Introduction

This book seeks to ask questions-and to make some proposals-about the identity and functioning of English in the secondary school curriculum. This interrogation is conducted from a point of view informed by what has been called theory. The kind of theory advocated here, though, is not simply literary; it seeks also to address the social, the cultural and the institutional being of English, aiming to establish a critique founded on the idea of an alternative practice. The project I’ve attempted is to re-examine the fundamental practices of English: to reexamine the practices of reading, writing and oracy in schooling-in the light of a theoretically informed rereading of what they are and how they work in existing, routine and institutionalized practices. Proposing different activities and a different orientation in classroom practice, the aim is also to examine some of the issues concerning the institutional identity of the subject.