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What kind of knowledge informs the practice of English teachers? Recent policy developments, in England and elsewhere, have sought to specify a knowledge base for teachers. Drawing on case studies produced by pre-service English teachers, this essay explores the complex, multifaceted and situated character of the knowledge that teachers develop in and through their practice. It questions the utility of 'knowledge' as the overarching term for the development of attitudes, capacities and sensitivities that are always relational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ways that Anne Turvey writes her way into classrooms, producing sophisticated accounts of the teaching and learning she encounters there. In her role as an English tutor, she conducts a sustained inquiry into the complexities of the English curriculum and pedagogy as her students experience them while on school placements. The subtlety of her analyses into language and literature within English classrooms shows what is lost when teacher educators no longer visit their students. Her essays reveal the nexus between writing and inquiry, between ordinary language and critical insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-stakes assessments continue to command a directing influence on education systems globally. While there is much research detailing the challenges associated with this curricular framework, there is little evidence of a move away from high-stakes assessment frameworks to date. Accordingly, attention is being drawn to spaces and opportunities where meaningful teaching and learning experiences may be fostered within high-stakes systems. This paper explores the case of the Transition Year Programme in Ireland through the lens of the poetry classroom as a case study of striking counter-cultural curriculum innovation set within a high-stakes assessment educational framework. Drawing on the perspectives of poetry teachers, the findings of the study highlight the joy, freedom and gravitational pull experienced by practitioners teaching on this programme. Curriculum and policy-based considerations supporting both the integration of counter-cultural educational innovations across high-stakes educational systems and within high-stakes educational programmes are advanced arising from the findings of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

with the continuous development of communication technology, the rise and promotion of mobile terminals and the sound concept of digital learning are widely accepted. Mobile learning based on digital learning and mobile intelligent terminal technology has gradually attracted the attention of academic research and discussion circles. It can provide students with new learning experience of learning and training at any time. Due to the rapid development of social economy and science and technology, the application of science and technology in the education industry has also had a further development trend. Learners have also been looking for new learning methods to meet the complex and changing social development trend. This article studied the virtual reality human–computer interactive English teaching system based on mobile terminals and introduced the network topology of mobile learning environment and the elements of mobile learning service platform model. The design of virtual scene human–computer interactive English video teaching network resources was discussed. After the completion of the system construction, the relevant teaching practice was carried out. The practice results showed that 77.5% of the students agreed to the use of mobile terminals for English teaching, and 26.25% of them agreed very much. It could be seen that most students supported the English teaching mode of virtual reality human–computer interaction based on mobile terminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy such as Accelerated Literacy (AL). We examine the experiences of Bruce, a teacher teaching English in the middle years of school in a school that mandated AL as a whole-of-school approach to English and literacy instruction. We show how intersecting notions of social justice can collide in the English classroom and how teachers in these contexts are in danger of re-colonising through English teaching practices that neither produce statistical improvement nor advance culturally responsive teaching based on giving primacy to Indigenous-authored texts in subject English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practices of sorting things out and bringing things together, which I summarise under the term relanguaging, sit between fluid, situated languaging practices and the administrative standard grid in education that relies on bounded, named languages. Relanguaging, I argue, was invisible to socio- and applied linguists' analytical vision because of a tendency to set named languages as the norm. This led to questions about switching between or transcending languages but not about producing and dissolving them. Together with two English teachers in Khayelitsha, South Africa, I instead set fluid languaging practices as the analytical norm to then investigate the relationship between such fluidity and (administratively) fixed languages. The language classrooms I focus on then emerge as one of the production sites of named languages – here of English. English teachers (sometimes in collaboration with their students) sort out extremely complex spatial repertoires with various heterogeneous linguistic resources to produce English as a recognisable, teachable and learnable entity. The reflections I present suggest a different idea of how language classrooms work (also in settings beyond Khayelitsha) but they also open up (language) philosophical questions about the ontology of linguistic features and how they come to be English (or not). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recalling Freire's lessons on education and teacher development, this study embraces the transformative power of dialogue. In the context of Brazilian public schools, where education faces challenges such as rigid curriculum prescriptions, the researchers implemented a Lesson Study cycle as a dialogic teacher development intervention. Despite constraints, it fostered a collaborative and dialogic space, enabling English teachers to share and reflect in formative interactions. This approach allowed for critical discussions, empowered teacher agency, and enhanced the quality of English teaching. Inspired by Freire's vision, dialogic Lesson Study proved to be a liberating experience for teachers, promoting active and meaningful practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors explore the phenomenon of 'selective amnesia' as it relates to education. We define this as a politically engineered loss of collective memory, both curricular and pedagogic, which has adversely affected what teachers and teacher-educators do. Through an intergenerational dialogue between four secondary English teachers/teacher-educators, we invoke the power of memory to explore alternatives to currently dominant narratives in English teaching. Our starting point is 'what exactly has been forgotten?'1 From there we move on to consider the underlying principles and values of the different model of English that emerges from our collective memory, and discuss how this might engage with policy in order to identify new forms and ideas. We propose that, for those involved in English teaching and teacher education in the here and now, memory has both a critical and motivational role to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity - prominently captured in the notion of 'translanguaging'- are starting to be seen as normative and natural. In turn, homogeneity and fixity, instantiated for example in standard languages, are becoming the 'odd-ones-out.' I challenge the dichotomy between linguistic fluidity (languaging) and fixity (named languages), in a situated conceptual account of translingual writing practices in English classrooms in a Khayelitshan primary school. These spaces fold the linguistic fluidity typical of South African townships, and the fixity of two standard languages, into one complex spatial repertoire. Operationalizing this spatial perspective, I suggest that students are constantly engaged in relanguaging, recursively sorting out the classroom repertoire according to the various linguistic norms enfolded in the space, and of bringing together linguistic resources in various combinations. Relanguaging systematically unsettles the dichotomy between fluid languaging and fix institutional language norms retained in dominant conceptualizations of translanguaging. This way it opens up new conceptual and analytical perspectives with possible pedagogical implication for writing instruction and testing. Standard English could, for example, be assessed beyond its own confines, using writing tasks that can make visible increasingly sophisticated linguistic sorting skills as students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularity of English, more and more attention has been paid to students' English learning. In order to understand student learning and make accurate predictions about student performance, this paper analyzed student performance under English teaching by using a decision tree algorithm, i.e. the C4.5 algorithm. The calculation process of the algorithm was simplified by the Taylor series, and an example was analyzed. The results showed that the running time of the improved C4.5 algorithm was improved by 22.86% compared with the C4.5 algorithm, the precision rate was above 75%, the recall rate was above 85%, and the F1-measure value was above 80%. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the improved C4.5 method in studying student achievement. This work is beneficial to the further optimization of decision tree algorithms and provides some reference for the application of intelligent algorithms in the field of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Australian literature mandated for study in the Victorian senior English curriculum creates opportunities for problematizing central myths about Australia. We engage with Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence to demonstrate how representations of colonization, rurality and migration reflect discursive formations of Australia. We consider how each discourse serves a pedagogic function, essentializing a set of myths about Australia: as having redeemed the violence done to Indigenous Australians in the colonial period, as embodying a white, rural masculine ideal, and as a welcoming nation open to migrants. Here, we show the points of orientation these texts provide, in their rearticulations of "the scraps ... of daily life", and further consider how the texts can problematize nationalist narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All too often lost in the pressure and intensity of the current practice of English teachers and literacy educators is due acknowledgement of the continuing importance of history. This paper brings together two concerns: the work of Margaret Meek Spencer as a key figure in the history of English teaching, reading pedagogy and literacy education, and the value of curriculum inquiry as a resource for re-focusing and renewing the field. In that context, the paper introduces a particular notion of literature as curriculum, working first with one of Meek's most generative texts and then linking with another key figure in English curriculum history, James Moffett, to outline what is possible when the relationship between literature and curriculum is richly reconceptualised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on ways in which the use of participatory action research (PAR) in a study to improve the teaching of English as a second or additional language, promoted knowledge democracy. In the article, we pay special attention to how nine Senior Phase/Junior Secondary (Grade 7–9) school-teachers of English as a second or additional language, together with two researchers/the authors, reflected and identified factors that needed to be engaged with to improve teaching and make learning English meaningful to the Bafokeng children's language, community values and ways of living. In developing the partnerships that were crucial for PAR, first, we acknowledged and affirmed how the teachers described and accounted for their teaching and, second, how together with the researchers, individually and collectively co-produced knowledge democratically about the teaching that was studied and how it could be improved. The argument is that without the partnerships that were developed and continuously constructed during field-work, the collaborative ways of identifying how to improve the teaching of English while recognizing language, values and ways of living they brought into lessons would have been impossible. Finally, the article reflects on the conditions that made the partnerships and roles played by all eleven participants in the study crucial in laying the foundations for meaningful professional development for the teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited attention has been given to the emotions of university English teachers in their identity constructions in the context of curriculum reform in China. Drawing upon the identity control theory (ICT), this qualitative study examines how six teachers negotiate their emotions during curriculum reform in China. Data were collected through in-depth interviews. Findings indicate that teachers experience a variety of emotions in response to the curriculum reform and that the emotions are triggered by teachers' identity constructions. Based on the findings and ICT, this study proposes a model that delineates the interplay between self-identity, performance outcome, and teacher emotion in the context of curriculum reform. The model explicates that congruence between teachers' self-identities and the identities imposed by the reform contributes to positive emotions and vice versa. Adding to the original ICT, this study suggests that teachers' performance outcomes (i.e. teaching outcome and student performance) are likely to influence the (non-)verification of role performance and teacher emotion. In addition, this study reveals the factors that influence teachers' role performances in the reform, including rapid changes in education policy, stressful teaching evaluations, the instruction of ideological and political thoughts in English courses, and teachers' insufficient computer skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to test the improvement effect of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)-based hybrid English teaching mode on the English listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills of students, this study divided 200 college students into two groups. One group was the control group which was taught by the traditional teaching mode, while the other group was the experimental group which was taught by the MOOC-based hybrid teaching mode. The listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities of the two groups were tested before and after teaching. Moreover, a questionnaire survey was carried out after teaching test. The results showed that the listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities of the experimental group what was taught by the MOOC-based hybrid English teaching mode was effectively improved. The results of the questionnaire survey also demonstrated that the MOOC-based hybrid English teaching mode was more effective in stimulating students' interest in learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus here is on English teaching and media education, with particular reference to the Australian and English contexts. It considers the role and significance of media in and for English teaching, as a school subject. It asks: What are the legacies of Cultural Studies in this regard? English teaching is considered in relation to, first, the UK national curriculum, the 1989 Cox Report and what was called 'Cultural Analysis', and second, the Australian Curriculum, and the programmatic shift in focus to 'texts'. In particular, we want to think about the lost legacies of Cultural Studies: those insights and orientations that don't seem to have been taken up, or perhaps have withered, or have fallen away. This includes Cultural Studies' key concern with everyday life and media culture, as practice and flow. Some questions remain: What remains of Cultural Studies today, with regard to English teaching and media education? Moreover, What possibilities and prospects for curriculum renewal are there in the current conjecture, in the third decade of the 21st century? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Margaret Meek Spencer's 1988 pamphlet "How Texts Teach What Readers Learn" to frame a discussion about the purpose of English Literature in English secondary schools. The primary data informing this article is taken from original interviews with ten Heads of English departments in English secondary schools. Henri Lefebvre's framework of conceived, perceived and lived spaces is used to analyse the data to understand how the Heads of Department conceptualise the place and purpose of English Literature in their schools. The views of the Heads of English are then discussed in light of Meek Spencer's work, highlighting how the current curriculum for English Literature produces a subject which is at odds with her ideas and contemporary views of the English curriculum and its purpose. The article concludes with some suggestions about how the teaching of English Literature in schools can be developed so that it is more in line with Meek Spencer's ideas, is more socially just and more ambitious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses in detail two lessons that were part of a larger research project on English teaching in Canada, England and Scotland. It considers whether the two English lessons are by their nature both dialogic and formative in practice. The research undertaken was carried out using arts-based criticism. It found that Eaglestone's notion of good English teaching was synonymous with Alexander's idea of dialogic assessment in the nature of the decisions teachers took to encourage students to think about texts. The dialogue that took place, through feedback that was cumulative, could potentially take any direction. In English, 'the point is to respond to the "simultaneous presence of many meanings" rather than draw out one unambiguously'. The key decision for the teacher is to listen, assess and respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While speaking, reading and writing are identified in the Newbolt Report as components of English and are still acknowledged as such one hundred years later, Reading Aloud, which the Report ranks alongside them, is no longer accorded any prominence. The Newbolt Report connects Reading Aloud with literature and announces it as a method of interpretation, though this is not elaborated as a pedagogic practice. This article examines how a Reading Aloud methodology evolved and was articulated in theory and practice, first in government guidance and then in influential books about English teaching. During this process a methodology emerged in which a focus on voicing and hearing a poem was a means to interpreting and understanding the poem and ultimately to an ideal reading of it. Reasons are suggested why attention shifted away from this practical methodology whereby familiarity with reading poems aloud gives more confident access to understanding and appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes to education policy in England since 2010 have led teachers to reflect on what and how they teach. This paper presents original data exploring how a small selection (n = 10) of Heads of English in some English secondary schools are accommodating policy changes. Ball's analytic framework developed to explore neoliberal policy enactment in education is used to reveal how Heads of English might be at odds with recent policy changes, particularly regarding the range of text choices in available for examination studies, but are using their limited agency to accommodate their values in practice. This research shows how these Heads of Department are generally positive and confident in their approach to teaching English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incorporation of peace and war into the curriculum poses problems to teachers, especially in an examination-focussed school system. Whilst recent research concerning conflict has considered conflict-resolution within schools, and difficulties teachers face teaching about terrorism, little has been written on teaching 21st century war without the high-profile deployment of UK troops. In this article, I examine how peace and war are taught in an English school. After identifying the school's overall war-focussed discourse, I focus on the practices of an ex-services English teacher and his techniques to debate, discuss, and ultimately problematise war creating a space akin to Foucault's heterotopia. I argue this 'other space' allowed him to develop his practice and there is evidence of the heterotopia 'leaking' further afield. I suggest that although there are limitations to the classroom-as-heterotopia, it can nevertheless provide a space for practitioners to disrupt the wider discourse within their schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of The Newbolt Report, the first official report about English, in spirit a liberal document, arguing for an emancipatory English. Since 1870 The School Subject of English [SSE] has experienced several historical phases. One phase [1980-92] is presented as a period of 'harmonious practice', arguing that it offers a positive view of a future in which SSE and its teachers are at one. SSE is a democratic and emancipatory project, its boundaries constantly expanding to reflect societal change, the needs of its students and a belief in social justice. In the current 'panopticon' phase this emancipatory ambition is performatively diminished. The current dominance of 'The English Literary Heritage' and terminal examinations are stultifying teachers. This overview seeks to trace historical developments, considering ways to recapture the spirit of Newbolt but in a 21st century model of English, we are ready for a new phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report data from the first national survey of secondary Shakespeare teaching in the UK, conducted online in 2017–18 with a sample of 211 teachers distributed through England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We report on what is taught and why. Our survey shows that the most popular play in the UK is Macbeth, which is one-fifth of all Shakespeare teaching instances in our sample. At age 11, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest dominate, while at A level A.C. Bradley's "big four" – Othello, Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – are the most popular. Reasons to teach certain texts related to clear plot, themes and good characters for analysis; aside from the play's characteristics, whether or not there were copies of the text in school was the major deciding factor in what to teach, along with the existence of supporting resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing interest in the history of curriculum and pedagogy in subject English might be seen as a response to educational reforms that are replacing earlier, progressive understandings of subject English with narrowly technical understandings of teacher professional knowledge and practice. This essay emerges out of an intergenerational, dialogic inquiry with late career and retired English teachers in Victoria, Australia. The study, called 'The cultural memory of English teaching', generated a range of personal-professional narratives of teaching English from the 1970s onwards. Key to their recollections was their relative professional autonomy with respect to curriculum making and text selection. This article focuses on two retired English teachers and how curriculum making was central to their efforts to use and develop their professional knowledge. We argue that a cultural memory of English teaching is an increasingly valuable resource for understanding teacher professional knowledge and for evaluating current standards-based imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on a day of dangerous bushfire conditions in NSW, I recount my leadership responsibilities as a principal, highlighting the shaping force of my English teaching past in my response to certain managerial demands that I faced. I illustrate how the sense of ethical responsibility and a commitment to openness that came to define my understanding of subject English, and my programming practices and advocacy, remains with me, mediating my work and subjectivity as a school leader. I outline how, on this day, it was necessary to recognise what poet Wallace Stevens calls a 'supreme fiction' in my engagement with aspects of policy and governmentality. I contend that key aspects of English as a form of 'knowing' have much to contribute to the efficacy of school leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Continuing Professional Development (CPD), a critical element in successful educational systems, teacher quality, organisational effectiveness and student outcomes. Topics include introducing teachers to fundamental pedagogical principles such as formative assessment, classroom management, and differentiation; and focusing on evaluating the impact about CELT P/S courses on the trainees' professional identities.

This is a review essay of Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. I interrogate many of North's claims, most notably his argument about the way a shift from literary criticism to literary scholarship has blunted the capacity of people working in literary studies to engage in a socially critical praxis. I use his book as an occasion to explore the relationship between literary studies (as 'knowledge') and the meaning-making that occurs within English classrooms when students engage with the texts chosen for study. I argue that North's failure to make connections between English teaching and the literary critical projects of people like I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams ultimately limits the reach of his book. For each of these critics, literary criticism was deeply embedded in an educational project that extended far beyond the confines of the academy, and their literary criticism might usefully be reread in these terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its publication in 1921, The Teaching of English in England, otherwise known as the Newbolt Report, has informed both the shape of English as a school subject and the discourse about the teaching of English in England. The 1960s saw the report as promoting a cultural heritage rooted in outdated social values; the 1970s explored how it encouraged a version of personal growth through a love of literature. The 1980s returned to issues around social class, which were further developed in the 1990s. More recently there has been a limited reappraisal of the Newbolt Report, crediting it with introducing the modern discourse around English teaching. This paper argues that a deeper understanding of the Newbolt Report would allow teachers to become more engaged with the discourse about English teaching and re-connect this with their values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the way English language teaching (ELT) is currently understood and practised in Malaysia. It presents a critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts in order to show how CEFR represents a form of Western-imposed globalisation that conflicts with local cultures and values. We argue that the newspapers construct a dominant discourse that promotes a vision of society that accords with CEFR–ELT implementation. Our aim is to contribute to the development of a counter-discourse that challenges the broader world-view underpinning ELT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steve Shann's latest book is a novel called The Worlds of Harriet Henderson. It's about 15-year-old Harriet Henderson who has a new English teacher, Molly McInness, and all at once school seems full of possibilities. But, inspired by Molly and impelled by her own adolescent restlessness, Harriet makes an impulsive decision, a decision that takes her, her teacher and her new friend into complex and dangerous worlds. The novel is a natural extension of Shann's earlier articles and books arguing that mythopoetics - the use of intuition and imagination to reveal the ordinarily unseen - is a legitimate scholarly methodology. In this article, Shann uses extracts from a 2015 journal he kept as he began to think about writing a novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how English teachers learn to become expert designers of learning and why sharing that expertise is increasingly vital. Its conceptual framework is the widely recognised, empirically tested, five-stage developmental Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, exemplifying the development of teacher expertise, constituted by the “milestone” [m] and “transitory” [t] phases connecting with the five stages of: Novice [m], Advanced Beginner [t], Competent [m], Proficient [t] and Expert [m]. Teacher planning is analysed as one key tacit or non-tangible component of developing expertise. Focusing specifically on English teachers as key participants in this pioneer teacher cognition study, the defining characteristics of milestone stages of expertise development are explored with specific attention to the remarkably under-researched area of planning. We introduce three new categories, defining modes of planning: (i) visible practical planning, (ii) external reflective planning and (iii) internal reflective planning, demonstrating their role in teacher development through the Dreyfus five stages. English is a subject which suffers from frequent disruptive changes to curriculum and assessment: new learning designs are constantly demanded, making planning an ongoing challenge. The implications for practice include the importance of an explicit understanding of how teachers’ planning moves through the three phases from the very “visible” novice phase to the internal relatively “automatic” competent teacher and finally the seemingly “invisible” expert phase. Further research is needed to explore how English teachers can share planning expertise between the three phases to improve teachers’ skills and student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ‘close reading’ is problematic for English teachers, yet a heightened awareness of the role that language plays in mediating experience and social relationships is fundamental to an informed and critically engaged citizenry. This essay finds that a focus on abstracted ideological content of literary texts comes at the cost of material, aesthetic considerations of language or ‘literariness’: it is the baby that has been thrown out with the bathwater. The essay argues that a false dichotomy between a literary education as ‘cultural studies’ and the study of ‘Culture’ (with a capital C) has diverted attention from the relationship between words and meaning. It draws on the work of Raymond Williams in contending that a renewed concept of ‘close reading’ should be at the heart of English teachers’ professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates perception of English amongst Indonesian English language educators who pursued postgraduate studies in Australia, leading to decisions on which English(es) to teach upon their return to Indonesia. Through individual interviews, 14 participants were asked about expectations of the English language they would encounter prior to their arrival in Australia, followed by questions about the actual varieties they faced in Australia. They were also asked to reflect on their experiences and suggest which English(es) to teach upon their return to Indonesia. Regardless of the multi-varieties encountered in Australia, the participants were highly influenced by external factors in deciding which English(es) to teach upon returning to Indonesia. Most participants would teach American or British English due to textbook availability, not because of their beliefs; some would also share information about other varieties with their students. Intelligibility, the most important matter in communication, would also be shared with their students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2013, GCSE English Language and Literature courses in England have experienced changes to assessment and curriculum that have ushered them in a supposedly new direction, both under the umbrella of wider GCSE reforms. This divergence has included the abolition of controlled assessment and the concurrent resurgence of academic courses being assessed only by examination. Alongside these changes have been wider reforms to the GCSE system in its totality, with a switch from the typical A* to G grading system to a new 9 to 1 structure. This article is a consideration of these changes and some other caveats of the reform documents released between 2013 and 2015. I am posing this inquiry from my perspective as an English teacher and a poststructuralist, using deconstruction to scrutinise the language in some of the reform documents. Governmental agenda of the reform is explored, demonstrating an archaism to the 'new' direction of the GCSE and the hierarchizing of the academic elite in the oppositions presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To illustrate differences in lower secondary-level language and literature teaching, we contrast a typical teaching episode in Denmark with one in England. Both reflect the dominant discourses in each country alongside recent policy initiatives, and each exemplifies a different orientation to language and literature teaching focussing on performance in England and a personal formation in Denmark. Descriptions of the episodes are linked to wider debates and potential areas for further consideration are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teachervis-à-visa devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws from histories of “educationalisation” and neo-Foucaultian histories of English teaching in an archival analysis that revisits landmark pedagogical texts that coincided with the rapid expansion of the school subject English in between the 1894 Report of the Committee of Ten and 1918 Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. The archival analysis considers these two reform documents along with the first comprehensive books on English teaching, which were published between the 1890s and 1920s. The study’s analysis adopts a selective focus on their explicit aims and rationales for teaching English, particularly in secondary schools, and the pedagogic logics and practices by which English was imagined as a governmental response to various social problems. This archival work recovers the largely overlooked ways in which the teaching of English was positioned to improve the moral and social condition of the population, to develop youths’ capacities for self-governance, to professionalise teaching through the psychological sciences, and to include “problem” populations within the corrective spaces of the English classroom. It also illustrates how distinctive approaches to teaching English language and literature were understood to attune youths’ “souls” to a range of governmental norms. This study bridges ideas from two historical literatures in order to unearth “educationalisation” problematics and “governmental” practices that traditional histories of English teaching have largely obscured, particularly in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little research has been conducted that explores connections between the fields of intercultural communication and English-language instruction. To address this gap, we report on an intercultural communication course delivered as an integral part of a short-term professional development immersion program for English-language teachers from South Korea. Study results indicate that intercultural communication training served to enhance participants’ pragmatics awareness along with sensitivity regarding sociocultural influences on communication that they experiencedin situ. After the four-week course, most of the participants expressed desire and readiness to integrate intercultural communication into their teaching in South Korea. Intercultural communication training promises to complement pragmatics instruction aiming at improving English-language learning and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of teaching in Denmark and England. Its broader aim is to help develop an approach for comparing pedagogy. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernstein’s pedagogic discourse to construct teacher roles, which provided a view of pedagogy. Through this approach we have begun to identify variations in pedagogy across two countries. All teachers in this study adopted a variety of roles. Of significance was the ease with which competent English teachers moved between roles. The English teachers observed adopted roles consistent with a wider techno-rationalist discourse. There was a greater subject emphasis by Danish teachers, whose work was set predominantly within a democratic humanist discourse, whilst the English teachers placed a greater emphasis on applied skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the Cartesian influence in mainstream American education, writing instruction has come to reflect a dualistic worldview, with the writer understood as an autonomous observer/knower. As such, writing instructors have the potential to convey problematic lessons about the self as entirely separate from the world. This essay delineates a corrective to the Cartesian mindset in mainstream writing instruction: Yagelski's ontological theory of writing as a way of being-in-the-world. In the spirit of connectedness Yagelski espouses, I consider the ways in which Yagelski's ontological theory of writing might work in tandem with Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading. Together, Yagelski and Rosenblatt allow English educators to reimagine reading and writing as activities with the ethical potential to repair the rifts of a dualistic worldview, and ultimately to reimagine English education as a field that breaks the Cartesian frame. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-bound rationalities, this essay analyses James Moffett’s depiction of the censors who opposed hisInteractionstextbook series in the Kanawha County, West Virginia, schools. Many reviewers have found Moffett’s analysis of the censors inStorm in the Mountainseven-handed and respectful. Such lauding of Moffett’s work obscures the ways in which his understanding of the censors and their motivations inadequately considers the cultural history of the Appalachian region, its relationship to literacy, and the rationality underlying the censors’ stance. A critical look at Moffett’s representation of the censors permits a reconsideration of his theory of literacy, and moves us closer to understanding how to realize pluralistic education in resistant locales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia’s place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the recently publishedAustralian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of ‘enduring artistic and cultural value’ that are drawn from ‘world and Australian literature’. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ have when young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers’ and students’ interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a ‘literary’ education, whether conceived in ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘global’ terms, have in the twenty-first century? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the metaphor of the classroom as a ‘crucible’ for early professional learning where beginning teachers forge professional identities in complex, unpredictable, paradoxical, affectively and physically potent contexts of practice. It works into the dissonances and contradictions of the micro-narratives embedded in the accounts that three high-achieving early career English teacher graduates give of their early professional learning in schools. It traces the conflicts they experience in the gap between ‘economies of performance’ and ‘ecologies of practice’ within which they improvise new professional identities as teachers. Their effective ‘transmutations’ into teachers are contingent on a bewildering range of factors, many of them out of their control. As the medieval transmutation of lead into gold was analogous to personal transformation, purification and perfection, so new teachers aspire to ideals of practice that may be impossible to achieve. The paper moves beyond simplistic conceptualisations of theory–practice binaries in new teachers’ work and evaluates the impact of new pressures from globalised discourses of standardisation and professionalism that erase singularity, particularity and relationality. Rather, it posits professional learning as complex identity work that is variously constrained and enabled by local institutional factors and broader policy contexts that affect the capacity and desire of beginning teachers to introduce and sustain innovative pedagogies in their English classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late nineteenth-century expansion of public schooling in Australia from an initial focus on the elementary phase to post-primary provision, and then to a more systematic secondary education over the early to mid-twentieth century, went hand in hand with the emergence of new populations of children and young people – a new constituency. In turn, these developments called into being a New Teacher, and a new system of teacher education, formed in accordance with what was widely understood as the New Education. Moreover, this was conceived as clearly in the service of nation-building. This paper traces aspects of the history of teacher education in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, proposing that this is best understood with reference to the cultural and ideological significance of English teaching and the English language, nation and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to problematize perspective-taking – an instructional practice widely thought to be useful in helping students develop the ability to better understand their own worlds and the worlds of others in multicultural texts. We provide examples that illustrate difficulties discovered in implementing a perspective-taking approach to teaching multicultural texts across three diverse classrooms. Specifically, these examples suggest that perspective-taking was perceived by students to be a rhetorical strategy that their teachers wanted them to acquire in the interests of persuasion, politeness, political correctness and uncritical tolerance. Through discussion of these examples this paper argues that in order for perspective-taking to be a valuable instructional strategy for teaching multicultural texts it must be grounded in a larger effort towards an ethical approach to response to multicultural texts – an effort by which teachers encourage ownership of initial responses, genuine and continual consideration of conflicting views, and a positioning of one's response in relation to those of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we hold that cultural colonization in English teaching in the cross-cultural context is a legitimate concern, we argue that when overstretched it tends to ignore the complex power relations within a culture by imposing homogeneity on it. It may also fossilize the role a foreign language can play in a multilingual context, which, we believe, cannot be reduced to simplistic terms of cultural subjugation. We will use an example from the teaching of English argumentation in China to show that English in its contact with Chinese interrupts an otherwise inert cognitive process based on habituation, thus participating in and contributing to the cultivation of critical literacy. Translingual ability is what makes critical literacy possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The film scholar Robin Wood, who died recently, taught me English during the mid-1960s at Welwyn Garden City High School (now Sir Frederick Osborn Comprehensive). He was one of those teachers who ‘made a difference’. He helped me learn that it was all right for a boy from a working-class home to study stuff such as literature. But it was largely through film that he achieved this. Despite the dismay of many of my peers, Robin often ignored the English syllabus in favour of showing us films, encouraging us to argue about them, and also write about them. He wanted us to do what he himself had learned to do: to take films seriously, look at them closely, and make up our own minds, uninhibited by a weight of critical scholarship and the demands of a curriculum.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper historicises familiar assertions that English is qualitatively different from other school subjects to highlight historical commitments and sociopolitical effects of English teaching that are often obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. It juxtaposes three different pedagogical literatures across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to illustrate how English teaching has been - and largely remains - linked in important ways with pastoral Christianity, the social sciences, and a range of governmental objectives of 'modern', welfare states. The paper denaturalises contemporary pedagogical distinctions and practices by highlighting how they largely reiterate pastoral logics and disciplines of nineteenth-century Sunday school pedagogy. In addition, it examines historical continuities and discontinuities that sensitise us to the (un)changing ways in which English pedagogy has been implicated in practices of social regulation, productive power, and larger struggles over telling the 'truth' about one's self, others, and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on my first-hand experiences of being a 'purist' in Hong Kong, during which time I was not allowed to use mixed code, a common discursive practice among Hongkongers in Hong Kong. I shall discuss the difficulties in using 'pure' English and 'pure' Chinese in my daily life, as well as exploring the problems I encountered when I used 'pure' English in teaching English to a small group of ESL students at a primary school in Hong Kong. I argue that mixed code is very much characteristic of everyday language use by most Hongkongers and represents an important marker of their ethno-linguistic identity. In relation to language teaching, I suggest that mixed code may be usefully adopted in teaching English in Hong Kong, rather than being shunned at all costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based upon a larger study that considered three high school literature units in the US. Through a close analysis of one classroom discussion between a teacher and a provocative 8th grade student named Fish, I argue that it is not only ethically responsible to position the Fishes of this world as laudable, but that doing so is beneficial for critically focused English classes as a whole. Further, I argue that my reading of Fish as a provocateur can be productively transferred to other student-provocateurs in our English classrooms who vex the smooth doing-of-school in different ways than Fish did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]