English under Pressure: Back to Basics?.

Abstract In the United Kingdom, politicians are calling for teachers of English to get “back to basics,” a phrase that they use as shorthand for a concentration on grammar, spelling, and handwriting—with primarily a print-based focus. We argue that instead, what is required is that teachers of English look forward to the 21st century rather than backward and that they reexamine notions of literacy rather than return to a 1950s curriculum. What teachers should be focusing on is development of confident and competent readers and writers in the whole range of technologies currently available. We consider how acts of reading and writing are changed, how the reader-writer relationship is affected by computer technologies, and how those changes might translate into classroom practice. We argue that children must become adept at manipulating a wider range of forms than those available with print and that they must also understand the effects of those forms on provenance, meaning, and the reader-writer relationship. Finally, we identify the need for a model that represents what such a curriculum might look like in practice.