Over the past two decades, Western governments have embarked on a series of reforms of education and schooling. Literacy education has been especially vulnerable to mandated policy changes designed to improve students' literacy standards. Literacy is typically deemed to be in a state of decline and even crisis, necessitating the introduction of standardized testing and other measures that render teachers and schools more accountable. Such reforms are invariably justified by policy-makers and bureaucrats as having a foundation in scientific inquiry, as is shown by current rhetoric about "evidence-based" research to bring about improved literacy outcomes. In other instances, inquiries are established to gather supporting empirical evidence that will justify pre-existing reform agendas.Yet questions about the validity of the research claims underpinning such reforms have gone begging. The very fact that certain research has been translated into mandated policy lends it validity, as being of sufficient importance to prompt legislative action. The connections between research, policy and classroom practice have been radically reconfigured and (some would argue) seriously compromised. Increasingly, policy makers and bureaucrats are privileging research which supports their policies, enabling them to resist any attempt to scrutinize the meaning or value of the reforms they are implementing.

Within a professional landscape characterised by top-down, "evidence-based" reforms, teachers have found it increasingly difficult to affirm the value of their own professional knowledge and experience. "Action research" and other traditions of practitioner inquiry continue to constitute a subordinate discourse, a body of knowledge about practice that struggles to attain the status of "evidence-based" research. What validity could such local knowledge have in comparison with the universal claims made on the basis of large surveys and other "scientific" practices? How might teachers justify their resistance to mandated reforms on the basis of their experience of specific communities? Where does their local knowledge fit within the world created by large scale policy reform? These questions are directly and indirectly related to researchers' and teachers' social, political and ethical responsibilities with regard to their work and the impact it may have on literacy education.

The ever-increasing complexity of the relationship between government policy, research and professional practice means that it is timely to revisit questions about the purpose and value of research in literacy education. What role can research play within the current policy environment? Is there still a place for disinterested inquiry? (Was there ever one?) Does practitioner inquiry still have a place within the policy environment produced by large-scale reform? Or does this question imply a false binary? Can practitioner inquiry be used to support large-scale reform, helping to implement mandated policy at a local level? What kind of commitment motivates the work of researchers and research communities at the

This special issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique explores the role that research currently plays in language and literacy education. The various contributions investigate a range of aspects of the research/policy/praxis nexus as it is currently being enacted in educational settings in England, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. The aim of the issue is not so much to facilitate debate relating to different types of inquiry, as in methodology handbooks, but to probe the meaning and value of research at the current moment. The questions below served as prompts for contributors.

• What currently counts as research in language and literacy education? What should count?
• Does research have any impact on the teaching and learning which occurs within educational
  settings?
• Why do we do research on language and literacy education?
• What are researchers' and teachers' social and ethical responsibilities for literacy education?
• How do we evaluate the impact that research has on the professional practice of educators?
• How would you describe the relationship between professional practice and research?
• What significance does research have in the professional lives of teachers?
• What role does practitioner inquiry play in developing understandings about language and learning?
• What is the relationship between professional learning and scientific inquiry?
• What is the relationship between local knowledge and scientific generalizations?
• What does it mean to say that research is evidence-based?
• What types of research are relevant to professional practice?
• Do sociologists or philosophers have anything to say to teachers of language and literacy?
• Do teachers read research journals? Why/why not?