Editorial: Open-themed issue: December, 2011

This journal has aligned itself with this “reignition” agenda, in large part because its mission statement aligns with a commitment to strengthening the voices of English teachers, teacher educators and researchers worldwide, at a time when a range of policy pressures are posing a real threat to the professional identity of teachers and their ability to conduct their working lives in accord with their own ethical frameworks. This non-themed issue contains articles which have evolved from conference presentations (Comber and Cloonan, for example) or which have been developed by conference attendees (O’Mara and Dix, for example). Other articles vindicate the ETPC Board’s decision to make non-themed issues a regular occurrence, since they are a reminder of the fruitfulness of inviting our constituency to tell us about the thinking, practice and inquiry they have been engaging in

Editorial: The challenge of teaching english in diverse contexts

At the international conference on Language, Education and Diversity, held at the University of Waikato in November 2003, 450 delegates from over 30 countries gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing language educators in teaching and learning contexts that are increasingly diverse. The conference was regarded as a major success. It highlighted the importance of bringing together educators from different fields – bilingual education, TESL, literacy education and language planning and policy – to discuss the urgent issue of addressing and accommodating diversity more effectively

Language and the design of texts.

By demonstrating lexical and grammatical analysis – the rough work that underpins critical discourse analysis – this paper demonstrates the importance of grammatical knowledge for the critical reading of texts. It also provides readers with a grammar rubric for working systematically with the linguistic analysis of texts and argues that Fairclough’s model enables teachers and students to move beyond text analysis to an examination of texts in contexts

Deconstruction and reconstruction: Diversity as a productive resource.

This article uses critical discourse to show that a series of advertisements by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are premised on a discourse of sameness that constructs difference negatively. This article moves from deconstructing these advertisements to possibilities for reconstruction that show difference as a positive and productive resource

The access paradox.

Because English is a dominant world language, access to English provides students with ‘linguistic capital’. Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic market (1991) has important consequences for the teaching of a powerful language such as English. English teachers, who take issues of language, power and identity seriously, confront the following irresolvable contradiction. If you provide more people with access to the dominant variety of the dominant language, you contribute to perpetuating and increasing its dominance. If, on the other hand, you deny students access, you perpetuate their marginalisation in a society that continues to recognise this language as a mark of distinction. You also deny them access to the extensive resources available in that language; resources which have developed as a consequence of the language's dominance. This contradiction is what Lodge (1997) calls the ‘access paradox’. This paper explores ways of working inside the contradiction by examining language in education policy in South Africa as well as classroom materials and classroom practices. It shows the importance of counterbalancing access with an understanding of linguistic hegemony, diversity as a productive resource, and the way in which ‘design’ can be enriched by linguistic and cultural hybridity

Critical literacy: Beyond reason.

In this paper, I argue that critical literacy is essentially a rationalist activity that does not sufficiently address the non-rational investments that readers bring with them to texts and tasks. I begin by looking at playful advertising texts that work with humans and the transgressive in order to consider the role of pleasure rather than reason. Then I examine the force of powerful identifications in relation to reason to show that educational inventions cannot ignore them. Finally, I tentatively suggest that we may need to find ways to combine socio-cultural and psycho-analytic theory in order to imagine new directions for pedagogy in the critical literacy classroom

The importance of critical literacy

This paper is divided into three parts. It begins by making an argument for the on going importance of critical literacy at a moment when there are mutterings about its being passé. The second part of the paper formulates the argument with the use of illustrative texts. It concludes with examples of critical literacy activities that I argue, are still necessary in classrooms around the world

District Nine and constructions of other: Implications for heterogeneous classrooms.

Culturally responsive research and pedagogy are a challenge in classrooms that are increasingly heterogeneous. I start from the premise that culture is dynamic not static, that difference is a resource for new ways of doing, thinking and believing, that identity is hybrid. The challenge for teachers is how to harness the productive potential of diverse classrooms for pedagogy. John Thompson (1990) argues that discourses of “unification” which construct an “us”, and discourses of “fragmentation” which construct a “them”, produce and maintain relations of power. Us/them discourse will be explored in the South African context in relation to both apartheid’s racial othering and post-apartheid’s xenophobic othering. The South African film, District Nine, which can be interpreted as both forms of othering, is presented as a case for considering these ideas