The English Classroom 1977: A Report on the EJ Readership Survey

Abstract

In January, the English Journal published a survey to assess the materials and activities teachers use in their classrooms. With everyone from Newsweek to the Los Angeles Times telling teachers what they are and (more often) are not doing, it seemed time to find out from teachers themselves what actually is going on in English classrooms. The picture of today's typical secondary school English class painted by the press depicts a loose, unstructured, even chaotic place, where a raggedy bunch of undisciplined students mill around doing only what they wanna do, which is generally reading popular fiction (trash) and comic books (God help us), listening to loud music, and making movies under the guidance of a teacher who believes the only language activity worthy of the name is speech on the colloquial, slangy, even illiterate plane; that writing is a secondary, unimportant activity.' But the picture of the English classroom 1977, obtained from the nearly six hundred teachers who completed the Readership Survey, bears no resemblance to that scene. In a nutshell, it looks something like this: If you are a student in an English class taught by a mythical respondent, you are in a senior high school class with students with above average or mixed abilities. Your class stresses literature and writing. You study subjects such as how writers use language, themes in literature, spelling and vocabulary, standard usage, how to write thesis and topic sentences, and how to organize paragraphs. You write exposition, narratives of personal experience, and interpretations and analyses of literature. You read many short stories and novels, and your text is an anthology. You spend time in class talking freely about the literature, discussing study guide questions, and writing. If you enrolled in the course wanting to make movies, write scripts or advertisements, read off-beat, technical, or minority literature, take field trips, or study transformational grammar or features of dialects, you are out of luck.