Globally teachers are experiencing reductions to their autonomy and constraints on their professional practice through legislative impositions of limiting standards, external testing and narrowing curricula. This study explores the ways English educators find a balance between these external expectations, contemporary pressures, professional…

This article critically examines the literature around grammar and grammatical terminology. It is essentially a critical consideration of the debates in England and Wales in four main parts. Part 1 considers debates in policy, the "What", i.e. grammatical terminology from the perspective of national policy as defined by the English…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a critical discussion and re-evaluation of the Personal Growth (PG) model of English, noting that the summer of 2016 marks 50 years since the Dartmouth Conference and the publication of John Dixon's seminal response to the conference in "Growth Through English" (1967). The influence of the London…

Fifty years ago, in 1966, the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English, later known as the Dartmouth Conference, brought together English educators from three nations--the United States, England, and Canada--to discuss the future of the school subject of English. The Dartmouth Conference is now considered to be a watershed moment in the…

Since 2013, 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 reforms. This divergence has included the abolition of controlled assessment and the concurrent resurgence of academic courses being assessed…

It can be argued that nearly thirty years of heavily centralised intervention into English pedagogy, curriculum and assessment have had a deprofessionalising effect on teachers. The accountability stranglehold means it is safer for English teachers to implement accepted strategies that are perceived to enable pupils to negotiate assessment…

This article reflects on the values and practices of a revolutionary A level (senior secondary) course that achieved a high degree of validity and reliability in assessing the study of English literature. John Hodgson and Bill Greenwell were involved in its teaching and assessment from an early stage, and Greenwell's comments on an early draft of…

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995;…

The Foreign Language Learning (FLL) programme aimed to improve the English language attainment of Year 3 and 4 pupils through a detailed curriculum of weekly French classes with linked activity in English lessons. The programme, created by the Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT), lasted for three half-terms. French classes were 45 minutes…

Teachers in classrooms throughout England are facing a shifting demographic in their pupil intake. Where the teaching of children whose first language was not English was once considered an inner-city teachers' role, more recent migration patterns have challenged this preconception. In England in particular, this change sits against an historical…

This paper reports a small-scale study of wider reading at Key Stage 3 in current English classrooms in secondary schools in the south of England. Six English teachers, three of whom were relatively new to teaching, were interviewed on what they thought about wider reading. The findings indicate that because of a lack of time and absence of demand…

Using recent books, articles, research reports, conference working papers, and publications of Curriculum Centers in English as a base, this study examines and compares two major current approaches used in the definition and teaching of English. In the American approach, the emphasis is placed on the development of a discipline model of English…

Research and controversy continues to surround the principles that underpin the teaching of English. English teachers, nonetheless, must understand and be able to articulate a rationale for what they believe to be important in the teaching of English. In Great Britain the introduction of a National Curriculum for England and Wales has produced a…

Uses examples of curriculum development efforts undertaken within a government-funded pilot project to illustrate how teachers can take advantage of curriculum development resources and opportunities. Addresses teacher motives and satisfactions in curriculum development and ways in which administrators might take account of those feelings to…

This article feeds into the discussion of transitional issues begun in Volume 2 of "Arts and Humanities in Higher Education." It draws on research into A-level students' expectations of university English and how these compare to the experiences of first-year students, university lecturers and A-level teachers. The data presented are…