Donald Gutteridge describes the unique way we read poetry and fiction and offers concrete ideas about how English can be best taught in schools.

He argues that students should read literature in the same spirit in which it is written--aesthetically. Similarly, students should be encouraged to create their own stories and poems through a poetic writing process. Teaching English presents six aesthetics-based principles for teaching literature and includes sample lesson plans and annotated lists of resources.

Drawing on recent work in psycho-linguistics, rhetoric an learning theory, Teaching English offers a refreshing method for bringing students closer to the English language.

Don Gutteridge is the author of more than forty books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He was born in Sarnia, Ontario, and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He graduated from Western University in 1960 with an Honours English degree, and taught high school English for seven years before moving to the Western Faculty of Education. He taught there for twenty—five years and is now Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario. In a review of his book The Way It Was, in The Western News, Kane Faucher said Gutteridge's poems have been "memorially 'lived in'" and "must negotiate a world with - and without - words…Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices…in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond."

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