Catching up

English in Education is published online and in print. If you’ve been reading the journal online, you may have noticed more than 20 “latest articles” that haven’t yet appeared in a print edition. The number of good papers, poems and reviews received has nearly outstripped the space offered by the quarterly arrival in your letterbox. Fortunately, the next three general issues, including this, will accommodate most of the backlog. Future writers for English in Education will find conciseness a way to the editor’s heart.

This issue focuses on student and teacher experience of the classroom in a range of national settings – but Francis Hult’s poem Perseverance will resonate with committed teachers everywhere. The UK school students in Rebecca Lefroy’s qualitative case study frequently prefer audio to written feedback because of its relational, social nature. Edward Collyer and his colleagues study the effect of collaborative teacher planning on pupil engagement in a British secondary school; their work, like Lefroy’s, has possible implications for reducing teacher workload.

Peter Mirisi and Ansurie Pillay investigate the views of pre-service teachers in a South African university of their preparedness to teach grammar, and what has shaped these perceptions. Jim Hill and his co-writers from the US suggest seminar-based ways in which pre-service teachers can reflect upon their experience and foster their efficacy as novice English educators.

Margaret Merga reports on teachers’ perceptions of the barriers experienced by struggling literacy learners in Australian secondary English classrooms, and of the inadequacy of the time available to meet their students’ needs. Gloria Latham (also from Australia) takes us out of the classroom to describe a writing collaboration between a grandmother (the author) and her 11-year-old granddaughter. The author makes connections between this and the possibilities of collaborative writing in school.

We conclude with a Call for Papers for a special edition on Poetry to be published early in 2022. If you want to catch the contents before then, you’ll find them online, awaiting their printed existence.