Editorial

Abstract

There’s nothing new about the assertion that language and identity are intimately related: John Marenbon, a prominent cultural conservative, acknowledged this thirty years ago, when he argued that inclusion of speaking and listening in the English curriculum was an unwarranted intrusion by the state: ‘Governments should not, and cannot, break down this function of speech as self-definition’ (Marenbon 1994, 6). His advice went unheeded, and governments in England have been eager to require teachers to police all aspects of language, to the extent that the current version of the Teachers’ Standards announces that ‘a teacher must . . . take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject’ (DfE 2021). We open this issue with an inspiring account of classroom practice that takes a much more nuanced view of language variety. Eliza Kogawa’s work with her primary pupils involves them in rigorous reflection on the Englishes they use and encounter, at home and in the community as well as in the classroom. The pupils are positioned as coresearchers, with her, into language choices and voices. And the essay might legitimately be presented as a working out in practice of the argument that Paul Tarpey makes for ‘dialogue not decoration’ – for forms of pedagogy that create authentic and meaningful learning experiences. A similar imperative lies behind the following two contributions. Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee reports on the benefits of collaboration among students on a lifewriting course, while Samuel Holdstock makes the case for digital forms of interactive fiction as a dialogic teaching tool. A somewhat different text, Coleridge’s bizarre poetic fragment, Christabel, provides the stimulus for the shared reading and discussion explored by Lilach Naishtat Bornstein. There is sometimes a tendency to imagine reading groups as cosily consensual affairs, instances of the least troubling versions of literary sociability. That is not the story of reading that Bornstein presents here – and much of the interest of her account lies in the sheer difficulty of the negotiations, with the text and with the other participants, that is revealed in her study. Intercultural negotiation is also the subject of the research conducted by Jueyen Su and her collaborators, as they investigate what happened when Balinese and Chinese students worked together online to explore the Japanese concept of amae (presumed indulgence) and cognate words/concepts in Balinese and Mandarin Chinese. We conclude this issue with Lucinda McKnight’s provocation: if AI is already better at producing the kinds of writing that are valorised in high-stakes tests and which thus constitute the focus of much contemporary writing pedagogy, what might an alternative approach to human (or posthuman, or transhuman) writing development look like? What might remain a distinctively human contribution to writing and to thinking about writing? What forms of collaboration or co-authorship with machine intelligence might be productive? CHANGING ENGLISH 2021, VOL. 28, NO. 4, 353–354 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2021.1988268