EAL QUESTIONING STRATEGIES

Knowing where these points of misunderstanding may arise before I begin to teach also allows me to pre-teach, preparing the ground of what is to follow. For example, by paying close attention to the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet or making use of a modern retelling of the story, students can hit the ground running when they encounter the full text. I used the Frankenstein play script by Phillip Pullman for this with real success for some SEN students, who read the play as part of their supported tutor reading, before arriving at the English lesson. Making use of graphic novel versions of the plays and short animations can also be a useful gateway into the greater complexity to come.

Pre-teaching vocabulary can also be another useful way to support students once they arrive to the text as a whole. Simple translations of things like the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, an area that a range of students often struggle with, or key vocabulary which allows them to explore a text in more depth, such as villain, or hierarchy, can again mean they are able to approach the lesson with more confidence. 3) As I have considered the steps and stages through the plot and character, it gives me the perfect opportunity to check that all students are really accessing the learning. Low-stakes quizzes on mini-whiteboards help me to see what everyone has understood and what is being retained. If there are key points missed, I can either reteach then and there, or make a note to revisit this later. Reteaching and revisiting could be with the whole class, a small group or an individual. But by checking understanding regularly it means that I can see exactly where students are and whether I need to guide them back on track.

4) Performance is obviously an important element of Shakespeare’s work, although these plays were not just written for performance. Allowing students to see a good quality performance though, scaffolded by pre-teaching and summary as suggested above, will help them to interact with the text as an audience. A good production will also model the reading of complex lines and support students to hear the links between the individual words and overall meaning conveyed in the action. Giving students the opportunity to explore the text as performance themselves can also be a good way to ensure they have a greater understanding of the plot, themes, and character. This doesn’t necessarily mean them performing whole scenes, but focusing instead on key phrases or moments. A ‘yes/ no’ argument between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as she tries to convince him to kill the king, can be just as interesting as students performing the whole of that dialogue, as they consider what she does with each line: what might the tone be when she says, ‘had I so sworn’? Which way would she face? Where would she stand in relation to him? Does this change when she delivers the next part of her speech? Line by line and moment by moment performance, including using tableaux and collaborative storytelling, can really bring a text alive for some students.

5) To create links between what we are discussing about the play and the performance, I use visual, images taken from the performance I selected, to allow students to associate particular characters, with key moments

“A good production will also model the reading of complex lines and support students to hear the links between the individual words and overall meaning conveyed in the action.”

and the different themes or ideas. Romeo and Juliet for example is a play where students can sometimes get confused as to who belongs with each family, and how they relate, and a visual family tree, which we then discuss, helps to ensure that as they follow the action as it unfolds. Using these images later to reinforce who is speaking can also provide a scaffold to understanding and linking images to lines, themes or characters can also ensure that there is greater access for all.

6) Once we are at the stage of writing about the plays, not something that should be rushed, I model, model and model some more. This means whether we are writing our own summaries or adding details to those we had at the start, or writing in a more analytical way, I will show students how they can do this, taking them through step-bystep. Coupling this with sentence stems, which can gradually become embedded as part of their own oral and written toolbox, means they will be able to write with greater confidence and fluency about these complex ideas and texts. Breaking this down into its component parts is really important and allows a close focus on crafting their work from the first sentence to writing a full essay.

Ultimately, however we may feel about Shakespeare and his influence ourselves, we cannot argue his work hasn’t managed to work its way into our psyches over the centuries. If we want students to be able to engage with the debates that surround this, examining where his ideas, stories and language transcends the boundaries of their English lessons, and be successful in their exams too, we need to consider how we can ensure that as many barriers to engaging with his work as possible are removed.

It’s then up to the students to decide whether it will be ‘once more into the breach’ when they meet with his work again or whether it’s ‘for ever, and for ever, farewell’ to the Bard, confined to the dim and distant memories of their English classrooms. But if we don’t support them to understand what his work could offer, that will never be a choice they are in a position to make.

Let’s tork abawt speLLing

The English language contains so many sounds and spellings that seem, at least on the surface, to make little sense. In this piece, Neil Almond explores the reasons for this complexity and how we might understand it better.

By Neil Almond

The reason English is such a hard language to read and spell is because it has a deep orthography or complex code. Orthography refers simply to the spelling system. In English there are multiple ways to spell the 44 sounds of the English system - around 176 common spellings to be precise1. In very simple terms, this is why spelling in English is so difficult.

Contrast this with a language with a shallow orthography, or simple code, such as Finnish, where each sound in the language is only spelled by one symbol. This makes learning to decode and spell words in Finnish far simpler. The reasons for the complexity in English code is a complex journey that I will attempt to distill.

In 1786, the Anglo-Welshman Sir William Jones, working as a British judge in India, wrote a sentence that appears in many textbooks on the subject of historic linguistics. A talented linguist, he was tasked with the regulation of English merchants in India along with the existing rights of the local population that followed ancient rules and laws based on Hindu laws. These laws were written in Sanskrit, a language that no other British judge could read. Over time, Jones poured over Sanskrit texts and was soon able to speak the language. It was while studying this, that he came to a conclusion which he presented in his third annual discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”2

Three languages: Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, separated by time and space but all having a common source language, echos similarities to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Only, we are not talking about the ancestry of biological life-form but a socially constructed invention. It was this understanding of the nature of language, that languages have evolved from a common ancestor that linguists were able to trace Latin, Greek and Sanskrit back to that ancestor - ProtoIndo European (PIE). Over time, linguists were able to add other languages which had their ancestry in PIE.

indo european tree

As can be seen in the IndoEuropean-Tree, English is not a direct descendant of PIE. (Some words can be traced back to PIE. For example ‘father’ comes from a word that would have sounded like <p>, <ah>, <t> <er>3 .) However, its roots lie in ProtoGermanic, a direct descendant of PIE, that was spoken some 6,000 years ago.

The Germanic influence arrived in the early 5th century with the departure of the Romans from Britain and the arrival of three Germanic tribes: the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. These tribes would have brought their West-Germanic language with them when they eventually settled on these isles. This would be known as OldEnglish.

It is worth pointing out here that, despite this being the main root of the English language, if we were able to travel through time to 500CE, we could not converse easily with an AngloSaxon. Indeed, both our languages would sound completely foreign to each other. That is because after approximately one-thousand years, a language evolves to such an extent that it would become difficult for each party either side of that millennium to converse with each other (unless specialist study was undertaken).

793CE marked the first planned invasion of the Vikings to Britain and with their eventual settlement here, they brought along their Norse language from Scandinavia, whose ancestry can be found in North Germanic languages. The mixture of language, culture and trade (another way that new vocabulary would have come into use) of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings in Britain continued for just under 300 years, becoming rooted in daily life due to the increasing literacy of the elite of society. But another invasion of Britain was soon to add another layer of complexity to the mix.

On 28 September 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, landed in Pevensey with an army and on October 14 this army defeated King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings. The successful invasion and eventual settlement brought with it the language of old-French, which has its root in Latin, due to Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul (modern-day France) a millennia before.

This Latin would also have brought with it elements of Ancient Greek, due to the Roman occupation of Greece. This is where we get the spelling <ph> to represent the sound /f/. French continued to be the language of the elite and of the courts but it failed to become the dominant language of the peasant class with Old-English continuing to be used.

From then on, the versions of English and French that were spoken at the time battled for dominance and it wasn’t until mid 15th century, for various political reasons between the nobility of France and England, that English emerged as the dominant language. However, it was not just through invasion and settlement that the English language evolved. Cultural shifts in religion also impacted the language that was spoken. Latin was the language of the Catholic Church which has been the dominant religion of the Britain for the best part of twothousand years. From Emperor Constantine through to Alfred the Great, William the Conquerer and beyond, Latin would have been spoken by some in Britain for approximately 1500 years.

It is worth noting that words which contain Latin roots are more often than not still Latin and not English. For example, struct is the Latin root of construction and the root has no meaning in English. This is useful to know as the Latin layer of the English code can be treated differently the English layer, when it comes to spelling.

The above represents a very brief and simplistic version of how English spelling system came to be so complex. It is a cocktail of other languages that through time have mixed together thorough political, cultural and social causes to produce what we have right now.

It would however, be remiss of me to not briefly mention the attempt to standardise the spelling of words by Samuel Johnson in 1755, after this great cocktail had been produced. However, there in lies part of the issue. Johnson attempted to standardise the spelling of words and not the sounds that make up those words. Had Johnson standardised the spelling at the phonemic (sound) level, then it is possible that the spelling <ee> could have just stood for the sound /ee/ as in ‘see’. The failure to do this is yet another reason why the English code continues to be so complex.