ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the curriculum subject of secondary school "English", redefining English as both a sociological field of exchange and as a form of cultural capital. Teaching careers are as readily the product of historical accident and coincidence, cultural lineage and industrial necessity, as of training and specialised disciplinary expertise. The dependency relationship between subject English in schools and university-based English has been broken long ago. With its affiliated crossovers into "composition", "language arts", "language education" and, more recently, "literacy education", English education developed its own hybrid disciplinary discourses. English as intellectual, historical enterprise is in transition – both in and across the various spatial, geopolitical, and cultural contexts where it is taught, and within and across its own institutions. The effectiveness of that stitching in part will depend on how well it addresses new relationships of social, economic and cultural capital.
