English teachers as readers, readers as English teachers : how are English teachers' attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about reading reflected in their teaching?

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Language, Literacy and Arts Education, 1999This study is focussed on classroom reading events, the encounters with texts in secondary English classrooms involving teachers and students. More specifically, it explores the discourses about reading and the schema or framework for reading English teachers bring to their classroom and how these shape what reading means in that classroom. I focus on three secondary school English teachers as readers and as teachers of reading and seek to identify how their attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about reading is, or isn't, reflected in their teaching. This research, constructed within a case study design, is informed by the writings of postructuralist and critical social theorists, shaped by the work of Dan Zancanella and influenced by Wendy Morgan's ideas of a 'default mode' - the position to which teachers 'return' when not constrained into other modes of operation. Data was collected through a series of semi-structured interviews with the teacher participants; participant-as-observer classroom observation; small group semi-structured interviews with students; and the collection of classroom handouts and students' products. The teacher participants were interviewed about their attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about reading and about teaching texts. They were asked to read and then to teach a particular short story with their Year 10 English class. This study reveals that each of these teachers read the text very differently and constructed very different classroom activities. The idea of a 'default mode' (Morgan, 1995) suggests that each teacher has a particular schema for reading which provides a way for these teachers to make sense of reading and working with particular texts in their classrooms. The research concludes that the classroom reading event - how the text was read and what the students did with the text - was shaped by these English teachers' schemata for reading and the discourses about reading in which they function as teachers and readers. In reading and working with texts in particular ways, these teachers create and position their student readers and frame what reading comes to mean in their secondary English classroom. These insights have implications for English teachers and their students, for curriculum organisation, for student management structures, for pre-service teacher education and training and for Professional Development