The Teacher as Reader: An Anatomy

In The Development of Writing Abilities 11-18, James Britton and his colleagues raised the issue of the audience of student writing by creating a number of possibilities: the self, the teacher, a wider audience, a general audience, and a miscellaneous group. The sub-classes of the teacher as audience included the child to trusted adult; the pupil to the teacher as a general audience; the pupil to teacher in their particular relationship; and the pupil to examiner.' Britton's categories have been used (and abused) by many writers on composition since the initial publication of the volume. They were a set derived from an examination of the writing of students, and thus are a set of inferred audiences-doubly inferred, in fact, for they are drawn by the researchers from the student's text which also infers or implies an audience. The question I should like to raise in this paper approaches the matter from another perspective, that of the role or roles a teacher may adopt as a reader regardless of the implied role in the student text. As we know from theories about reading, the reader's stance is independent of the author's intention or implied audience. The reason for choosing this perspective arises from a concern with exploring both the role of teachers as readers in the classroom and the role of teachers as readers in large-scale assessments. In both cases, I think, the role has not been fully explored or has been the subject of simple exhortation. In a recent article I discussed the kinds of comments that teachers make about student compositions and reported the finding that these comments seem to fall into four large categories (five, if one includes comments about grammar, spelling, handwriting, and the like): quality and development of content, organization and presentation of content, style and appropriateness of tone, and interest or personal response to the text.2 The relative importance of each of these five kinds of comment seemed to depend in part upon the kind of writing being assessed and in part on the nature of the person reading the text, particularly the person's cultural background-both in terms of nationality and in terms of career.