JAC Volume 9

For college writing teachers, James Britton is most closely associated with The Development of Writing Abilities (1975) and its exploration of function categories (expressive, transactional, poetic), audience categories (self, teacher, wider audience, and so on). and the composing process (conception, incubation, production) of adolescent writers. So it may come as something of a surprise to flip through The Word for Teaching is Learning and find drawings by preschoolers in Myra Bans’ “Drawing a Story: Transitions Between Drawing and Writing.” But a moment’s reflection will remind us of just how “developmental” The Development of Writing Abilities is; of its debt to Piaget and Vygotsky and their studies of language acquisition; of the holistic sentiment of its opening line, “We classify at our peril.”

The futility of trying to classify our field—to draw sharp distinctions between thinking, speaking, reading, and writing—is clear in many pieces in this collection. Among them are Bans’ “Drawing a Story”; Amanda Branscombe and Janet Taylor’s “Talk and Its Role in the Shared Journal Experience”; and Margaret Meek’s “How Texts Teach what Readers Learn.” Bans writes, for example, that “even when written language is technically within a child’s control ... quite a long transition period may be needed” before the links between drawing and writing dissolve (69). And Meek’s work is an engaging “workshop rather than an essay” about the intuitive way “children learn from texts . . . the nature and variety of written discourse, the different ways that language lets a writer tell, and the many and different ways a reader reads” (93).

As interwoven as the elements of our field are, the essays in this collection show them further enmeshed in broad, social contexts. Chapters like Courtney Cazden’s “Social Interaction as Scaffold” and Gordon Pradl’s “Learning Listening” (and the pieces by Meek and Branscombe and Taylor, for that matter) stress the lessons children bring to school with them and the importance of social contexts and talk in the classroom. In “Stories at Home and at School,” Henrietta Dombey recounts several of Britton’s 1968 lectures which taught her that “to develop our pedagogical practices in school, we should look very carefully at the best that goes on at home” (71).

Several essays take a political turn. Some, like Douglas Barnes’ “Knowledge as Action” and Mike Torbe’s “Doing Things with Language: Skills, Functionalism and Social Context,” explore the impact education has or should have on students. Others clarify tensions between the principles of effective language learning and the realities of school learning; for instance, Peter Medway’s “Reality, Play and Pleasure in English” deals with the English curriculum, and Arthur Applebee’s “The Enterprise We Are Part Of” examines teacher preparation. Still others, such as Don Rutledge’s “Institutionalizing Change” and Garth Boomer’s “Negotiating the System,” recount efforts to reform instruction in directions consistent with Britton’s principles.

Thus, one global message apparent in The Word for Teaching is Learning is that language activities interconnect with one another and with society. This, of course, has long been James Britton ‘s message. As Ian Pringle writes (in one of eleven brief reminiscences and analyses in the concluding “Annexe for Jimmy Britton” section), two of Britton’s major themes are that “language acquisition and development do not . . . take place in other than a social context,” and that “language development, intellectual and cognitive development, and social and moral development are all so closely interrelated . . . that to isolate any for the sake of discussion, or analysis, or extrapolation to pedagogy, is to distort” (264).

There is another global message in this book: that English language education is a common agenda in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States—the nationalities of the authors in the collection—and that James Britton has been very influential in shaping this agenda. At the same time, this really is a Commonwealth book. Only five of its twenty-seven essays are by Americans (and two of these are brief Annexe pieces); most examples of school practice and social contexts are British; and the United States is absent in the “Implementing Change” section, where three essays sketch Britton’s role in educational issues and reform in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain.

American teachers of college writing, then, won’t find in this book many pointed insights into teaching and learning English in American schools; nor will they find much specific information about college writing instruction. The Word forTeaching Is Learning offers broad principles of learning and teaching, developed primarily in terms of younger learners and embedded in details of other educational systems. However, exploring these principles and experiencing these alternate educational contexts can be valuable for college writing teachers, especially those who work with future secondary and elementary teachers in courses on how to teach writing.