Despite a reported sociocultural shift in the public perception of rights affecting LGBTQ+ individuals and some changes in governmental policies and laws, there has not yet been a resulting shift in the overall K-12 pedagogical paradigm. Within the classroom, LGBTQ+ individuals and students growing up in LGBTQ+ households are frequently and…

English education stakeholders need ways of envisioning and advocating for transformative approaches to literacy teaching. In this inquiry, we consider the dynamic field of literary studies -- one of the scholarly fields most directly linked to English education. We conducted a content analysis of 404 articles recently published in literary…

We extend research on social annotation in education by implementing a new annotation technique in the literature classroom. Over the course of one year, we invited students to socially annotate literary texts using emojis that reflected their affective responses to those texts. This approach was inspired by new functions of social annotation…

This paper reports on a short project undertaken with student English teachers during their one year Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) teaching course that considered the potential inclusion of the novella "The Woman of Colour" into their teaching. The research considers how the student teachers received the text and the…

This study explores the use of a metacognitive tool in the preparation of secondary English teachers. This multi-faceted qualitative study presents the findings from a phenomenological research approach that focuses on how literacy quadrants depict pre-service teachers' (PSTs') understandings of, or beliefs about, mental illness and the teaching…

This article is a discussion of some aspects of reader response. It attempts to track the development of various theories: from the view of the text as an entity set in stone, through structuralist and phenomenological arguments, to the point where the text becomes a virtual dimension. But not only is the importance of the text within the literary…

The emergence of e-literature -- texts created on and for digital devices -- has coincided with innovative, transgressive methods of storytelling. "Pry," an iOS-based text, exemplifies e-literature's potential to rethink traditional narrative conventions. Rather than depict the real-world as we experience it (i.e. mimesis),…

This article presents the results from an international collaboration between undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and Norway. Using Literature Circles and "Google Documents" in groups, the students liaised digitally over three young adult novels that are prominent within the UK school curriculum. This study explored the ways in…

This essay uses the metaphor of "savvy travelling" to discuss the limitations and problems associated with three current "best practice" approaches to the reading of literature in upper grade levels, particularly in the United States: close reading, response-based reading, and disciplinary literacy. A "savvy" approach…

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…

The teaching of grammar has been strongly debated for decades, often with reference to an alleged decline in the 1960s. This article takes a historical perspective on grammar, or knowledge about language, within English Education. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith's "Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles-lettres" offered a discernibly…

This note reports the results of a Delphi panel priority setting exercise for English education research. An initial item-generating survey of 75 English education academics and teachers worldwide was conducted; a thematic analysis of responses generated 31 potential priorities for future research. An adapted Delphi panel consisting of 44 English…

Teaching and reading literature are commonly viewed as contributing to the cultivation of empathy. This article presents critical and pedagogical approaches to test this view and suggests a distinction between low-level, simple empathy inspired by the reading and teaching of "The Tortilla Curtain" and a more complex, self-critical…

This longitudinal study examines three female Chinese students' responses to Ibsen's A Doll's House at a Hong Kong university. We interviewed them about their attitudes towards dating, marriage and divorce, before reading the play; we then elicited responses to a first reading. Finally, we interviewed them after six hours of class discussion.…

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary project in which English poetry and performance studies were integrated into a poetry performance project for EFL students in a language education programme at a Japanese university. The project used the theories and methods of But?¯, a contemporary Japanese form of dance and visual art, to…