The Language of Fiction and the Fiction of Language

Extract

Learning to read is inseparable from teaching to read. The foundational assumption of the common core state standards initiative (CCSSI) master plan in the English language arts is that its method for teaching reading will eventuate in students' learning to read (as well as speak and write) better. Teachers and students come at their shared task from different perspectives, but both are presumed to be working in the same project of engaging something unproblematically called “language,” the program's middle name (as it is of the MLA). The Common Core's framers assume a correspondence between the phenomenon they call language in their methodological recommendations and language as it is used by them and their students—and everyone else who speaks English—in the world outside the classroom. The standards are based on a theory of language.