ABSTRACT
Walk into a classroom of thirty students and teachers are confronted with the fact of difference: the thirty-odd students are not all alike. They come in different shapes and sizes, with different experiences and histories – and often with different languages, cultures and expectations of schooling. Schools work with and against these differences in various ways. In English, one of the difficulties of grouping by attainment or ability is that such judgements entail, at best, a very rough version of ‘best fit’. For teachers within the field of English studies, how difference is conceptualised, how it is constructed and responded to, intersects with long-running debates about the nature of the subject itself. Questions of difference, of identity and affiliation, have most commonly manifested themselves in relation to English in debates about which texts should be read in the classroom.
