Cirrus@Austlit

'In a 1966 edition of English in Australia Tony Delves considered the purposes and goals of teaching English in his article ‘English as She is Not Taught’. Delves identified a number of key debates and ideas around the teaching of English that feel, even to the teacher or academic revisiting them in 2018, surprisingly contemporary: the role of grammar, language versus literature, student experience, creative writing, personal response, and teacher and student knowledge (Delves, 1966). Delves’ piece speaks to ongoing debates around the nature and content of subject English, where English is at once imbued with huge breadth and scope, responsible for not only literacy but also the moral and ethical education of students (Patterson, 2000), but at the same time, seen as having ‘no content’ (Dixon, 1975) and lacking a tangible body of knowledge (Doecke et al., 2018). We might then ask, as many before have – what is subject English? Peter Medway calls the need to define the subject as ‘an itch some of us can’t stop scratching’ (2005, p. 19).' (Editorial introduction)