Writing from the edge: Reflections on ‘Twenty Years of L1'

It is indeed something to celebrate: twenty years of a journal such as L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, the flagship of a still emerging and consolidating research community organised around what is now known as L1 education and the L1 subjects. I come to this as a long-time Anglophone scholar in antipodean English teaching and English curriculum studies. For me, turning to comparative work across other such fields, elsewhere in the world, seemed not only entirely appropriate, but even necessary. There is no doubt that making such a move has been productive,greatly expanding the ambit of my work. I welcome the opportunity, therefore, to comment on the article “Twenty Years of L1: The Journal and the Research Community Behind It”. The L1 editors provide an illuminating picture of the development of the journal and its associated research field, as it is now, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. They ask: “what has been accomplished thus far”?—seeing this “as a starting point to review what still needs to be done”.