Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, this paper describes the emergence of "international" schools that are only accessible to upper-middle class and elite families and provide forms of cultural capital increasingly important for middle-class employment--"communication skills", "open-mindedness" and…

Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher preparation coursework to investigate practices associated with eliciting and responding to student writing. This article describes an attempt to address this problem with a searchable online digital archive of student writing, with and without teachers' written feedback, as well…

Even as research has begun to document that teachers matter, there is less certainty about what attributes of teachers make the most difference in raising student achievement. Numerous studies have estimated the relationship between teachers' characteristics, such as work experience and academic performance, and their value-added to student…

This study examined the complexities of mentoring discourse and agentive teacher preparation. I argue that such an examination is necessary to better prepare student teachers to engage agentively with the powerful status quo in schools. I begin by discussing the intersections of current thinking about mentoring and dialogue, and I describe how…

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us, nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings, new and veteran teachers in the…

Genre theory has been around for a long time now. The exchange between Michael Rosen and Frances Christie recently featured in "Changing English" is the latest in a series of exchanges between advocates of genre and their critics over the past three decades or so. Our aim in this response-essay is not to weigh up the merits of the cases…

The ways in which literacy in English is taught in school generally subscribe to and perpetuate the notion of a homogenous, unvaried set of writing conventions associated with the language they represent, especially in relation to spelling and punctuation as well as grammar. Such teaching also perpetuates the myth that there is one…

The first-year composition requirement at Murray State University was revised in 2008 from a 6-credit-hour, two-semester sequence to a 4-credit-hour, one-semester course. The revision overtly emphasizes critical reading, writing, and inquiry, while addressing the realities of the institution's resources for teaching first-year composition. This…

The small sultanate of Brunei, located on the island of Borneo in the South China Sea, introduced bilingual education shortly after independence. As a consequence, Brunei's Ministry of Education outsourced much of its English language teaching requirements to qualified expatriate teachers. Despite over 25 years of systemic English language…

Learning community (LC) programs continue to proliferate across college campuses as a strategy to engage and retain students. Although evidence exists to suggest increased levels of social engagement among LC participants, there is an ongoing debate about the impact on student academic engagement and intellectual development. This article…

There are increasing numbers of students entering Australian secondary schools whose first language is not English. Compound this with the numbers of Indigenous students who speak Creoles or who have distinct dialects, and teachers in secondary English classrooms are facing a struggle to implement the syllabus and engage students. The issue of how…

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the European-led projects in the field of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and their potential applicability in the Iranian EFL context. This paper tries to introduce various dimensions of CLIL and examine the compatibility of its component with the Iranian context.

While schools have been using computers within their classrooms for years now, there has been a purposeful ignoring of the growing power of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many schools ban students from accessing and using sites such as Facebook at school and many English and literacy teachers ignore or deny their value as a teaching…

The status of poetry both in the writing curriculum and in wider popular culture is best described as mixed (Wilson, 2009). In spite of a strong post-war tradition of enthusiasm for the teaching of poetry writing, it is currently felt to be marginalised in the writing curriculum (Dymoke, 2007; Ofsted, 2007). This paper reports on the beliefs,…

Calls now abound in a range of literatures--philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies--to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of "cosmopolitanism." Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically…