| Of all subjects taught in school, it could be argued that English is among the most contentious and continuously changing disciplines---even while the framework of expectations for secondary English has long been controlled by the provinces' Ministries of Education. This framework has the potential to be a place of convergence, even of balance for competing conceptions of the subject, yet while "research findings might guide a few curricular changes...other changes are motivated by a cacophony of assumptions" (Barrell, 2000, p. 42), especially at the secondary level. What is 'reading'? What is meant by 'great literature'? How do/should English teachers teach both in what has been called a curricular age of accountability?;This project takes one type of account of how teachers should teach literature (and the related implication of how students should read literature), that offered in the written, public, "official discourse" (Morgan, 1990, p. 197) of the current Ontario English curriculum document for grades 9 and 10 (1999), and examines it using a methodology I term a concept-rich critical discourse analysis, which co-joins "ordinary language use" concept interpretation (Coombs & Daniels, 1991), "critical discourse" analysis (Fairclough, 2003), and an explicit discourse called the 'language of education' (Scheffler, 1960).;Setting the stage for the analysis of the curriculum document in question are conceptual and historical portraits both of the state/status of 'reading' in subject English, and of the state/status of curriculum in general. Too many times, the call for those in the field to better "comprehend how government curriculum documents position" (Barrell, 1999, p. 29) 'reading' within subject English assumes those curriculum documents offer a stable and singular conceptualization of both reading and English. Only by examining the Ontario English document in light of the direction of (often unstable) curriculum reform and (often unstable) English reform do we reveal the nature of the document as an (often unstable and untenable) site that smoothes over and ignores many conflicts in the research, and as such, provides little in the way of real 'guidance' to the secondary level teacher of reading. |
