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Among other things, Applebee noted that there was "a need to reconceptualise the "literary heritage" and its implications for patterns of teaching'; that any such rethinking had to involve "prior assumptions about the nature and purpose of education'; and that a proper relation between learning about literature and acquiring certain communicative skills, such as grammar, was hard to establish because 'we know too little about fostering the kind of development we seem to cherish"! [...]the resulting pattern of change may well be unclear to many a practising teacher, preoccupied with more than enough urgent day-to-day matters, From all the research, the reflection, the trial and error of experimentation, what now emerges? In my own teaching - whether of five-yearolds, of postgraduates, or of students at any intervening stage between those poles of our formal education system - 1 have found that very similar pedagogic issues arise right through the scale. 1 do not believe that leading a discussion with first-graders of Munro Leafs The Stary of Ferdinand is a fundamentally different experience from annotating a draft chapter of a Ph.D thesis on Wordsworth's Prelude. For the most part this interconnectedness is not based on suppositions about sequential or 'spiral' learning; to study literature is not, in any substantial sense, to acquire a body of knowledge - either step by step or turning and turning in a widening gyre - as in French or mathematics· More and more information, to be sure, is progressively brought to each exchange of meanings, but this is seldom the kind of information that can be transmitted piecemeal in the classroom and consolidated in formal increments, No - fundamentally, a literary education remains, even at postgraduate level, the same kind of thing it was in infant school: a collaborative enterprise of creating significance through language, as reader and as writer, as speaker and as listener.