The English teacher today works in an area whose very identity as a subject for study in secondary schools is open to doubt. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the values and beliefs which have formed traditional English tend to devalue, or at least to exclude the experience of most students. At the same time, the tools of critical theory have become, in the context of higher education, the means to make the subject still more rarefied and more distant from everyday experience. In this exploration, Nick Peim, himself a practising English teacher, shows how the insights of discourse...