%0 Journal Article
%A Yandell, J
%D 2020
%F discovery:10109362
%J English in Australia
%N 1
%P 6-13
%T The creative sociability of English classrooms and ‘the true nature of stories'
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10109362/
%V 55
%X In currently dominant accounts, English as a school subject, its content and  processes, are construed as an induction into a well-defined, already-established disciplinary  discourse or set of discourses. In an attempt to challenge this version of English, I present some  examples of autobiographical writing by secondary students and I tell the story of an observed  lesson. From these instances of practice, a different picture of English emerges – one where the  English classroom might be regarded as a place of literary sociability, where students enter into  dialogue with each other and with the literature that they read, and where the complex challenges  entailed in any attempt to represent experience in words is properly acknowledged.
%Z This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.