The title of this issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique echoes the title of two volumes published during the past thirty years, each under the auspices of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE), namely English Teachers at Work: Ideas and Strategies from Five Countries, edited by Stephen Tchudi (1986), and English Teachers at Work: Narrative, Counter Narratives and Arguments, edited by Brenton Doecke, David Homer and Helen Nixon (2003).  Each volume self-consciously announces its significance as a reflection of a certain moment in the history of English teaching, and, read together, these books do indeed capture developments within English teaching that we identify as constituting our contemporary professional landscape. Of particular interest to us, as the editors of this issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, has been the emergence of standards-based reforms, producing a situation in which English teaching has been subjected to standards at multiple levels: both professional standards that claim to map what teachers "should know and be able to do" (to echo the rhetoric that is typically employed to rationalise/vindicate the development of professional standards) and mandated learning outcomes, whether in the form of learning continua that purportedly capture outcomes that students are expected to achieve at each level of development or in the form of standardised literacy testing (see, for example, Zacher Pandya, 2011).

This special issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique has provided an opportunity for contributors to look closely at English teachers' work in the current moment,  exploring how it has been transformed in the intervening period between the IFTE Conference of 2003 on teacher's work and the present moment. The contributions to this issue provide insights into what is happening in a range of contexts: The US, England, Australia and Egypt. Collectively, they provide a comparative lens through which to obtain a sense of the global reach of standards-based reforms.

Doecke, B., Homer, D., & Nixon, H. (Eds.). (2003). English teachers at work: Narratives, counter narratives and arguments. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press/AATE.

Tchudi, S. N. (Ed.). (1986). English teachers at work: Ideas and strategies from five countries. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Zacher Pandya, J. (2011). Overtested: How high-stakes accountability fails English language learners. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.