Should young people be trained in the English classroom to understand and assess television, cinema, radio and the press? If so, what form should that training take?

It is often said that the English language is particularly rich in vocabulary, but to make such a statement we need to know what words to count and what counts as a word.

Dictionaries of English today draw upon a tradition that is almost 400 years old. Depending on your point of view, this is a tradition of competition and cross-fertilization, of plagiarism and lexicographical incest, or something that has wavered and wandered between high originality and low theft. Some commentators have even argued that many English dictionaries are just variations on a common text that has been evolving since the 17th century.

In recent years there have been suggestions that English could break up into mutually unintelligible languages, much as Latin once did. Could such a break-up occur, or are we in need of a new appreciation of the nature of World English?

Grammar books are written for many purposes and with different users in mind. What are the particular problems of the scholarly reference grammar towards the end of the 20th century?