Language, literacy, education, and empowerment: a tribute to Ruqaiya Hasan

1. Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to survey Ruqaiya Hasan’s work in order to highlight its relevance and application to education in Pakistan and other developing countries. This paper includes only some of the key ideas from Hasan’s extensive work. These ideas have been selected because of their direct relevance to a discussion on (language) education in Pakistan and include: resementaicization, types of literacy, language development, semantic variation, importance of grammar, and cross-cultural education.

This paper is based on a plenary given to honor Ruqaiya Hasan at the 31st SPELT Conference. Although a number of changes have been made to adapt the plenary to a written format, this paper, in the spirit of the context in which it was first drafted, does maintain the interpersonal tenor of a conference presentation.

2. On resemanticization

The first time I heard Ruqaiya Hasan speak was in October 2002 at the International Association for World Englishes conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was Braj Kachru’s retirement year and both Ruqaiya Hasan and Michael Halliday were there to celebrate the occasion. In her presentation (later published as “Globalization, literacy and ideology”; 2003/2011), Hasan investigated how the language of globalization, “glib-speak” as she called it, used linguistic resources to make people think that they were agreeing to things that would make their lives better, when, in reality, the changes were essentially designed to bring higher profits to a small group of large multinational corporations and their supporters.

This was one of the first times at a World Englishes conference when a speaker did not talk about a “nation-state” based variety of English, but rather a variety of English that was spoken by an elite group of entities (which can include some elite individuals, bureaucrats, governments, and multinational corporations, etc.), which was designed to deceive common people by exploiting linguistic resources. Hasan pointed out that glib-speak uses language in a way that makes people agree to positions where they think they are going to get a good deal, but are often left disappointed. She pointed out that for glib-speak to work, it has to look like normal language – so, it uses standard grammar, etc. – but it changes one thing: it manipulates word meaning. Hasan called this manipulation of word meaning “resementicization” and identified three features of language that can be exploited to make this happen: inherent evaluation, inherent semantic elasticity, and hyponymy.

To explain how the feature of inherent evaluation is exploited, Hasan discussed in some detail how through “affective coloring”, glib-speak can give a positive spin on things that are not positive. For example, the phrase “liberalization of trade” couples “liberal”, a term which is usually “other oriented” and relates to “freedom, tolerance, and moderation” (220) with “trade” to give a sense that it will be beneficial to the addressee; however, instead through “a semantic reversal whereby the cryptotypic¹feature other-oriented comes to be replaced by its converse, i.e., ego-oriented: liberal trade effectively becomes trade for the benefit of the initiators of globalization” (221) [emphasis in original].

To explain how the feature of inherent semantic elasticity is exploited in glib-speak to make unfriendly things appear friendly to the listener, she points out that speakers of glib-speak use only certain denotative meanings of words and ignore other aspects of the meaning that are not convenient to their purposes. For example, referring to the definition of the word “democracy” in the COBUILD, she pointed out that while this definition states (in addition to other things) that “something that is democratic is based on the idea that everyone should have equal rights and should be involved in making important decisions” (223), this aspect is often ignored and democracy is reduced to elections and voting in elections.

Hasan did not present an extended discussion of hyponymy in this paper, but she did give the following example to illustrate how it works. She pointed out that shortly before a meeting on globalization was being organized in Australia, a senior police officer announced: “normal measures for crowd control will be employed” (218). In analyzing this example, Hasan pointed out that the formulation “does away with such repugnant facts as the use of batons, tear-gas, rubber bullets and arrests, while creating a spurious sense of comfortable normality” (218). By using a more general statement, “the speaker can control the listener’s access to information to suit his/her own purposes” (218).

These ideas were very revealing at a World Englishes conference. Instead of doing what most people at a World Englishes conference do – that is, describe formal features of a particular nation-state-based variety of English – Hasan showed us that: (a) varieties of English may exist in a number of places – not just geographically or nationally determined; (b) that they may be different from “standard” varieties in only limited – but meaningful – ways; and (c) that they can have an impact on our everyday lives. Her paper demonstrated the importance of focusing on semantics in our study of language variation and World Englishes (see also Mahboob and Szenes 2010). Without focusing on semantics, we might easily not notice the creative use of glib-speech, which does not appear to vary from “standard” English in any other aspect, that is, phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc. Her work further demonstrated that without identifying or studying such varieties, it would be easy for speakers of glib-speak to continue to fool people into accepting things that may run counter to their and their communities’ interests. Thus, from her work, we can learn that it is our responsibility to (a) study and describe language that might be used to manipulate us into accepting things that run against our individual and communal interests; and (b) share these findings with others in an accessible manner.

3. On types of literacy

In this same paper, Hasan went on to discuss how globalization and the interests of the globalizing forces influenced literacy education. In order to analyze this, she introduced three types of literacies²: “recognition literacy”, “action literacy”, and “reflection literacy”. Let us examine these briefly. In describing these types of literacies, I will draw both on the published version of her talk (2003/2011) as well as my notes from the conference.

The first type of literacy, recognition literacy, she stated, reflects a traditional approach where literacy is “simply seen as teaching students how the sounds and letters of a language calibrate” (228). While this does not appear in the published version of the paper, in her talk, she added that people with access to such limited literacy are essential in meeting the needs of the globalizing forces. People with only recognition literacy can read and follow basic instructions and thus increase productivity and reduce the risk of accidents. And, at the same time – for the benefit of glib-speakers – they do not have the literacy skills to be able to read through the resementicization or identify how glib-speech works. She added that limiting people to only access recognition literacy is the hidden agenda of certain educational policies and is sold to the general population through glib-speak.³ She also noted that a large proportion of children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds drop out of schools⁴ and that while governments bemoan this publicly, nothing really changes – since it serves the hidden agenda of multinational corporations. Hasan pointed out that this form of literacy flourishes where “language is simply an item in the list of disciplines” (229). One consequence of “recognition literacy” is that it helps maintain status quo between socioeconomic classes.

“Action literacy”, Hasan pointed out, developed in the latter half of the twentieth century in some affluent industrialized countries where boundaries between subject areas were seen as “permeable” (229). She noted that this permeability made it possible for approaches such as “language across the curriculum” to develop in these contexts. She observed that action literacy is a considerable improvement on recognition literacy, and “educating pupils to understand how things are done in their culture by using language is a necessary part of education” (229).

However, Hasan argued, that both of these types of literacies were limited because their “goal is conformity to an already established pattern. Following logically the dictates of action literacy, education must, in this era of globalization, teach its pupils to become fluent in glib-speak, to package their ideas in preferred mode so as to maximize the chances of success in profits” (229). As a result, neither of these types of literacies is sufficient to bring about a change in the exploitative nature of our emerging economies. To do this, she stated, we need “reflection literacy”. Reflection literacy presupposes that students would already have a strong grasp of both recognition and action literacies. Reflection literacy “is a form of literacy that would go beyond simple interpretation to reflection on how the ‘same’ words can be made to construe different meanings and what is the social significance of such semantic construals” (229). In order to help our students develop reflection literacy, Hasan identifies three principles:

(i) the study of the meaning-making potential of language should never be divorced from literacy pedagogy: this potential is also a potential for linguistic variation; (ii) all instances of meaning making should be subject to interrogation: e.g., “what meaning construed how”, “why” and “why here”; and (iii) the significance of what language refers to, what meanings it makes, should never be divorced from the social context from where the pressures for meaning making arises. (2006/2011, 243)⁵

This description of these three types of literacies and how they are connected with globalization helps us realize that World Englishes and language teaching is not simply about describing formal features of a language or about teaching “local” or “standard” forms of the language but about being part of a community that is working to understand how our societies maintain an unequal distribution of resources and what we can do to change this.

4. On language development

Hasan was deeply distressed by the state of education in Pakistan. In a paper that she published in SPELT Quarterly in 2008/2011, “Modes of learning, modes of teaching: semiotic mediation and knowledge”, Hasan outlined some key considerations for understanding language development. She argued that one of the key issues that we need to consider in looking at language development and its relationship to literacy is “semiotic mediation”. Showing the relevance of semiotic mediation to language development, she wrote:

… from early infancy, human beings participate in a large number of social experiences; experience of any kind is mediated to the mind as meaning; this constitutes the essence of learning, which in turn is the key to internalization of knowledge – the nature of human mental development consists in the continued iteration of the sequence of these inherently related processes. According to Vygotsky, acts of learning in social life and the knowledge that this learning produces form the foundation of the individual’s mental development. (50)

Thus, drawing on Vygotsky, she argued that all learning is semiotically mediated and occurs in social contexts. She further added “the most basic and foundational achievement… of semiotic mediation is the inculcation of mental disposition, that is to say, the habits of mind, tendencies to respond to situations in certain ways” (Hasan 2002, 114). We will come back to this point again later.

In addition to Vygotsky (1978), Hasan also drew extensively on Halliday (1975) who,

rejects the metaphor of “acquisition” because in learning how to mean, neither do children just collect something that is already there, ready made to be “acquired”, nor do they act alone: from infancy onwards, they actively co-participate in exchanges of meaning with someone in their immediate community. (58)

Hasan observed that when we look at language development, we need to consider three facets: “learning language, learning through language, and learning about language (Halliday 2004); this is so because language is for the living of life, not for the production of structures” (58).

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all of these aspects today, there is one issue that I want us to consider as it shows us how language and language learning–teaching differs in everyday environments and in the context of schooling. This is crucial for us in appreciating the difficulties that many of our children experience as they move from their home environments to the school. This work also has a number of implications for us and can help guide us in developing and adopting approaches to language and literacy that can help our students.

Let us consider the following extract (Hasan 2008/2011), which is a naturally occurring conversation between a mother and her 3.5-year-old son, Julian:

Extract 1:

1. Mother: d’you love daddy?… d’you love daddy?

2. Julian: mmm (=yes)

3. Mother: d’you love Rosemary? (Rosemary is Julian’s sister)

4. Julian: no!

5. Mother: why don’t you love Rosemary?

6. Julian: (LAUGHS)

7. Mother: why don’t you love Rosemary?

8. Julian: (CONTINUES TO LAUGH)

9. Mother: you’re a [?rat-bag] (REALIZES CHILD WAS TEASING)

10. Julian: i do

11. Mother: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

12. Julian: .who else do you want me to love?

13. Mother: you can love whoever you want to love

14. Julian: can I love Peter?… Can I?

15. Mother: no, I think that’s more like friendship

16. Julian: pardon?

17. Mother: I thought you’d say that. It’s like friendship, isn’t it? You’re

    friends with Peter, aren’t you?

18. Julian: yep… (drinks noisly from his glass; pause several

    seconds)

19. Julian: when I get old as you and [? Maree likes me] could we marry

    each other?

20. Mother: no because Maree is your cousin

21. Julian: oh!

22. Mother: ‘cause cousins aren’t allowed to marry

23. Julian: why?

24. Mother: ‘cause the law says they’re not

25. Julian: who is that?

26. Mother: the law? (= do you mean who is the law?)

27. Julian: yeah

28. Mother: the policeman… (conversation continues beyond this

    point)

Hasan analyzed this extract to draw a number of observations; however, for our current purposes, we will focus on four.

First, we note that the mother is asking “assumptive questions”. Hasan (2002) labeled such questions assumptive questions “because the person asking appears to have already made an assumption what the correct answer should be” (119). Second, Julian is learning about the word “love” and the senses in which his community uses it. Third, Julian is learning about his community and about who he can legitimately love in his culture. And, fourth, Julian is learning that decisions about what is permitted and what is not are made by authorities/authority figures. Hasan notes that such conversations do not occur in isolation, but that children are immersed in them in their everyday lives. She notes, “it is in daily discourses of this kinds that children’s mental habits take shape; they receive their early lessons in forms of reasoning, and in what is relevant to their ways of living” (2008/2011, 62).

Following Bernstein (1999), Hasan labeled the knowledge that children develop in everyday discourses as “common sense knowledge”. She also labels the unconscious teaching that happens in these everyday contexts as “local pedagogy”. This common sense knowledge and local pedagogy is contrasted with the knowledge that is taught in school contexts, which is “un-commonsense”, “exotic”, or “specialized” knowledge; and the pedagogy used in educational contexts is “official pedagogy”.

Official pedagogy includes at least three “critically important concepts”: curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation. Hasan (2008/2011, 65) defined these terms citing Bernstein (1975, 85):

Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realistation of this knowledge on the part of the learner.

Hasan pointed out that experts in education typically ignore both commonsense knowledge and local pedagogy and thus raise a barrier which many children, if they do not already have the right background, find hard to bridge. The children who are unable to navigate the invisible nature of official pedagogy are often only able to develop recognition literacy through schooling. Thus, Hasan saw a connection between children’s early language development and their success in school.

5. On semantic variation

One of the questions that intrigued Hasan was why do children from some backgrounds transition into school relatively easily while other struggle. As with her other work, her approach to exploring this question was semantically oriented. Her response to this question was based on an understanding of how children learn to mean and learn to know in different contexts. Earlier, in extract 1, we looked at how one mother interacted with her child using assumptive questions. Hasan (2002) contrasted this with another example where the mother asks “prefaced questions” (extract 2). Prefaced questions ask “the addressee not about what is or is not going on in the world, but about the addressee’s state of knowledge: did the addressee know something to be the case ” (117). Let us look at extract 2, another conversation between a mother and her 3.5-year-old daughter (2002, 118):

Extract 2:

1. Mother: Did you know that they are going to leave?

2. Kristy: No.

3. Mother: They’ve been building a house.

4. Kristy: Mm.

5. Mother: Oh, they haven’t been building it, somebody else has

   been building it for them, and it’s nearly finished, and they’re going to move to their house in May.

6. Kristy: Why in May?

7. Mother: They’re going to wait until the end of the school term.

8. Kristy: Mm.

9. Mother: Because Cathy goes to school now, and then she will

   change to her new school after the holidays.

10. Kristy: Mm

11. Mother: If they’d moved earlier she’d only go to the new school

    for a week or two, and then they’d have holidays, you see, it would mess it up a bit for her.

A number of things become noticeable here. For example, the purpose of the mother’s question here is not to ask the child a question that the mother knows that the child already has an answer to (as in the assumptive question), but to tell the child about certain things. Second, the mother is quick to clarify her statement “they’ve been building a house”; Hasan suggests that the mother does this to avoid potential misinterpretation by the child. And third, the child’s question is taken seriously and responded to.

The two extracts show a huge contrast: while the first one asked assumptive questions and responded minimally to the child by referring to authority, the second one scaffolds the child into ways of thinking that tells the child how things connect to each other and how decisions are made because of particular reasons. Based on her research, as well as research of colleagues such as Williams (1999) and Cloran (1999), Hasan (2002) argued that there is considerable evidence to claim that:

… at this early stage of three and half to four years, the children belonging to these two groups have established different ways of learning, different ways of solving problems, different forms of consciousness, or mental disposition… As this process begins from early infancy, invisible mediation which occurs in the course of everyday activities… attains a primary status in the life of the individual. It becomes in effect the ruler of attention and interest, of motivation and relevance. The child’s ways of participating in the negotiation and appropriation of technical concepts or specific knowledge structures, etc. is coloured initially – though not necessarily finally – by the experience of this primary mediation. (120)

Hasan noted these early lessons on semiotic mediation, that is, “mediation of something by someone to someone else by means of the modality of language” shape children’s ways of learning and meaning and leads to semantic variation.⁶ She also notes that even after a year of schooling, children do not change these habits. This raises the question of why schooling is ineffective in changing children’s language and what can be done to support these children. One answer for this is to adopt an appropriate model of grammar in and for education, one that would help students develop “reflection literacy”.

6. On the importance of grammar

At the 21st SPELT conference, so 10 years ago now, Hasan listened to a keynote speaker who suggested that the teaching of grammar was futile and a waste of time. Needless to say, this infuriated her and not only did she call attention to this at the conference but she also included this in the published version of her talk. She wrote:

And I believe it was implied that neither learning about words nor about grammar is relevant to the success of language teaching; in the speaker’s view [the keynote address given the day before Hasan’s talk], they interfere in entertaining classroom practices… I am afraid I disagree with such views: they are most probably based in genuine misinformation, hopefully not deliberate disinformation. A moment’s reflection will make any normal human being realize that one cannot use language without using words and one cannot use more than one word without putting them in some kind of relation to each other, which is what grammar is for: to simplify the story, grammar informs us about how in a given community speakers put words together to make some desired meanings. If one fails to get such relations right, one would either not get understood at all or there would be genuine problems of interpretation. In other words, one would have failed to be meaningful to some extent. As Halliday (1975) points out, learning language is learning how to mean: he said this in the context of a small child learning his mother tongue, but it is just as true for learning other tongues. We would have failed as teachers of language if after years of teaching the pupils fail to be understood. (2011a, 14) [emphasis in original]

As is apparent in this long quote, Hasan was irate about a SPELT keynote speaker who espoused the belief that teaching grammar was not only not useful but also perhaps harmful. Let us take a moment to try to understand this other keynote speaker’s perspective before proceeding. While I do not know who this other person was or what her work was grounded in, I am familiar with the chain of thought that leads people like that speaker to the conclusion that grammar is superfluous in language teaching. Typical applied linguistics and teachers of english to speakers of other languages (TESOL) programs (especially those in the United States, and, unfortunately, in Pakistan too) introduce pre-/in-service teachers to some form of formal and/or transformational grammar. Formal traditional grammars, as we briefly discussed earlier, are stuck in looking at only the surface-level syntagmatic structures of language and do not consider meaning or usage. Thus, as most teachers here would have observed, it does not really help students in learning how to use language appropriately. Transformation grammar – which, I understand, is still taught as a core grammatical theory in (applied) linguistics and TESOL programs in Pakistan – on the other hand, is based on a model of language that was never designed to be used in educational contexts and thus provides little help to teachers (in addition to its many other limitations). Thus, for educators and teacher educators who are only familiar with such models of grammar, grammar appears useless. This, however, is not the case with systemic functional linguistics (SFL), a grammar that has evolved to be used and responds to educational needs and contexts. While it is beyond the scope of this paper for me to describe SFL, suffice it is to say that teaching methods that draw on SFL can critique the unequal areas of semantic distribution and can go a long way toward re-doing the curriculum to make it more aligned with the needs of “reflection literacy”.

7. On cross-cultural education

Before concluding, there is one more area of Hasan’s work that I would like to introduce here briefly. This, like the other aspects of the work that I have introduced here is very relevant to the Pakistani context.

A couple of years ago, I mentioned to Hasan how I often receive e-mails and messages from people in Pakistan who ask me to suggest a topic for their research projects, both at their home institutions as well as for a potential PhD abroad.⁷ I also narrated a story about how one of my MPhil students from Pakistan had to discontinue her course because of her failure to meet our department’s academic standards. I said that these messages and my ex-student’s performance puzzled me because one would expect that students at that level already had the skills to work independently and to show initiative and direction. I asked her what she thought the causes for this might be and what could be done to remedy this. Hasan told me that she had, in fact, researched this topic in some depth back in the 1970s and published some of her findings in her paper “Socialization and cross-cultural education” (1976/2011).

In this paper, Hasan explored the reason why students who go abroad to study from Pakistan struggle. Hasan observed that the educational culture of a community is influenced by the broader culture of the country and that the difficulties that Pakistani students face can partly be explained by the differences in the Pakistani and foreign (in this case British) educational cultures. In the context of Pakistan, she stated,

Whatever the diversities of the sub-continent cultures, scholars are agreed at least about one attribute: the sub-continental cultures jealously guard the ascribed communal boundaries between segregates… the boundaries may be those of caste, or determined by sex, or by age, by kinship or by occupation: one thing that is common to all is that they are regarded as – or, it may be more accurate to say that they are affectively responded to, rather than explicitly intellectually analyzed as sacrosanct and irrevocable. Not surprisingly, in the classification of educational knowledge, the typical pattern is that of collection type: the contents of the curriculum are well-insulated from each other. (258)

Hasan analyzed the situation by using Bernstein’s (1971) classification and framing theory. Classification here refers to how tightly the boundaries between content is managed, “when the boundary between contents is clear-cut the relationship between them is ‘closed’ [collection type]; when the boundary is relatively open or blurred, this relationship is ‘open’ [integrated type]” (257). Framing, and here she quoted Bernstein (1971, 205–206), “refers to the range of options available to the teachers and taught in the control of what is transmitted and received… Strong framing entails reduced options; weak framing entails a range of options. This frame refers to the degree of control teachers and pupils possess over the selection, organization and pacing of knowledge transmitted and received in the context of the pedagogical relationship” (257).

Pakistani educational culture, like Pakistani culture in general, she argued, has strong framing and closed classification.⁸ This can be seen in the organization of the society, which is “determined by sex, or by age, by kinship or by occupation”. For example, the boundaries between adults – including parents and teachers – and children are clearly marked and not permeable. Parents, at home, and teachers, at schools, are considered authority figures who cannot be challenged. And, while teachers have authority with the children, they do not have much freedom over the “selection, organization and pacing” of the curriculum and the content that they are required to teach, which is given to them by the various boards of education. Thus, students in Pakistan are typically not encouraged to ask question or to challenge authority or “facts” as given in the curriculum. They are expected to learn facts, to follow instructions, and to demonstrate that they have internalized the information by giving the answers that the teacher expects them to give. This is not just limited to language or subject classes but even to arts. I remember someone once telling me that her arts teacher failed her drawing because she had colored the mountains green – for the teacher, mountains were always brown!

The closed classification of knowledge in Pakistani schools implies that the teaching of languages in Pakistan is insulated from the teaching of other subjects and “language is simply an item in the list of disciplines” (2003/2011, 229) – a fact borne out by even a cursory survey of the Pakistani school curricula. This, as pointed out earlier, creates the necessary condition where recognition literacy can flourish – and action and reflection literacies cannot. An expected outcome of people who only have access to recognition literacy is that they “might ‘read out’ an instruction; the degree of comprehension might leave much to be desired” (228–229).⁹

This strong classification and framing leads the students, Hasan argued, into a position where they become dependent on their teachers for input and guidance. When – and if – these students go to western countries, they take these cultural beliefs with them. However, western education (to differing degrees) draws on a more integrated classification and weaker framing culture. Students are expected to work independently and show initiative and understanding. This creates problems for many Pakistani students abroad and they are lost when their new teachers do not give them the information that they expect to be given and when they are expected to cross (disciplinary) boundaries in order to do their work.

My observations of Pakistani students in Australia corroborate Hasan’s analysis. Given that Hasan wrote this paper in the 1970s, one wonders why things have not changed much since. In addition to explaining why Pakistani student have problems abroad – or why I receive the kind of e-mail message that I do from students in Pakistan, it also sheds some light on the limited contribution of Pakistani-trained academics to the global knowledge construction. Most graduates from Pakistan, including people with PhDs, are still bound by the classification and framing that they were immersed in during their education – and have to work with in their jobs. Global knowledge construction operates with integrated classification and weak framing. Thus, the research done in Pakistan often does not meet the criteria of research expected in the west. One consequence of this is that these Pakistani scholars are unable to publish their work in leading academic journals.

One solution to this, which is not without challenges, is for Pakistani educational system to shift toward a more integrated classification and weaker framing. This will require considerable resources and some time, but it is something that the higher education commission and the Ministry of Education need to consider seriously and commit resources to if they want Pakistan to be part of the global knowledge culture.

Pakistani educationists also need to seriously consider the role of language within the educational system and to look into how SFL can help them in revising their educational policies, curricula, and pedagogical practices. They need to identify the type of literacy that the educational programs in Pakistan are currently offering and then consider what needs to be done to help students develop reflection literacy.¹⁰ Ruqiaya Hasan’s work gives us plenty of ideas to work with. What is needed is a will to make the efforts to adopt policies and practices that will enable students and, by extension, strengthen the country.

8. Concluding thoughts

Ruqaiya Hasan, as may be noticed by my discussion of her work, was an iconoclastic scholar. Her work cut through noise and focused on key issues that needed to be considered. Her writings are clever, witty, insightful, and thought provoking. She not only raises issues but also suggests ways of addressing them. Her analysis reflects her wide cross-disciplinary reading and reveals a mastery of linguistic analysis. And, very important for our context here, she frequently draws on and relates her work to Pakistan.

As we conclude, I would like to share part of the beginning of her plenary at the 21st SPELT Conference:

SPELT has come of age today; with age must come a sense of maturity and independence, and for an organization as socially responsible as yours, this maturity and independence comes with a greater sense of responsibilities. It seems to me that if the Society’s ideals are to be maintained, then the particular responsibility I have in mind today needs to be discussed. Indeed I would go so far as to say that this responsibility is so critical SPELT cannot afford to ignore it. Not taking it seriously will be almost like playing with the future of SPELT as well as with that of the wider society within which SPELT is embedded. This is not just a fanciful idea: teachers of any language – and particularly teachers of English, given the global status of that language today – have a central role to play in shaping the destiny of their countries.

Hasan dedicated her life to the study of language and how (and what) understandings of language can help our children and our communities become stronger. This year (2015) we celebrate SPELT’s 31st birthday. It has been 10 years since SPELT came of age. This is, therefore, a good time for us to pause and reflect on how SPELT and our profession have evolved over this period and consider what actions we need to take next.