Purpose: This paper focuses on the affordances of and issues surrounding the teaching of George Orwell's novel "1984" (1949) as a set text for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English and English Literature in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system. It considers this by focussing on the classroom…

Based on a 1-year interview-based case study of a preservice English teacher, this article considers the limitations of both intersectional literacies and reader-based responses to texts. In an effort to address students' problematic discussions of female sexuality, the participant implemented a queer pedagogy that emphasized alterity, or the…

My article argues that the concept of "aesthetic learning" can be helpful for English teachers on two levels. First, it can be a useful identity for English teachers and students to adopt, based upon my own experiences as a secondary English teacher, creative writer and PhD student. Second, I argue that "aesthetic learning" is…

In her book "Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?" Blakely Vermeule addresses the tendency of the academic establishment to dismiss affection for literary characters in favor of objective analysis, describing teachers with "the furrowed brow, the worried expression: responsible teachers [who] wean their students off their passion for literary…

Now in its second edition, Trevor Wright's hugely popular "How to be a Brilliant English Teacher" is packed with practical advice drawn from his extensive and successful experience as an English teacher, examiner and teacher trainer. This accessible and readable guide offers sound theoretical principles with exciting practical suggestions for the…

Reading skills are vital to student success, and those skills could be practiced with Shakespeare "if students are taught reading skills in the classroom." The problem is that many teachers of English do not consider themselves reading specialists and do not teach reading skills to their students. Fred L. Hamel notes that teachers in a recent…

Offers observations on the author's experience of the past two years as she returned to teaching high school English after over 20 years of training adults in business in government to improve their writing. Reflects on the differing demands of these work environments, and on how the canon itself and approaches to teaching classics have changed…

Evolution of the "old page", or written hardcopy texts, to the "new" (Kress, 2003), or electronic page, means that today's learners have experience with reading a variety of texts. Image, music, and electronic inscription (font, style, flash, and so on) are features of multimodal texts that many learners prefer to read and create. With the screen…

This book is packed with practical advice drawn from the author's extensive and successful experience as an English teacher, examiner and teacher trainer. It is accessible and very readable, and may be dipped into for innovative lesson ideas or read from cover to cover as a short, enjoyable course which combines exciting teaching principles in…

This document is a compilation of the four issues in the 22nd volume of "Classroom Notes Plus." The August 2004 issue includes: Celebrating Our Names (Nitza Agam); Group Resume (Jennifer L. Alex); There's Much to Learn from Listening (Ann McKenna); Roll Call Turns into Brainstorming (John R. Banks); Create Your Own Museum (Jennifer Collison);…