This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

This essay draws from the experience of observing writing practices in English lessons from 2010-2019, to suggest that the influence of education policy during this phase prioritises preparation for examination questions above the imperatives of learner creativity or volition. Through discussion of ways in which the 'high stakes' examination…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

It is now five years since the introduction of the current National Curriculum for English in England; it is just over 50 years since the Dartmouth Conference drew together American and English educationalists. This paper reports on a hermeneutic study that presents voices from the field of English teaching in England. It asks questions of today's…

I explore a series of incidents in my English classroom, which occurred while I was preparing my students for their high-stakes GCSE English Language exam ('Paper 2: Writers' viewpoints and perspectives'). I thereby attempt to confront some of my own failings and biases with regard to non-fiction and the teaching of persuasive writing in…

This article presents two separate but related studies on native-English speaking (NES) instructors' teaching writing practice in Chinese universities. One study is a case study that explores the teaching practice of three NES instructors' writing instruction in a southern Chinese university as well as students' responses to their practice.…

This essay explores what the development of writing might look like and how it might take shape in a secondary English classroom. The study problematises current definitions of progress. In direct opposition to standards-driven models, I propose an alternative way of thinking about the development of writers through a series of narrative accounts…

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, "The Island," that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a…

Creative writing courses are growing in universities and outside them. Publishers and agents even turn to them now as sources of promise and talent. This article describes a particularly successful MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London and makes a case for the popularity and the usefulness to universities, to aspiring writers and…

Over the past 15 years, there has been a range of standards-driven educational interventions in England: focused particularly on students' writing, they have been targeted at particular students, short-term and based on the assumption that identifiable, quantifiable inputs would produce pre-identified, measurable outputs. This article explores one…

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…

At the dawn of a national curriculum for English in Australia, grammar has appeared without any serious interrogation of the terms of its re-entry and against ambiguous evidence about its value for teaching writing. What kinds of knowledge about language do teachers need in rhetorically productive teaching? This article investigates the potential…

James Moffett's "Teaching the Universe of Discourse" set out an agenda for the study of development in writing, which influenced James Britton's work in the UK. Subsequently, however, the work of both these thinkers was largely set aside in the approach to writing taken by national strategies in England. In this article, we trace the…