This article makes a methodological contribution to investigating the policy-practice nexus in the English classroom. It looks beyond language to offer a multimodal case study analysis of English classrooms in three cities: Delhi, Johannesburg, and London. The article shows how policies mediated by the agencies of the state, the school, the English department, and individual teachers are inflected and refracted through the textual cycle to position teachers and students in particular ways. The case studies show local, specific inflections of what teachers are able to do within the constraints of the policy-practice nexus and provide insights into how "subject English" is realised across three countries, each of which has a distinct social, historical, and cultural relation to English. This study has implications for developing teachers' critical understandings of their central role in translating subject English through the textual cycle. (Contains 2 footnotes.)