Dr Velda Elliott

 I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that we get our English PGCE interns at Oxford to review a newish YA novel each, and that this year we had a focus on own voices. The list of books they've chosen is too good not to share - there's some I'd been looking forward to on here, and then there's a whole load I'd not heard of that I now can't wait to read. The list is:  The Girls I've Been Tess Sharpe Between Perfect and Real Ray Stoeve The Ghosts We Keep Mason Deaver The Gravity of Us Phil Stamper The Dark Lady Akala The Passing Playbook - Isaac Fitzsimons The Lonely Castle in the Mirror Mizuki Tsujimura Wonderland Juno Dawson Cemetery Boys Aiden Thomas Some Girls Do Jennifer Dugan On Midnight Beach Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick Run Rebel Manjeet Mann The Runaway Girls Jacqueline Wilson Song beneath the tides Beverly Birch Black Flamingo Kay Atta Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim The Henna Wars Abida Jaigirdar Wranglestone Darren Charlton The Cost of Knowing Brittney...

 Yesterday I came across an interesting study which shows that children 2 year olds don't learn vocabulary from lift-the-flap books. The study is:  Shinskey, J. L. (2021). Lift-the-flap features in “first words” picture books impede word learning in 2-year-olds.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 113 (4), 641–655.  https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000628 Sixteen children were shown a lift-the-flap book with photographs of fruit and vegetables, and another 16 were shown the same book modified to have no flaps. Each child went through the text six times, having the fruit and veg names given for them. The experimenters used starfruit as their key item, teaching the children it was called 'carambola'. Afterwards the children who had seen the no-flap book were significantly better at identifying 'carambola' from a choice of images or a choice of fake food items. There was no difference, however, between their ability to choose the higher frequency food items. The researcher ...

Very late to posting this, but the Lit in Colour research report launched at the end of June. One of the most exciting things about working with Penguin on this research was the expertise of their communications team. I've learned a lot about ways to get research picked up, but also it is so exciting to see beautiful graphics conveying some of the main points of what the research found.  The most shocking (and yet not that surprising finding) was that fewer than 1% of GCSE students answer on a text by a writer of colour in their literature examination. That drops to 0.1% when we bring gender in as well. (Overall between 6 and 7% of students answer on a novel or play by a woman - 6% of 19th century novel answers were on the female-authored texts, although they make up c. 40% of the options. The 1% of answers on modern female-authored texts might be an entirely different cohort of students, or it might overlap entirely with the 6%, hence the uncertainty.) The other really exciting pa...

 I'm very pleased to have welcomed to the world Knowledge in English: Canon, Curriculum and Cultural Knowledge . I wrote most of this while pregnant during a pandemic,  and checked the proofs with a tiny newborn, which is particularly appropriate since I came up with the idea during my first maternity leave. The book itself gathers together a lot of what I have thought and researched in English over the last 10 years.   Writing this book is also the reason I was away from blogging for so long - I hope to be posting more frequently now. 

1. Natives by Akala This is essential reading - particularly the chapter about schooling - for anyone in teaching in the UK right now. It will make you examine the way you relate to kids in your classroom and more broadly. If you're going to be going into schools and observing, or need to show in interview that you can think about the reality of lives in schools today, this is a must-read. (I actually think EVERYONE should read this. It should be compulsory reading before you get a license to be an adult. Along with the washing machine manual.) 2. That Asian Kid by Savita Kalhan This is a great teen novel. If you're applying to teach English, it's a good idea to have read some YA - tick! It centres kids of colour and a great moral dilemma for our YouTube time, which for once is not about sending naked snapchats. It's a romp but it also has a serious issue at the centre: how racism can affect kids, go uncalled out, and undermine even the most dedicated of students, ...

Hot off the press! https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/english/efz027/5542075?redirectedFrom=fulltext I started working on the idea of Hamlet as crime shortly after the new A level specs were published and AQA 'B' included the play on their crime writing module. It's taken a while to get into print (parenthood will do that for you) but it's finally out. The abstract is below: Abstract There is a well-established practice in schools in England of ‘retro-fitting’ genre to Shakespeare’s plays, namely, considering them within a genre which did not exist at the time of writing. This article explores a contemporary example:  Hamlet  studied as crime writing. The justification for studying the play through this lens is explored, and the ways in which this relates to concepts of genre. While rejecting the justifications offered by the syllabus in which this play is set, a presentist approach suffices to allow the consideration of  ...