Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the important work of Peter Medway in seeking to define English as a school subject in the period from the 1980s to the early years of this century. Design/methodology/approach: The author reviews the work of Peter Medway. Findings: The paper addresses the issue of how his work reflected -- or not…

The status of English as a global language has played a significant role in contemporary language education policies across the world. In East Asia, the hegemony of English has been reflected in a number of central governments' policies of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to participate in English language education. This paper…

This paper reports on a qualitative teacher inquiry conducted in a tertiary, English-as-a-foreign-language classroom in Taiwan. The purpose of the study was, first, to implement a poststructuralist view of critical literacy that focuses not only on texts but also on the practice of reading as constructed and contested, and second, to examine the…

We offer this piece as an essay, a dialogic, many-voiced attempt to represent the tensions and contradictions in our work and the work that goes on in London schools. Locating our work within a polyphonic, narrative-based tradition of inquiry into practice (Burgess & Hardcastle, 1991; Doecke & McClenaghan, 2011; Parr, 2010; van de Ven…

Despite critical literacy being identified as a desired outcome of South Africa's new curriculum statement, in reality this does not seem to be occurring (DoE 2002, pp. 5, 11). Critical literacy is one way in which spaces of contestation and resistance can be opened up. In order to do so it is necessary to provide students with basic literacy…