ABSTRACT
A number of themes emerged from my conversations with the teachers of English at An Ting School and with the middle school teachers who had graduated from East China Normal University with a degree in education that were directly related to modernisation and social inclusion. Seeing the Chinese film Crazy English at the same time as I was writing up these two conversations added another dimension to my thinking (see Case studies 9 and 10). Debates about foreign-languageteaching, about language, status and identity and about curricula for citizenship, made me realise how central is the issue of diversity and how ambivalent is the response of governments, west and east. Further, it became clear to me that increasing the participation in education of those excluded because of their poverty, poor health, isolation, gender, communication difficulties, culture, religion or disability, requires the same confident flexibility that would foster the creativity educators everywhere see as a priority for all learners in the twenty-first century.
