Editorial: “Grammar wars” – Beyond a truce

Any special issue of a journal is an acknowledgement of a conversation that needs to be had. The conversation in this double issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique has had a multiplicity of prompts, some of which I will refer to in this introduction, others of which will be referred to by the contributors to this issue (Part 1). In respect of this journal as a forum, the conversation will spill over into Volume 5, Number 1 (May, 2006). This editorial should be thought of as a work in progress; contributions to Part 2 have yet to arrive in my email basket and cannot be referred to here. Some of my own prompts in initiating this conversation have their origins close to home – in my experiences as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher in the New Zealand context. It is a context that has had its own share of social upheaval and educational “reform” in the last twenty years (Locke, 2000, 2001 and 2004). In the larger context of struggles over administrative, curriculum and assessment policy and practice, questions of “grammar” and “language” have not been prominent on the radar screen