-what is the purpose of studying "English" / "Language Arts" / "Literature" in junior and senior high?

Critical thinking. Language is what civilizes us and a study of language is a study of the basis of civilization. By building familiarity with the fundamental mechanics of communication, you are aiding your students in building a familiarity with the fundamental mechanics of culture, rhetoric, interpersonal relations and what it means to be a member of society.

-what are the most important skills that a grade 12 student in 2021 will need to possess? (Think vertical: something that can be implemented in grade 7 and refined until the end of grade 12)

Critical thinking and analysis. There is no shortage of written material right now and the amount of blogspam and useless persuasive pieces will only increase. Your task is to give your students the tools to evaluate every piece of communication they encounter for truth, accuracy, lyricism, bias and effect.

-should reading be divorced from writing? The focus of formal writing assignments in upper senior high are literary essays: one text, thesis statement, focused paragraphs that explicate the text in the thesis' direction, a conclusion that wraps up the argument and gives the "so what?" of the entire paper. Is it necessary in our world today to have such a complex and highbrow assignment, or should reading and writing be taught and assessed using discrete methods?

Writing and the construction of an argument is essentially the only place students study rhetoric anymore, and rhetoric is the art of convincing someone (or being convinced). Unless you wish your students to be gullible, credulous slackjaws that believe everything Jeb Bush says, they need the experience of shaping an argument themselves to see how it is done.

Hello, I'll attempt to answer your answer with some of my opinions.

Though I'm currently majoring in civil engineering, my other choice was going to be English. It's polar, but there was that one brilliant out of class teacher that inspired me through tenth and twelfth grade. I believe that English, or any language primarily used in a person's work, is worth studying because if taught well, it's not just metaphors and dissanence, but rather points us to how to truly analyze a person or situation. It opens discussion, and alternate views because there really isn't a correct answer in analysis. Essay writing allows students to practice something fundamental to every day life: communication, whether it be complex rhetorics to an article on Philae's discovery. We, humans, are social creatures. In the end, we still rely on communicating with each other to get around. When there's a breakdown in communication, things can get really nasty. That is why it is important for us to be able to concisely, but elegantly, convey our ideas to other people. Too blunt, like a boulder rolling down a hill, will elicit negative responses. Too confusing, like English translations of French texts (sorry), and no one will pay attention to your words. To sum it up, language teaches analysis and communication skills.

I believe (though I'm only 20) that as society and technology advances, more and more emphasis will be placed on being 'human'. That is to say, what we have over machines, such has empathy, creativity, and 'connecting the dots'. Empathy requires similar experiences, relatable events, and one can perhaps draw upon a charactet's tragic demise to understand another person's feelings. Creativity and connecting unlike thoughts both require critical thinking, analysis skills, and the ability to be unlimited by what is 'right'. Furthermore, being able to quickly select key points in a lengthy text will be very important as well, if they are to be deft at connecting the real critical factors in many situations.

For me, reading should always be coupled with writing. From my personal experience, no input, no output. We absorb ideas and form our own opinions. The reality of a school system is that without a given structure of an essay, there can't be a schematic to evaluate students. I don't have a better idea yet of how to promote creativity but still be fairly graded. My two cents. Apologies for brusque sentences, on mobile.

Like Elisza, I'm an engineering student whose second choice was English.

The analytical skills that you get from studying writing is really useful across any discipline. It forces you to really look at something critically, analyse all the different layers and eventually come to your own conclusion.

Interpreting something for yourself is also a really useful skill. You learn to look at something from different viewpoints which helps you understand and even empathize with someone you don't necessarily agree with. Also, when you make an interpretation, you now have to defend your view based on existing evidence. Another valuable skill that is definitely used outside of high school.

Finally, and more of a personal opinion than anything else; an appreciation for books is something everyone should have. Written word allows us to look back through time, gives us insight into someone else's mind, or often insight into our own. Reading and writing forces people to really think for themselves, and that is something of inestimable value.

One of my professors told us that the two best ways of assessing any civilization are by the materials they used and the records they kept. You might agree or disagree, but I think he's at least more right than wrong.

The only real thing that I can think of that I regret is that English somehow believes it exists in a world of its own. In high school I was taught English and we were fed the basics of literature and writing. For me being interested in politics I was never allowed to read political works and analyze the language of those texts. That would have been a different world for me honestly. When I got into college and began my study of politics their language was foreign to me. I'm not saying that the literature that I read was useless or bad, I just wish I had the option to explore language and its use in different settings than the common form that is taught now. That would probably be my best suggestion. Allow the students to on occasion explore the language they find most intriguing whether its science, politics, history, or fiction.

That is the study of language

That sounds like a really interesting program! Seeing the end of the first six-year cycle must have been quite an experience.

I TA English courses at the post-secondary level at a large university, which means that I mark papers, lead tutorials, hold office hours with students to explain assignments and so on. Essentially, the students I deal with are the ones that have come from high school English and have decided, for whatever reason (interest, breadth requirements, not sure what else to take) to take an undergraduate English class. I've posted in the past about what I think English classes try to teach students. That might be of interest for you if you are preparing students for taking university-level English courses, but I doubt that you can assume everyone leaving your class will go on to be an English major. Your curriculum is undoubtedly significantly broader than mine. With that in mind, here is what I think English courses (at various levels) attempt to teach:

1) Analysis/critical thinking:

Yes, people who teach English throw around 'critical thinking' a lot. But we really do try to teach our students to critically evaluate statements. What is the argument of this article? Is it logical? Is it persuasive? Why/why not? These sorts of questions are not entirely dissimilar from the ones asked by English journal articles (What is the author doing here? Why are they doing it?). I stand by the argument that teaching students to assess the merits and flaws of statements made by others will serve them well regardless of their ultimate career path.

2) Synthesis:

This is perhaps something that only really comes in at the end of high school or the beginning of university, and its something that students I see frequently struggle with. Reading others' arguments about a text and trying to come up with their own argument which is in conversation to the ones they've read can be very challenging for students. This is where having been taught good analysis skills comes in handy, since one of the most straightforward ways of building your argument is to critically analyze the arguments of others (what does this person say about the text? Do I agree/disagree with them about these aspects of the text? etc.) Synthesis skills are obviously important for academia, where scholars are expected to engage with others' arguments about texts all the time, but I would argue that these sorts of skills are also useful in any discipline where you have to make (and evaluate) decisions based on various proposals.

3: Communication/Argument:

Others have already commented on this, so I'll just leave my two cents. I've often found that I'm never entirely confident about my thoughts about a text until I've written something about it. Getting your thoughts down on paper in a manner that others can understand is, to me, a vital part of developing your own understanding of your ideas. I'm not a big fan of the 'five-paragraph essay' (and in fact spend a good amount of time 'un-teaching' it to students who have been taught that it is the only way to write a good essay in English), but being able to set down an argument in a logical and coherent fashion is as valuable as it can be difficult, and I think that's the case regardless of what career you're in (I've seen lots of meandering business e-mails and reports).

As you can probably surmise, these points build on one another. If you're lacking strong analysis skills, you're unlikely to be able to do much in terms of synthesis of communication. Some of the students I deal with have a hard time keeping their essays on track. But far more often they stumble at having to create a thesis statement, and end up offering plot summary rather than argument, which also prevents them from doing any sort of synthesis or communicating any coherent ideas about the text. I agree with Elisza that decoupling reading from writing is not a good way to go, because I think that strong writing depends on strong reading.

Obviously, you know your students and their needs and weaknesses better than anyone here. If you haven't thought about it in this way already, it might be worth considering what you felt were the most challenging aspects of the 'first cycle', whether or not you felt you were able to address those challenges, and if/how you would do so differently next time.

What is the purpose of English class typically? Or what should be the purpose of English?

Well typically the purpose of English is to teach people how the language works, but in a prescriptive manner based on popular style guides. Attention is significantly focused on parts of speech, proper punctuation, grammatical rules, basically the foundation of a style guide presented as a bit more than just a style guide.

Now I'd say I think it's important that people learn how to use English and understand it, but I think it's significantly less important and infinitely less relevant to learn to describe how you use it. I'm a damn good driver, but I have next to no idea how cars work. I can just barely change a tire. I don't need to know how it works to know how to use it.

It seems to me that for most people that's how language is. It certainly is for me. I have only the faintest of notions of what a past participle is and I don't think it really matters. Unless I'm trying to teach English I don't need to know it. We don't learn language by learning what the parts are, we learn it by using it and by hearing others use it. People are using adverbs correctly before they have any idea what an adverb is. You don't learn what nouns are before you learn what cats, dogs, and balls are.

That's not to say that style guides are worthless, they have their place, but I think it's a major mistake to cause students to confuse style guides with rules that are somehow inherent to the language itself. There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition and 'ain't' is totally a word. You might want to be able to distinguish between 'their' and 'they're' if you want to come across as vaguely intelligent, but it's honestly not that important to most people's interactions. Moreover, it's fairly superficial. I mean, sure, being well spoken can make you seem intelligent, but it's not as good as having something significant to say, and outside of a classroom context correcting other people can be worse than not saying anything at all.

Then there's the other side of what English is right now, which is the approach to literature. Literature is important, people should enjoy reading and do it all their lives as far as I'm concerned. The problem I found, though, and that I hear again and again from pretty much everyone else, is that English teachers have a tendency to over-analyze and even to impose their own preconceived notions onto it, to the detriment of those who are forced to sit through it.

So what should English be? You certainly do have to make sure they're capable of writing without looking like total prats, but I'd say it's much more important to build an appreciation for language and for writing in general. Language isn't just the domain of academics, it's the domain of artists. Look at all the new words Shakespear alone gave us. That's not something you get from a person who's afraid to use language incorrectly. You don't get that if you can't see language as your own, but as something handed down to you from an ivory tower. The ivory tower didn't invent language, the people did. It was art from the beginning long before academics even existed. If people view language as something that's theirs, something they're being taught to hone for their own use rather than something someone else owns that's being forced upon them, they can feel passionate about it. You can't feel passionate about inflexible robotic language that's been foisted on you mostly in the form of restriction of your preexisting individual stylistic choices.

So here are a few steps to make an English class not suck:

1) Don't ever describe language choices as "wrong". If you make a prescriptive statement, classify it as such and make sure the students know the motivation behind that prescription.

2) Try to find some more modern uses of language to illustrate that it doesn't just belong to a bunch of old dead men and stuffy academics. Don't just bang away at the same old style guides and literature, show some alternatives, some diversity. Check out some different dialects, even pidgins. If you make people care about language they'll learn a lot on their own even when you're long gone from their lives.

3) Poetry? Throw some Wu Tang and Eminem in with your Rimbaud and Robert Frost. Ask the class for examples of some more recent wordsmiths that they'd like to look into.

4) Books and short stories? Throw a little bit of weird or significant scifi in there. There's a mountain of well written and engaging scifi novels and short stories out there, and it's a lot more interesting than some of the samey boring crap they had us reading when I was in school.

Basically, try to break away from that snooty classist English and embrace the real living language that's spoken and written as a massively diverse modern lingua franca.

lil katakowsj -paiging all educators.