Eliminating the Negative in English Teaching

Abstract

in English teaching, where we have constantly tried to accentuate the positive in such matters as assigning more com-, positions, providing individualized instruction, offering work in reading improvement, and experimenting with the findings of the new grammars. But rarely have we tried seriously to follow the second half of the sage wisdom in the song; we have not tried to identify the negative and then to eliminate it. In the paragraphs which follow I hope to make a small beginning by identifying some practices in the teaching of English which I think are negative and which I believe could and should be eliminated. I include seven such practices in all. 1. Pop quizzes. About the only thing the teacher of English who uses pop quizzes reveals is the unfortunate paucity of his motivational skills; rarely, do such insults to students provide much other information. They may tell us who has studied the night before and who hasn't, but the damage they do far outweighs this meager information which we could discover anyway with a few well-chosen discussion questions. That teacher who suggests to students that they had better read the short story for tomorrow because I just might give you a little surprise quiz on is doing more disservice to the short story in particular and to English study in general than he could do if he deliberately set about the task of ruining both. In truth, I must confess that such quizzes sometimes get stud nts to read the lesson assigned to them, but so also would threatening them with death and destruction if they didn't read it. Though this line of argument smacks of reductio ad absurdum, it does categorize the pop quiz where I think it properly belongs: with a group of threats which have little place in good teaching. There are times when a student ought not to read the assignment, when he ought instead to study for his chemistry test, or dream Walter Mitty-type dreams, or telephone his girl friend. What we English teachers must do is to make the reading we assign as intriguing or as desirable as these other activities. We