Editorial : English teachers’ work in an era of standardisation

Of particular interest to us, as the editors of this issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, is the emergence of standards-based reforms, producing a situation in which English teaching has been subjected to standards at multiple levels – both professional standards that claim to map what teachers “should know and be able to do” (to echo the rhetoric that is typically employed to rationalise/vindicate the development of professional standards) and mandated learning outcomes, whether in the form of learning continua that purportedly capture outcomes that students are expected to achieve at each level of development or in the form of standardised literacy testing (see, for example, Zacher Pandya, 2011).