"The New Zealand Curriculum" expresses a vision for young people who are contributing and participating members of society. While this social vision is supported by the inclusion of key competencies, the curriculum document says little about content and its role in developing this participatory agency. This article uses interview data…

Achievement data from New Zealand secondary schools suggest that students from lower socio-economic communities have fewer opportunities to engage with complex content in subject English. This article examines this phenomenon by drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality and considers how a context of simultaneously increased autonomy and…

Since its emergence as a distinct subject area in the nineteenth century, English has been an important, but contested, subject. Competing discourses, resulting in different models of English, have vied for prominence, each with ideologies about the purposes of education and the needs of students and the state. However, while international…

"Innovative use of English language teaching as an international language in graduate studies in Thai universities" is a mixed method proactive and responsive action research study exploring learning management in teaching English as an International Language (EIL). The research has 3 objectives: (1) to study the opinions on the use of…

The present study examined preservice teachers' (PSTs) knowledge of basic language constructs across four different English-speaking teacher preparations programs. A standardized survey was administered to participants from Canada (n = 80), England (n = 55), New Zealand (n = 26), and the USA (n = 118). All participants were enrolled in…

This article reports on a small-scale case study involving all English teachers of junior classes in a rural high school in New Zealand. The Head of English had been involved in Writing Project professional learning, designed in accordance with principles and practices that can be found in a number of countries, especially the United States. The…

From the perspective of World Englishes (i.e., varieties of English in different regions of the world), mutual intelligibility is a key issue for both listeners and speakers. Nevertheless, learners often have an idealized notion of native-speaker spoken norms and may be in favor of more prestigious inner circle models than others. This study…

Current professional development initiatives show a preference for whole school approaches. However, pedagogy related to English language learners (ELLs) is often not widely dispersed in New Zealand primary schools, impacting on teacher efficacy with these learners. This paper discusses findings from a qualitative study which aimed to identify…

This case-study explores the effects of a school-wide writing competition and the implementation of a poetry-writing unit across all junior English classes in a rural New Zealand school. Teacher interview data were thematically analysed using a social constructionist lens. Results highlight the varied strategies adopted by teachers, while…

This project explored teaching and learning of hard-to-learn threshold concepts in first-year English, an electrical engineering course, leadership courses, and in doctoral writing. The project was envisioned to produce disciplinary case studies that lecturers could use to reflect on and refine their curriculum and pedagogy, thereby contributing…

This article describes a project conducted with Year 12 English students. It was based on the model of "Teaching as Inquiry" (Ministry of Education, 2007) and aimed to develop students' self-efficacy in relation to their literature-response essay writing. Self-efficacy was measured using Bandura's (2006) self-efficacy scale and an…

This article presents and analyzes qualitative ethnographic data from research investigating intensive reading in an English Second Language high school class. It focuses on selected teacher-student interactions and considers the effect of these interactions in terms of the processes and products of students' intensive study of a fiction text. The…

Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Since British colonial settlement in the early 1800s, Maori children have been predominantly educated in an English-speaking system dominated by colonial governance. In this institution, Maori children have been constructed as deficient learners, primarily in relation to a colonial curriculum taught…

In an educational context, local, ecologically valid tests can reflect the use of literacy and thinking tools. These tests present a challenge to central, content-focused, high-stakes testing, and to transmission approaches to teaching. They require teachers to accept knowledge as a verb, and to design assessment protocols that reflect…

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research conducted a study to determine students' perceptions of and attitudes toward poetry instruction. A group of 186 fifth form (eleventh grade) students and 56 fifth form English teachers were queried in the following areas: the point of studying poetry; the "really important things" about a…