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This paper discusses the experience of four refugee and asylum seekers seeking access to Higher Education. The methodological framework intersects applied ethnopoetic analysis and poetic inquiry, underpinned by Freirean, Translanguaging dialogue. The approach foregrounds participants' voices to address a structural refusal to recognise the repertoires of multilingual marginalised participants. The paper deals with two types of vulnerability: vulnerability imposed on participants and vulnerability practiced by the researcher. A practice of vulnerability disrupts traditional power dynamics through 'an attitude of not knowing, discovery, critical self-dialogue' with an emphasis on co-creation.

During crisis times, what children are playing and what grown-ups think their games signify can become a focus of adult anxiety. The Play Observatory, a COVID-19 research project, drew on folklore studies and cultural histories of childhood to collect, document and understand what children were playing and doing during extraordinary times, in ways which were meaningful to children themselves. This article discusses some of the children's and families' contributions, juxtaposed with children's contributions to the archive of childhood folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, to highlight and contest adultist interpretations around children's play during difficult times. We suggest that these interpretations are rooted in particular social constructions of the child, of childhood and of play that reflect themes of innocence, purity and vulnerability, and the need for adult protection from contamination, both material and symbolic. We introduce the idea of 'inflection' to suggest how habitual and perennial forms of play may be made to temporarily accommodate contemporary issues by the players as opposed to the play (and hence the child) being 'infected' with troubling or distressing themes which detract from idealised constructs of childhood.

The paper focuses on the importance of Internationalisation at Home, access and support mechanisms which are provided and co-created by students and university departments to encourage sanctuary scholarship. The paper gives particular attention to activities that encourage meaningful interaction with local communities and widen international participation of marginalised groups, such as students from the global south and asylum seeker communities. The paper presents two case studies. The first case study focuses on a student-led project developed by the students and staff of Canterbury Christ Church University. The second case study projects students' voices from the global south and refugee communities at The University of Kent and University College London (UCL). The experiences of these students highlight the importance of welcoming and supporting students from marginalised backgrounds. They also demonstrate the need for both curriculum-based and co-curricular activity and student services which provided tailored support and encouragement.

This article presents the methodological approach taken to investigate students' experiences of synchronous online tuition in health and social care at a large, distance learning university in the UK. Seeing the students as the 'privileged knowers' on the topic of their tutorial experiences, this study took an experience-centred narrative approach and used voice-centred relational method to analyse the data. This paper will explain and then discuss the two ways in which voice-centred relational method was adapted for the purposes of this research: firstly, the particular approach taken to the construction of the I poems in the second stage of the analysis and secondly, the addition of an extra listening, adding a deductive lens to seek out evidence of the different types of presence from the Community of Inquiry framework within the students' narratives. These adaptations provided additional insights into students' experiences and made aspects of these experiences more visible to educators.

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers to treat school English as a social practice and to make students' experiences central to the curriculum.

This study reports on the journal entries written by undergraduate students (N = 42) after participating in Spanish as a foreign language classes with a critical pedagogy orientation which unfolded from the exploration of homophobia in a poem by Luis Cernuda. Students were requested to express their views on how the lessons had impacted their FL competence and critical literacies. The teaching proposal was held to successfully activate an increased awareness of the issue of social justice, empathy towards marginalized groups, and a desire to take social action. As for perceived benefits in FL literacy, while learners confirmed that lessons were useful for enhancing language skills and linguistic competence, they also highlighted issues which to date had remained uninformed in critical pedagogy (CP) research: a demand for more explicit instruction of grammatical forms, and the role in critical FL pedagogy of specific FL methodological principles such as the dynamism or the student-centredness of the lessons.

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language, particularly literary style. Poetry has been a staple of stylistics. Creative performance of poems and stylistic analysis, however, have rarely been bedfellows. I showcase a stylistics pedagogy for creatively interpreting poetry in higher education where students make digitally multimodal storied interpretations of poems. The pedagogy reflects contemporary internet mashup culture, recognising that students inhabit a "postdigital" world where commonplace software and resources offer opportunities for DIY juxtaposition of audio and video for different purposes -- artistic, comedic, etc. An advantage of such "Postdigital Stylistics" is that it integrates performance-based readers, marginalised in exegetical reading practices associated with print. I illustrate the pedagogy with a student video of Charles Bukowski's poem "the bluebird", accessible analysis of its foregrounded style, and explanation of how this analysis -- crucially -- motivates shot design.

This essay explores the creativity and learning that can take place when students are given the opportunity to go beyond the GCSE set poems and create their own poetry anthologies. I argue that in the process of creating a poetry anthology, students are encouraged to engage on a deeper and more personal level with poetry. I suggest that when students are given the time, space, and autonomy to create their own anthologies, they not only develop the critical and creative writing skills required for their examinations, but are also more readily able to explore and express their lived experiences. I consider how such a project invites students to develop their writing and shape their identities through drawing on experiences, views and attitudes often overlooked in an increasingly exam-pressurised classroom. I closely examine two students' anthologies, arguing for the need to affirm and advance students' writing through a co-operative creativity.

Today, children's literature given the concept of childhood, has gained a special status in the studies of humanities. Children's poetry is one of the branches of this type of literature. Naturalistic themes have the highest frequency among the themes of children poems in two countries. The population of this research consists of collections that have been published from 1921 to 2011. Children's literature was born in England in the eighteenth century and before that the first didactic books for children had come into existence in England. In addition, due to industrial growth, the emergence of the new middle class and expansion of formal education the UK was pioneering among Europe and the world countries. Therefore, to find the roots of the formation of children's literature should be referred to the UK. Therefore, in this paper Britain children's poem has been selected to be compared with Iranian children's poem so that by revealing the similarities and differences one can deal with the pathology of poems for children in Iran and to detect shortcomings and strengths and present some guidelines that be helpful for children and young poets as well as critics and researchers in this field.

The University of Warwick's FutureLearn MOOC "Literature and Mental Health: Reading for Wellbeing," which began its first presentation February 2016, was identified as an opportunity to conduct some research into the course subject area, "reading for wellbeing" or "bibliotherapy". Since 2013, a substantial body of literature has emerged in the field of MOOC-related research, with the MOOC becoming both the subject of and vehicle for research. The research approach adopted in "Literature and Mental Health" was influenced by other, recent research studies conducted within MOOCs, and particularly by the first presentation of Monash University's "Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance" FutureLearn MOOC, which distributed a stress survey to its learners in the first and final weeks of the course, to assess the efficacy of the course's mindfulness practices. A number of reasons for trialling the use of this MOOC as a research tool were identified at the project's outset. MOOCs give researchers access to large numbers of possible research participants, making MOOC research an attractive prospect, while the opportunity to gather valuable, potentially publishable data from free online courses may help to justify the time and resources expended during the production of new MOOCs. Several additional benefits of in-MOOC research were discovered during the process, including the potential for research activities to enrich the learner experience. However, a number of challenges and limitations were also encountered during the development of the study; the inevitable self-selection bias among MOOC learners, and the difficulty of establishing a control group within the MOOC activities, posed impediments to the gathering of useful, publishable data. Although we were aware of other MOOCs which had been used as vehicles for research, the process of adapting "Literature and Mental Health" for this research study was nonetheless an illuminating and instructive experience. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on that experience, and to consider the lessons learned during the process which may be useful in informing future research studies conducted via Massive Open Online Courses.

This article describes some of the methodology, practice and effect of reading groups run by Prison Reading Groups (PRG), which currently operates in 60 prisons across the UK, and is supported by the charity Give A Book. Groups choose what they want to read together and how they will read it. Reading aloud can aid literacy as well as being a force for collaboration and pleasure. Poetry can thrive in this environment, despite initial wariness, and Shakespeare has found some new and enthusiastic readers.

The purpose of this study was to consider the issue of "authentic engagement" with texts in the context of KS3 and KS4 classroom English teaching. This article describes an exemplar session on the poem "A Fine Romance" by Roger McGough designed to elicit authentic engagement and provoke personal responses, and reports on the perceptions of the five pedagogic approaches used by 12 PGCE English trainees. These perceptions were gathered through both guided personal reflection and group discussion, and encouraged the trainees to consider the pedagogies as both learners and teachers. The article discusses the implication of the trainees' perceptions and the potential impact of these perceptions on their future classroom practice.

In this article, we explore how adults in a community shared reading group discuss the notoriously difficult poem 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' by the American poet Wallace Stevens. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's notion of action, we explore how participants negotiate the poem, actively constructing meanings from their shared personal experiences rather than simply reading off meanings contained in and bounded by the poem, a text which continues to be divisively contested by literary 'experts'. In enabling them to act collectively in such a purposive and immersive fashion, shared reading, we suggest, constitutes a public space where participants experience the plurality that Arendt argues is central to the human condition. At a time when tolerance of difference has been compromised by divisive politics, a focus on the collaborative aspect of shared reading contributes to a greater understanding of the role it can play in supporting inclusive, participatory arts practices in communities.

This essay questions the place that conversations about 'race' hold in the English classroom. I hope to reveal the problems that may come with easily dismissing tense and racially charged dialogues about language and identity. I also explore the way classroom talk opens up an opportunity for students to create and contest different meanings and why such conversations are an essential part of teaching and learning in English.

This article considers an exchange between pupils in response to heard poetry, approaching it through a "conversation analytic mentality" informed by the theories of Basil Bernstein. Using his terms, it describes an existing "pedagogic device" of poetry study for schools, to which responses under discussion do not easily correlate. This is more than an issue of discourse, as the modality of the classroom encounter with the poem--in sound--and the ensuing public discussion present distinctive questions of meaning-making extending beyond semantics to intonation and participation, elements not said. These are salient for the epistemology of classroom interactions with poems as audio texts and related discussion between pupils. The nature of responses can be viewed as entirely apt to the context and the nature of the stimulus, and may constitute subtle insight and imply sophisticated cognition. The discussion is developed with attention to current issues in UK poetry teaching, in particular the difficulties reported in examiners' reports that pupils experience in trying to write about poetry in a conventional analytical discourse. One interpretation of the transcript is that pupils can indeed respond sensitively to poetry, though in ways not easily acknowledged by this established discourse of poetry in schools.

In this paper we report on one aspect of a qualitative study about an online wiki community, which was developed to build collaborative knowledge about poetry among a group of pre-service English teachers. Our paper explores pre-service teachers' experiences of writing in a digital medium and their perceptions of themselves as writers. We focus specifically on the processes of poetry writing (both collaborative and independent) undertaken in this digital medium by two groups of teachers, who were working in contrasting settings in the UK and Canada during their pre-service year. We investigate the affordances (Laurillard, Stratford, Lucklin, Plowman, & Taylor, 2000) that a multimodal, wiki environment offered these teachers for learning about poetry writing and question the impact that these affordances have had both on the teachers' collaborations and the poetry they wrote. In analysing the pre-service teachers' wiki writings we were interested to observe how they shaped themselves as writers and intervened in each other's work in progress within a digital third space. We also wanted to explore how the wiki had supported their professional learning about the teaching of poetry writing during their training year and the implications that this support could have for their own future classroom practice as teachers of writing.

This paper offers a historically comparative picture of the latest waves of policy and technological changes that have occurred between 2000-2006 and discusses their impact on the practices of secondary school English in the UK. It draws on data from two previous research projects to explore significant moments of micro-interaction in a classroom that can be framed and integrated in the broader macro social and policy contexts of the production of school English. Specifically the paper offers a comparison of two distinct "moments"--2000, when the first data set was collected, and 2006 with a focus on the impact of technological and policy change for English. (Contains 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

This article presents data which challenge current hegemonic discourses in public and media spaces which reductively position young British Muslims as linguistically problematic. Framing these data are public space statements which argue for an overly simple linguistic basis to so-called extremist behaviour based on the presence or absence of the English language. Through an analysis of a questionnaire and interviews carried out with young performers, singers and reciters of devotional song and poetry in a range of language varieties, this article shows how such performance practices lead to the deployment of complex and mobile language resources which help negotiate and fashion rich linguistic repertoires and fluid identities for these young British Muslims. The article argues that these are (a) more representative of the wider British-Muslim youth community, (b) unmarked, and thus generally invisible within public discourses and (c) a far cry from the prevailing discursive attempts to frame young Muslims as posing a linguistic problem.

"What am I without paid work?" Some would say, "A non-person." Others might say, "Free!" The experience of retirement is explored using creative writing for therapeutic purposes. Written from the perspective of fictional British retirees from different workplaces, the paper offers a view of how expressive and reflective writing can be both therapy and research at times of transition. Little in the literature on retirement in the UK uses the "experience near" approaches of writing as inquiry. This paper will point out some of the benefits of research methods that are "up close and personal", culturally embedded and embodied. Encouraging the use of playful, creative writing in individual counselling and in groups is one of the aims of this paper.

This paper draws on findings of comparative international research on students' poetic writing about the natural environment in the context of the classroom and a naturalistic setting. The study involved 97, nine- to 10-year-olds in four classes: two classes were in an English primary school with their counterparts in a Western Australian primary school. One class in each school had vicarious contact with nature as a stimulus for writing, using a previously taught technique for writing poetry; the other class in each school used the same technique but had direct contact with nature. The study has implications for students' literacy development, creativity and agency and suggests that students' poetic writing is enhanced through direct contact with nature. Teachers in both England and Australia, countries where 'high stakes' testing dominates the literacy curriculum, may find that standards of writing improve when students are given direct contact with natural spaces and are scaffolded to elicit their poetic voice.

This article explores the potential of using camcorders when studying poetry in secondary school English teaching. Drawing on the work of trainee teachers on a Secondary English and Drama Postgraduate Certificate in Education course in the UK, it argues that the process of representing poetry as moving image enables learners to deepen their explicit understanding of how both kinds of texts work.

In 2015 the government initiated reforms to English Literature which included a shift from open book to closed book examinations. This change, now being implemented in schools, has been overlooked in research and policy discourse. This study compares government intentions for the reforms with teachers' experiences of teaching poetry, using data drawn from interviews with seven teachers. Teachers felt the demands of closed book examinations affected their autonomy, distribution of classroom time and students' creative relationship with poetry. This study raises questions as to whether closed book examinations are appropriate for assessing poetry and are conducive to a fulfilling poetry education.

Following the devastating result of the May 2015 general election in the UK, the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home organised "Compassion is dissent: Manifesto Slam." It put out an open call for participants, asking them to bring a three-minute manifesto as means of admission to the event. Here, the Institute showcases three manifestos and also presents the manifesto developed in response to a commission from the Live Art Development Agency for "Through the Looking Glass" Art Festival in St Helens in 2015.

Fishman's scale for evaluating language vitality proposes a stage in language shift where exclusively the older generation takes part in "rituals", "concerts" and "songfests" in the minority language. Once this generation dies away, according to the scale, these cultural practices disappear with them. Within certain Muslim youth communities in the UK, counter examples exist where the younger generation leads the way in reviving, performing and extending the repertoire of this religio-cultural heritage. Although this emerging expanded repertoire of song and poetry is clearly multilingual in nature, recitation and performance of the community heritage languages, Urdu and Punjabi, feature strongly. What remains to discover is whether such increasing familiarity with poetic language and form can impact positively on reversing the language shift these communities are experiencing in their third and fourth generations. Although there is evidence that singing and reciting in other minority language settings, secular and religious, are not infrequent pursuits of youth, it is argued in this article that an accompanying religious revival provides an important extra, galvanising, boost to the process of possible reversing language shift. It is suggested that available scales for evaluating language vitality are inadequate in the face of complex diasporic minority language settings.

The aim of this study is to review research on poetry reading pedagogy in secondary education from 1990 to 2015. Today there is little research on poetry teaching in Sweden and thus little guidance for secondary teachers. Therefore, this study thematically analyses peer-reviewed articles from English language international journals. Articles were retrieved through a systematic literature review. The results show that many researchers suggest personal response pedagogies mainly developed from Louise M. Rosenblatt's work. Further, a progression of poetry interpretations seems to require explicit teaching throughout the years of secondary education. Also, current educational politics, heavily influenced by neoliberalism, impose high-stakes examinations that challenge poetry curricula. Teacher education needs to address this issue. Minor themes found were: ontologies in relation to teaching poetry reading, and poetry reading as identity formation/tool for social critique. These could be possible areas for future research.

This paper describes some of the key principles and practices of Teachers as Writers groups in the UK. It draws on participants' own accounts of the personal and pedagogic benefits of these voluntary teacher-led activities. It also presents a case-study of a teacher who used her experience of the process of writing in such a group to support students who were writing analytically about poetry in an A level (senior secondary) literature course.

This provocation shares findings from the use of bespoke voice-recognition performance software in a number of seminars (which took place in the 2014-2016 academic years at Glasgow School of Art, University of Warwick, and Falmouth University). The software, made available through this publication, is a web-app which uses Google Chrome's native voice-recognition function. It can be used as a digitally augmented performance tool for poetry and has been adapted for use in teaching by emphasising certain formal constraints and characteristics. The primary aims of this provocation are to introduce the software and to encourage further development.

This article responds to intermediality through a case study of an intermedial applied performance for young people. "Heterophobia," a hybrid fusion of live performance, digital technology, social media and urban street art, aimed to challenge homophobia in schools and online. Intermediality was used as a tool to enhance young people's engagement. My research suggests that the young people preferred the live performance elements to the digital elements but it was a combination of the two which enhanced engagement and as a result challenged their preconceived thinking.

For centuries, memorisation was the vital mode through which the "uses of poetry" were realised. Mixed reactions to its reinstatement on the primary curriculum indicate how much has changed. But does memorisation afford a type of understanding not available through reading or critical analysis? This article draws on the initial findings of the Cambridge Poetry and Memory Project, which sought to identify what is distinctive about this mode of engagement. At the time of writing, we are still analysing our findings. Here we explore three emerging themes through which we are starting to make sense of these: the memorised poem experienced as a living entity; as indwelling and indwelt; and within a relationship of love. We suggest that memorisation and literary analysis may become mutually enhancing, and conclude that the memorised poem is a largely unrecognised resource with the potential to enrich people's lives in multiple ways over many years.

This article explores the views of children's poet Michael Rosen in relation to poetry in education. It is based on an interview in which Rosen not only discusses the significance of encouraging young people to engage with poetry at school but also analyzes a number of threats to poetry's place in the English curriculum. This article identifies parallels between Rosen's views and current education research and shows how in both cases there is a clear awareness of how certain educational policies risk undermining the value of poetry's contribution to young people's learning experience.

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10-11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they involve a different kind of interaction with text. Although the children's unofficial reading appears trivial, fleeting and fragmentary, analysis shows that they are applying, albeit in a rudimentary way, the comprehension skills of retrieval, inference, interpretation and evaluation promoted by the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the National Curriculum. These skills, however, are driven by children's emotional, critical and creative responses to the texts. The children's reading is more imaginative and dialogic than is possible within official curriculum activities; they interweave emotional and moral response with argument and critique in one example and respond humorously to poetic rhyme, rhythm and tone in another. These spontaneous reading activities, where children are active, animated and engaged, provide evidence of important dimensions of literacy which are not adequately addressed in official surveys and curriculum assessment. (Contains 3 tables and 3 extracts.)

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing being taught. The study adopted a mixed methods design with a large-scale randomised controlled trial accompanied by a qualitative dataset, which provided contextual information about how the intervention was implemented. In this paper, we will outline the pedagogical principles that underpinned the intervention, and illustrate both the theoretical grounding and practical classroom examples that exemplify the approach. We will argue that any future policy or professional development that draws on this research must take account of these pedagogical principles, rather than focusing too superficially on either the grammar or the teaching materials which exemplify them. (Contains 7 tables.)

This article discusses the role of eye gaze in creative sign language. Because eye gaze conveys various types of linguistic and poetic information, it is an intrinsic part of sign language linguistics in general and of creative signing in particular. We discuss various functions of eye gaze in poetic signing and propose a classification of gaze behaviors based on the observation of a number of poems in British Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language. (Contains 1 table, 28 figures, and 4 notes.)

This article applies conversation analysis to classroom talk-in-interaction where pupils respond to poetry they have heard. The phenomenon of repeating in discussion details from the poem, including patterns of delivery, is considered and named echo to distinguish it from quotation in writing. The phenomenon is significant to the pedagogy of literary study given the existing tacit and unexamined assumption that when pupils repeat textual details verbally this has equivalence with quotation in writing. Three episodes drawn from a single sequence of classroom interaction are presented together with a transcript of the stimulus heard poem. Each is accompanied by an interpretive commentary. It appears that echo in classroom discussions of poetry performs actions distinct from quotation in writing, for example that the acts of presenting and analysing textual detail occur simultaneously. The innovation of the research lies in the inclusion of the transcript-rendered poem as a turn in the sequence of interaction: as a verbally oriented method, conversation analysis provides an apt means of rendering response to poetry presented in the oral mode. More broadly, the discussion is consistent with the emergent popularity of conversation analysis as a method for considering classroom interactions with a view to reflecting on subtle aspects of learning.

This paper investigates the personal epistemologies of teachers in relation to the place of linguistic and literary metalanguage in the teaching of poetry writing. The data draw on 93 interviews with 31 secondary English teachers in the UK, following lesson observations, and the data are a subset of a larger study investigating the impact of contextualised grammar teaching on writing attainment. The analysis indicates that teachers' personal epistemologies relating to metalanguage are ambivalent and, at times, contradictory. Teachers tend to view literary metalanguage as linked to the creative freedom of writing poetry, whereas linguistic metalanguage is constructed as associated with rules and restrictions. At the same time, teachers reveal a lack of confidence with subject knowledge in both literary and linguistic metalanguage, which may be shaping their epistemological beliefs. Teachers' comments on the place of literary and linguistic metalanguage in poetry writing are paradoxical, but do appear to be strongly connected with their personal epistemologies. They subscribe to a literate epistemology which values literary metalanguage as part of the knowledge base of a creative, expressive subject, but linguistic metalanguage is not included within this literate epistemology. (Contains 5 tables.)

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working with four of the UK's most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and asked them to think "out loud" about the process as they created their compositions. We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we solve problems (van Someren, Barnard, and Sandberg 1994; Tirkkonen-Condit and Jaaskelainen 2000; Stone 2009). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion (rather than only its final product). (Contains 3 notes and 6 figures.)

In this "RiDE" themed edition on environmentalism, some short pieces are chosen where practitioners describe their own specific environmental practices. Zoe Svendsen and Lucy Neal point to the positives in two commissioned works ("The Trashcatchers' Carnival" and "3rd Ring Out"), underlining the importance of participant agency for effective environmentalism--an argument the authors make in their introductory article. A similar point is made by Gary Anderson and Lena Simic who adopt "slow travel" in place of "frequent flights", promoting participation as a family affair. Though they admit that they do not know if their slow travel performances work, they also acknowledge that they do not know what else to do. David Haley and Emelda Samba are similarly "troubled". Haley outlines the likely failure of an ecological walk--even though his ecoart resonated with people's emotions in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Samba, meanwhile, revisits the site of workshops which were believed to be successful in changing farming habits in Cameroon. These responses from practitioners are troubling in their concerns--raising the familiar question of "what can one expect from performance?", but they are also, as is clear from the writing, offering a quiet air of determined optimism too. (Contains 12 notes and 2 figures.)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, British women chemists used poetry as a way of describing their work and as a means of social commentary. As far as we are aware, the chemistry-poetry interface has not previously been explored in the context of women's experience.

This polemic paper illustrates the correlation between the original principles underpinning the British National Curriculum which was introduced in the late 1980s and the current quality of the nation's schools' poetry from a variety of poets including those "from other cultures and traditions". It argues that the conception of the National Curriculum and its subsequent revisions, specifically in relation to the subject of English, are historically products of a nation's social, cultural and economic insecurity.

What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question, this paper takes the practice of annotation--a defining activity of the subject English in the UK seldom researched--and uses it as a device for uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The theoretical approach is that of multimodal social semiotics with an historical perspective. A multimodal approach looks beyond language to all forms of communication. The approach used in this paper allows investigation of the interactions among changes in the social environment, policy, curriculum, technology, and student resources. The authors draw on illustrative examples from three research projects around subject English. Their analysis shows that by 2009, the policy, technological, and communicational landscape of school English had changed dramatically. Now the majority of English lessons are taught on an Internet-enabled interactive whiteboard (IWB) supported by scanners, visualizers, and wireless peripherals such as slates. (Contains 3 figures.)

This article explores the educational potential of an arts-informed performance ethnography entitled "Across the Tamar," which comprises a series of stories, songs and poems. As a classroom action research project--a "teaching experiment"--we gave three performances to undergraduate and postgraduate sport and health science, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy students at two universities in the United Kingdom. Drawing on data that comprise the written responses of 126 students, we explore the learning processes evident in the students' accounts. Student responses suggest that through privileging personal, embodied and emotive stories, the performance stimulated alternative insights into older women's lives and provoked them to reflect on this new knowledge in the context of their own lives. By considering student responses in relation to narrative theory, we explore how performance ethnography can contribute to learning, critical reflection and transformation among students more familiar with scientific approaches to research and teaching. (Contains 3 notes.)

Much attention has been paid in the literature to matters of script choice vis-a-vis languages. This attention, however, has focused on script choice in a national and political context. By contrast, there has not been any significant attention paid to more local and idiosyncratic instances of script choice operating on an individual and community level. These instances may take place when recourse is made to script as a "most appropriate technology" on a pragmatic and functional basis. The examples outlined in this article occur in a multilingual diasporic setting. This article will seek to describe and, to an extent, interpret a recently observed religio-literacy practice in which participants make recourse to Roman script in their endeavours to record, memorise and share poetic verses and song lyrics composed in languages traditionally associated with non-Roman scripts. In a related example, the use of Roman script as a pedagogical "shortcut" to the learning of a classical non-Roman script will complement the discussion on the nature of script choice in a context where "choice" is problematic. It has been noted that new scripts often render literary traditions inaccessible. This article presents findings where, in certain respects, the opposite is occasionally true with a replacement script providing a means to access literary traditions otherwise out of reach. (Contains 7 figures and 10 notes.)

The "Touchstones" series of poetry anthologies was first published in the UK between 1968 and 1972 in five volumes. Over a million copies and three revisions later, "Touchstones Now 11-14" appeared in the summer of 2008. Few, if any, books for the classroom can claim such longevity. In this article, the compilers of the anthologies, Michael and Peter Benton, look back over the 40 years of the series' life. They reflect upon the principles which have guided their choices; and the social and political pressures, often exerted by governments, which they have confronted in their attempt to help school students become enthusiastic, committed and discriminating readers of poetry.

Learners' pronunciation errors when reading aloud in the L2 often suggest an inability to use the language's sound-symbol relationships, or grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). UK teaching methodology has failed to provide systematic instruction in L2 phonological decoding, and there is an absence of research on the effectiveness of teaching L2 GPCs. The present study evaluates a GPC training programme delivered to a mixed-ability Year 7 class of 28 beginner learners. The GPC training is based on the use of short poems in conjunction with a sequence of cognitive and metacognitive strategies which I have labelled "referring back". Essentially, this encourages learners to derive the pronunciation of unknown words by making analogies with familiar ones. Pre- and post-test scores showed a small but significant improvement in pronunciation accuracy for the experimental group, but not the comparison group, when reading unknown L2 words aloud. Evaluation questionnaires, interviews and field-notes highlighted the popularity of the GPC training materials with pupils. However, there is also evidence that more time was needed in order for training in the "referring back" strategy to be effective. Overall, the study suggests that the approach to GPC training evaluated here can be effective, but that a longer-term intervention study is desirable. The article includes a brief account of the teaching methods and a copy of the poems used, in the hope that others may wish to try them out in their own classrooms. (Contains 2 figures and 2 notes.)