to find an engaging, accessible text and explore the skills it enables us to explore and develop in the classroom… or to begin by identifying the skills we want to explore and develop and then find an engaging, accessible text that allows us to explore them. The former – beginning with the text, purely because it is accessible and engaging – can lead to a random and haphazard programme of skill-building. Yes, you might cover everything that needs to be covered. But not necessarily in the right order.

Building an effective curriculum at Key Stage Three is essential in supporting your students at GCSE. An effective curriculum cannot be built on a foundation of text choice – it must be built on a logical and recursive progression of skills-building. The texts you choose should support, not dictate, that progression.

So the first question when choosing a text – whether a novel, a play, a poem or a newspaper article – is ‘How does it fit into my curriculum?’ If the answer is ‘Erm… it doesn’t really…’, then that’s not the text for you. But if you struggle to answer the question at all, then it is highly likely that your curriculum needs further development before you’re ready to make effective text choices. Yes, text choice is important. But there are more important questions to ask before you make that choice.

Once you know the skills or features you need a text to teach, then you’re ready to interrogate possible candidates: Is the text accessible to my students? Will it engage them? If the answer is yes, great – but there is a still one important hurdle to jump: the hurdle of usefulness. For example, at some point you will want to teach students metaphor. You find a text featuring an example of metaphor. But is that example accessible to your students? Is it a truly useful and effective example? Having explored it, will students be able to replicate it and then develop the use of metaphor in their own writing?

Take this example from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle: “The air was clear and the sky was bright, but my thoughts were dark.” The word ‘dark’ is used metaphorically – but it’s an example of metaphorical language rather than a metaphor, pure and simple. It’s far less clear and replicable than another example from the same text: “The moor was a vast, grey ocean, its surface shifting like a storm-tossed sea.” And this one has the added bonus of a simile!

A curriculum-driven process of text hunting and text choice at Key Stage Three can be frustrating. It’s a game in which you’re constantly hoping for ladders but, far more frequently, getting snakes and being sent back to ‘Go’ to start the hunt all over again. But if your curriculum is clearly defined, and you have the patience and time to match texts precisely to it, then students will be as ready as they possibly can be to tackle the variety of texts that GCSE English Language and Literature will throw at them.