Engaging Students in the Disciplines of English: What Are Successful Schools Doing?

Arthur Applebee

* English Journal, 91(6).

The six approaches to improving literacy learning discussed in this article underlie the Partnership for Literacy, an instructional development project sponsored by CELA. The emphasis on these approaches emerged from discussions among a number of people at the Center.

In this article, I want to address a key question: In an era of MTV, video-games, and the Internet, how do we keep students engaged in the disciplines of English – literature, composition, and language study? At one level, we clearly do not; the signs of disengagement are everywhere.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, students regularly report reading less, and enjoying it less, as they progress through school (Langer et al., 1990). Similarly, teachers around the country report that it is harder to keep students interested, harder to get them to complete homework, and harder to teach the canonical texts that traditionally anchor the disciplines of English. And if these signs within the profession are not enough, we have all felt the waves of public dissatisfaction with school achievement. As a result, teachers and their students face new performance standards, and new tests based on those standards, around the nation.

Yet we also all know that many schools and classrooms in fact are very successful in engaging students in the teaching and learning of English. Since its establishment in 1987, the Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA) has focused a good part of its effort on places where teaching and learning are unusually successful, in order to better understand what features of curriculum, instruction, and assessment make the most difference in literacy learning, from Kindergarten through Grade 12. Working with teams of teachers and university-based researchers, the Center has studied successful practice in a diverse body of schools in key states around the country, with a particular emphasis on schools that serve traditionally underachieving populations – children of the poor, and of linguistic and ethnic minorities.

CELA results are rich but also complex – they are available in all their detail from the Center’s website, from the ERIC Document Reproduction Service, and through a wide range of published books and articles. In the present article, I draw from recent research at CELA (and more generally in the field) to suggest six approaches to curriculum and instruction that can be productive starting points for schools seeking to improve reading, writing, and language achievement for all students.

No one of these approaches is sufficient to make a difference, but taken together they can have a significant effect on what students know and are able to do. In the sections that follow, I discuss each of these six approaches and then turn to a more extended example of what they can look like in practice.

In the most successful classrooms that the Center has studied, English becomes an arena where students are challenged to think carefully about readings and discussion topics that pose questions of substance on which reasonable people can reasonably differ. This is not simply an issue of whether to emphasize ‘basic skills’ or ‘thoughtfulness’ (Brown, 1991); indeed it is difficult for a student to appear thoughtful without having mastered an array of appropriate reading, writing, and thinking skills. The real issue has to do with the whole set of ground rules (Durst, 1999) that the teacher establishes for the disciplines being studied. These ground rules include such things as what topics are appropriate for discussion, what kinds of evidence and argument will be valued, and what standards will be used for judging performance. Such ground rules are negotiated by every teacher in every classroom, but they are neither casual nor idiosyncratic – they create the link between the individual classroom and the larger disciplinary communities within which the study of English is located (Applebee, 1996).

Take a "simple" discussion question such as, "What is Toni Morrison’s Beloved about?" In the more successful classrooms that CELA has studied, students usually differ widely in their answers but are able to defend and elaborate upon their responses in academically appropriate ways. In answering such a question, students are learning to work within a tradition of literary critique and scholarship, with a technical vocabulary, history, and internal consensus about what is interesting and what is appropriate. Students are, of course, likely to encounter more than one set of ground rules within their studies of English. Depending upon the background and interests of their teachers, their responses to Beloved may be cast as a feminist critique, a New Critical reading, an historical exploration within the African-American literary tradition, or an exercise in cultural studies. But in using any of these approaches, the students are learning a variety of tools for analysis and interpretation, tools that enable them to participate effectively in a particular tradition of literary critique.

In more typical classrooms, the same question becomes an opportunity to restate a consensus view, usually one that has been presented previously by the teacher or textbook. In such cases, there is still a surrounding tradition of literary critique, but students are learning about the tradition – the canonical conclusions that others have drawn – rather than learning to work within the tradition to draw appropriate conclusions for themselves.

English language arts at all levels has always been something of a hodgepodge, trying to deal with everything that involves the use of language in any way. At the high school level, for example, English classes cover literature, composition, and language study, but also face a smorgasbord of other activities. Students are taught to make introductions, analyze rap lyrics, write science reports, compose thank you letters, use the library catalog, use the spell-checker, criticize advertisements, utilize the world wide web, define allegory, and build models of the Globe Theater (or of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry). At some level the list is literally limitless – anything that involves language is fair game, and an English teacher can find language in anything.

There is nothing wrong in this supremely encompassing sweep for English; I embrace it myself to justify my studies of what goes on in mathematics, science, and history instruction (Applebee, 1981). But the most successful classrooms at all grade levels keep a clear focus on the disciplines underlying their subject, and develop a web of discipline-based interconnections among the activities that students do. At the elementary school level, for example, successful classrooms do not reflect the polarizations implied in debates between "phonics" and "whole language." Rather they provide direct instruction in needed literacy skills, woven together with exploration of engaging topics. Reading, writing, and discussion are related to one another thematically and topically, creating rich webs of intertextual references and related personal experiences (Pressley et al., 1998).

Similarly at the high school level, the most successful classrooms emphasize the systematic teaching of important skills and knowledge, all interwoven with rich layers of links within and across lessons. How these classrooms deal with skills instruction is particularly interesting. The most successful schools provide students with new literacy skills and approaches in three ways: through separated, direct instruction when needed (e.g., a mini-lesson); through simulations (relatively short tasks designed specifically for practice in applying new skills); and integrated with other tasks (provided as needed while students are engaged in extended reading, talk, or writing) (Langer, 2000; in press). Almost all teachers use one or another of these techniques – but the teachers in the most successful English programs use all three, and tie them together by flagging their relevance and interrelationships ("Remember what I said about colons on Monday? That’s what you need here." "Remember when you analyzed Hemingway’s sentences in the short story yesterday? Try using a similar approach for your character’s dialogue.")

Interconnectedness is an important feature of successful curriculum and instruction at virtually every level, from the coherence and interconnectedness of classroom discussion on a particular day, to connections across school experiences and between school and home, to the interweaving of reading, writing, and discussion throughout a unit, to the exploration of key concepts and questions over the course of a semester or year (Applebee et al., 2000; Langer, 2000; in press; Nystrand et al., 1998; Pressley et al., 1998). The most successful classrooms use a variety of strategies to insure such links, including thematic units, author studies, and pairing of contemporary and historical selections, or of canonical texts with ones from alternative traditions.

In contrast, the good but not exceptional classrooms that CELA has studied have been orderly and systematic, but they have tended to treat ideas and experiences in isolation from one another, as building blocks in the larger curriculum, rather than nurturing the rich layers of possible links by inviting constant comparison, contrast, and the revisiting of related ideas and experiences.

In many classrooms, difference of any sort is a problem: Difference can interrupt consensus and violate expectations, and often reflects underlying differences in cultural values. These in turn can cause problems because of underlying differences in previous experiences with literacy, attitudes toward schooling, or expected ways of demonstrating authority. Students and teachers alike may be uncomfortable when faced with others who differ from them, whether those differences are based in language and culture, religion, physical abilities, or previous experiences.

Yet difference is inevitable, even in the most homogeneous classroom and community; and the more successful classrooms use these differences to enhance learning. If we go back to the first point, about the need for higher-order talk and writing, we find that students are more likely to learn to argue and defend their own points of view when confronted with disagreement. When classmates differ, students must learn to deal with it. They must learn to listen and understand; to muster arguments and evidence; and to accept that the difference that remains is a natural part of a democratic society. The importance of difference is seemingly most obvious in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, but many of our classrooms are not particularly culturally diverse. They are more likely to be 95% African American, or 95% Hispanic, or 95% European American. Even in schools that have more diversity, that diversity is all too likely to be reduced by a tracking system that resegregates the relatively more advantaged students in the upper tracks, and the relatively poorer students in the lower tracks where they become part of a "second system" of remediation and special education (Allington, 1994).

But any teacher knows that even a seemingly homogeneous class of 25 or 30 engaged students will have 35 or 40 different initial ideas about a story. And this is what we can build from. The important point is to recognize and cultivate the importance of multiple perspectives in enriching our understandings – our "envisionments" of possibilities (Langer, 1995) – rather than closing them off in our preoccupation with consensus and uniformity.

In the last few years, public concern about the quality of education in American schools has led to a proliferation of high-stakes examinations for promotion and graduation. While we may debate the wisdom and effectiveness of these assessment systems, for teachers these tests are no longer just part of an abstract policy debate: They are a fact of life and have to be dealt with. Across the country, schools and districts differ greatly in the ways they have responded to the challenges posed by high-stakes assessment. One response – in some cases perhaps a necessary initial quick fix – is to focus on "test prep." This is usually detached from the regular curriculum, involving weeks of mock examinations or sets of special commercially prepared test preparation booklets. The problem with such activities is that they usually have no connection to anything else that students are being asked to do. There is also little doubt that such activities can bring an initial boost to scores in schools that have otherwise been dysfunctional.

But, the most successful classrooms take a different approach. In schools CELA has studied, teachers and administrators have used the new standards and tests as a lever to reexamine their own curriculum (Langer, 2000; in press). This approach is workable because the core of the new tests, in all states, has emphasized important higher-order disciplinary knowledge and literacy skills. Students are expected to learn how to read and write well in the course of dealing with challenging academic subject matter. After deconstructing the standards and the accompanying tests, schools and districts can use them as a tool for reconsidering the present curriculum, highlighting both the strengths and the gaps in current programs. This analysis, in turn, provides the foundation for reconstructing the curriculum to insure that needed knowledge and skills will be taught and learned across the grades. Such an approach takes longer to orchestrate than a series of "test prep" lessons, but the effects in the end are much stronger. And it also has the advantage of co-opting the new tests as another lever in the struggle to provide rich and engaging literacy instruction for all students, instead of letting individual test items co-opt the curriculum.

"Scaffolding" is a term that has become widespread in discussions of classroom instruction, moving quickly from studies of child language to analyses of teaching and learning (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976; Cazden, 1979; Langer & Applebee, 1986). The basic notion is that if we are going to ask students to do more interesting but also more difficult things, then we have to help them by providing support as they carry the task through. Scaffolding, built into the tasks, provides students with the knowledge and strategies necessary to complete a new task, all embedded within "a natural sequence of thought and language" (Langer & Applebee, 1986) that helps the learner internalize the new knowledge and skills for eventual use on other tasks. Many familiar teaching techniques can be construed as scaffolding designed to support students in particular tasks: Prewriting activities to generate ideas; prereading activities to provide an initial orientation; outlining after writing as a technique for reexamining the structure of an argument; peer conferencing to provide a more distant "read" of a draft. To work well, scaffolding must be targeted at the difficult parts of a particular task – not all writing tasks require a prewriting activity, for example, any more than every brainstormed idea is worth developing further. It is also important that students understand the purpose of the scaffolding, so it can become a tool to use on their own. If students do not realize that a "prewriting" activity is designed to help them through the problem of developing material to use in their writing, it is no different than a workbook exercise unrelated to the writing they will do. Unfortunately, it is easy as teachers to assume that connections that are obvious to us will be equally obvious to our students.

The importance of scaffolding is implicit in much of what I have discussed already. An emphasis on higher order talk and writing about academic topics, for example, requires the development of new knowledge and strategies. And cohesiveness comes about in part because the various classroom activities are orchestrated to support learning. Thinking in terms of the scaffolding necessary for success on new and difficult tasks insures that students will gain the knowledge, skills, and strategies to enter into important disciplinary traditions, rather than simply studying what others have said and done.

Every teacher has faced the challenges presented by students who cannot or will not keep up, the students who lack basic reading and writing skills, who do not do their homework, and who do not participate in class discussion (or worse, work hard to divert and interrupt it). Yet the successful classrooms that CELA has been studying do work for these students as well as for those who are doing well. The necessary components are: the topics for discussion are truly open for debate; everyone is expected to have an opinion worth expressing – and is listened to when they express it; diverse perspectives are truly valued; and there are careful scaffolding and systematic teaching of necessary knowledge and skills. Again, there are many particular strategies that teachers use with individual students, including alternative textbooks that accommodate diverse reading levels and needs for extra support; individualized skill instruction; the use of books-on-tape; and in-class rather than pull-out extra instruction. With such approaches in place, struggling readers and writers have an educational environment ideally adapted to developing more advanced reading, writing, and discussion skills. This will take time, of course – students often bring a legacy of many years of contrary experience. But a classroom full of rich, academically focused literacy experiences is the most productive environment for all students, an environment that can ensure that even students who seem to be struggling will end up "beating the odds" (Langer, 2000; in press).

I want to introduce one more set of ideas to help crystallize the kinds of teaching I have been discussing. In my own studies at CELA, I have been exploring ways to think about the curriculum, which provides the overarching framework that unifies the various parts discussed so far. We tend to think about curriculum as a set of specific knowledge, skills, or books to be covered. I want to propose instead that we think of curriculum as a set of important conversations that we want students to engage in, taking conversation in a grand sense to include a full range of reading and writing as well as discussion activities. Conversation is a useful metaphor because successful conversation requires topics worth talking about, appropriate background and knowledge of the topic, and knowledge of how to participate effectively (to take positions, make arguments, evaluate appropriate evidence). A curriculum of conversations is one way to insure that all of the other features of successful instruction are brought into play (Applebee, 1996).

What does all of this look like in practice? Emily French’s 9^th grade World Cultures course provides one example. The freshmen in this course were heterogeneously grouped, comprising a cross section of the diverse school community of which they were a part. The course itself was structured around a set of core ideas and concepts that were revisited and elaborated as the course progressed. French called her first unit "Perspectives," and she used it to establish an initial frame for the year; she followed this with six more units on broad geographical regions each of which contained a variety of specific cultural groups.

The Perspectives unit provided a matrix with which to analyze myths, folk tales, and proverbs. Throughout the year, students returned to this method of analysis. French explained:

I give them patterns. They may not remember all the myths but they will remember the patterns and when they see [myths] later on the patterns will come up. . . . Then I will move into short stories, essays. From the myths and stories of one culture I go to the other cultures so they can see how the myths compare across cultures.

In each culture that the students studied – about one per month – the conversation began by analyzing these mythic patterns. A unit on Africa, for example, began with the study of Nigerian culture. French started with Nigerian creation myths, moving to Nigerian proverbs and folk tales consisting of "trickster" tales, "dilemma" tales, and "orphan" tales. From there the class moved into folklore from other African countries, with contrasting tales. Running concurrently with the analysis of myths and folk tales, students read novels, short stories, and poetry from the cultures they were studying.

Most importantly, the frameworks for analyzing the tales became a way for students to see patterns across the whole year's course: The frameworks became the real lessons of the class, shaping and guiding the conversations that the students had. Culture was studied through these literary patterns, each unit addressing a different culture, using folk tales, myths, and other genres to study cultural values and perspectives, always harkening back to the year’s first unit with its emphasis on alternative perspectives.

Diversity was itself part of the conversation, beginning with the emphasis on perspectives; French constantly challenged her students to "see" the literature they were reading from beyond their own perspective. This was set up at the beginning of the course with the month-long unit on Perspectives and French returned to this topic throughout the year. Gender differences also became important in the conversation. French was careful to include works by and about both men and women in each unit, and that in itself became a topic of discussion in the class. The discussion of diversity became at bottom a conversation about the integrity of differences, both cultural and individual. The students talked explicitly about their different ways of interpreting and responding to the literature they were reading, just as they talked about how the literature related to their individual lives.

Contributions to the conversation in French’s class took many forms, including dance, drawing, writing, poetry, multimedia projects, and extended essays. French also required regular journal writing, because, as she put it, "If I give them questions they just run through the reading and answer the questions because they are used to that. But I ask them to come to class and write a personal response, something in their life that was triggered by the reading," then they are forced to engage with the text.

With such an approach to curriculum, students' knowledge and understanding developed cumulatively throughout the year, as they revisited important issues and concepts from new perspectives, with gradually broadening frames of reference. Their explorations reflect five of the six suggestions for increasing literacy achievement discussed earlier in this article. Students were engaged in discussion of open ended questions that required higher order talk and writing about academic topics, not just responding to ‘did you read’ questions. Topics were consistently connected to one another and to the experiences of the students. Diverse perspectives among students and among the topics studied were used to deepen discussion and enhance learning.

Activities were carefully scaffolded to introduce the new knowledge and skills necessary for students to participate effectively in challenging academic tasks. And instruction was tailored so that all students, including struggling readers and writers, could be successful in this diverse and heterogeneously grouped class. The only approach not apparent was the alignment of the curriculum with high stakes tests, though in fact the writing tasks that French introduced over the course of the year were carefully orchestrated to introduce students to the range of forms for which they would be held responsible in later years.

There is no simple way to engage the students in our classrooms with the disciplines of English, but the approaches discussed in this article can make a significant difference. Individually, no one of these approaches is enough to transform a classroom, but taken together they can help to insure that all students develop the skills they need to engage with success in challenging subject matter – and at the same time to meet and surpass the standards imposed by whatever high-stakes assessments they may face. Ideally, the continuing development of curriculum and instruction will be a communal task, worked on together by teachers and administrators within a school and district (Langer, 2000). In such professional communities, we can provide one another with the support we need to continually improve our practice, just as we seek to do for the students in our classrooms.

The six approaches to improving literacy learning discussed in this article underlie the Partnership for Literacy, an instructional development project sponsored by CELA. The emphasis on these approaches emerged from discussions among a number of people at the Center, including Judith Langer, Martin Nystrand, Peter Johnston, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Mary Louise Gomez, Janet Angelis, and Elizabeth Close.

Arthur N. Applebee is the Director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA) at the University at Albany. The research on which this report is based is supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (Award #R305A960005). However, the views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the department.

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