ABSTRACT
Before going on to explore the content and philosophy of the National Curriculum for English (NCE), it is important to establish what you yourself understand by English as a subject and think what you want to achieve through teaching it. Whether you have worked in schools recently or not, you have already had a wide range and many years of pedagogic experience as a learner of English – at primary school, at secondary school and most recently at university. All of these experiences will have operated in you to establish your own views of English – what you like and dislike, how you view the relative importance of literature and language as issues for study, how comfortable you feel about teaching grammar, your opinions regarding teaching media, or how you feel about the use of drama in the English classroom.
