Editorial

Abstract

Questions of knowledge continue to preoccupy us. What do we know about teaching and learning in English? And who are the knowledgeable ones – the ‘we’, if you like, of the previous question? This issue opens with Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini’s playful thought experiment: is there anything to be learnt from the current pandemic – and are there any parallels between Coronavirus and English (language) teaching? Might this be a moment to reconsider what we think we know, and to question (again) the relationship between research and practice? The other contributors to this issue might be regarded as taking up Mirhosseini’s challenge. Yan Huang and Azirah Hashim’s report on perceptions of (English) accents indicates that the spectre of the native speaker continues to haunt the consciousness of the Chinese university students who were the participants in their research. But the picture they present is more complicated than this would suggest. When the students considered their own (English) accents, they appeared to judge them according to their sense of native-speaker norms; when they reflected on others’ accents, however, they became much more accepting of diversity, readier to adopt criteria of intelligibility and more inclined to see language as a shared resource for meaning-making – for getting things done, collaboratively, in the world. John Keen interrogates the orthodoxies that have grown up in the past three decades around the teaching of writing: the dominance of what he terms the ‘analysis-andapplication’ approaches that tend to situate knowledge about writing firmly in the minds of the experts – those who know a thing or two about genre, or the use of adjectives, or fronted adverbials and suchlike arcana. Keen returns to an older tradition of ‘process’ writing, modified in ways that further undermine what might be seen as common-sense hierarchies of knowledge and of the knowledgeable. In the classroom practice he presents, students’ development as writers entails learning from each other rather more than from the teacher-as-editor. What, then, of reading, which is, in different ways, the subject of the other contributions to this issue? Lorna Smith and her collaborators offer a fictionalised account of a preservice student teacher’s experience of her first practicum, a school in which the shared reading of stories has been reduced to mere exam-focused instrumentalism. In this place, no-one cares if the students are bored: feelings are irrelevant; what matters is results. The bleakness of this story is inseparable from the absence of meaningful, respectful dialogue in the interactions between Thea, the student, and her more experienced colleagues. And yet there is hope: perhaps Thea’s second practicum will be different. Other schools are possible, and other experiences of reading, as Özge Üstündağ Güvenç and her colleagues demonstrate in their account of literature teaching during the pandemic. Their university students in Turkey are given opportunities to engage meaningfully with the texts that they are reading, as they use their reading to reflect on CHANGING ENGLISH 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2022.2026651