canon of texts, practices and "ways with words." Simply, new and blended texts, communities of readers and writers, bloggers and tweeters, new forms of identity and social interaction are developing as we speak-and literacy studies researchers are steaming away trying to document, describe, interpret, theorise and, indeed, prognosticate the directions and consequences of this new textual universe for those in cities and hinterlands, for dominant and minority communities, for elite and marginal classes-North, South, East and West.These matters come into play each time we scan a headline about Wikileaks, internet censorship and control, or whenever we speculate on the social effects of blogs, tweets and webpages.

So much has been made over the crisis in English literature as field, as corpus, and as canon in recent years, that some of it undoubtedly has spilled over into English education. This has been the case in predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and Commonwealth nations, as well as in those postcolonial states where English remains the medium of instruction and lingua franca of economic and cultural elites. Yet to attribute the pressures for change in pedagogic practice to academic paradigm shift per se would prop up the shaky axiom that English education is forever caught in some kind of perverse evolutionary time-lag, parasitic of university literary studies. I, too, believe that English education has reached a crucial moment in its history, but that this moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization.