This essay explores the importance of formative creative writing in schools through a Key Stage 3 Creative Writing lunchtime club. I examine the power of unassessed and unconstrained writing through the work of one Year 8 pupil in the early stages of English language acquisition, who so often chooses to write about snow. Reflecting on her writing,…

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…

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…

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…