Editorial

A central focus which emerges from this first open issue of 2018 is the way in which subjects are positioned through the use of language, and languages, within ‘pedagogic discourse’ (after Bernstein, 2000). Whether it be the students positioned as consumers in today’s UK universities (Collins), international students travelling from across Asia to a Taiwanese university to study in English (Lin); schools and colleges ranging from Catalonia to Canada who support migrant children and students learning the language(s) of the host country( Mady; Petreñas, Lapresta &Huguet) or a conversation between two researchers engaging one postgraduate student recently arrived at a European university, and remotely relayed between their various offices (Amadasi & Holliday),what most of these papers demonstrate is that ‘pedagogic subjects’ –pupils, learners and students -can no longer be viewed as ‘cultural dopes’ within diverse global educational systems; rather they can engage agentively with the ideologies (e.g. Collins) and resources of these systems to advance their own needs (e.g. Mady) and negotiate their own positions (e.g. Lin). Furthermore, this negotiation often entails a manipulation of the many languages which subjects have at their disposal: not only the often multiple languages with which many immigrants are endowed, arriving expectantly at the borders either for study or for longer term sojourn, but also those with which they engage as they navigate their way into a foreign ‘culture’. Several of the contributors to this issue (e.g. Collins;Lin; Petreñaset al.)also demonstrate once more that it is simply not possible to attribute decontextualized, supposedly universal, attributes to learners derived from their first language, ethnicity or religion, but rather that attributes are adopted by learners -often knowingly –which are specific to, and contingent upon, the educational and social contexts within which they find themselves. Nevertheless, pedagogic discourse is inevitably intertwined with the discursive constitution of political systems and nation states, however ‘imagined’ these may be (Anderson, 1983). And so we round off the papers in this issue with Xiaoping Wu’s welcome analysis of ‘stance’ in news reports published in the press of the different state actors in the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute, which affords us considerable insight into just how the –often adversarial -political ideologies of these ‘imagined communities’ are created.

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