The last two decades have seen a good deal of work in educational linguistics, which has created a deeper understanding of how language works in different varieties of discourse and what a teacher needs to know for engaging successfully in language education. In this sense, the focus has been largely on instructional discourse - i.e., what is to be taught. The chapters of this book attempt to widen the field by focussing on who is being taught. After all, the true active element in the processes of education is the learner. Children have already acquired specific ways of learning, long before they enter the classroom, and in pluralistic societies learning styles vary systematically across communities. This book argues on the one hand the need to attend to the different voices in the classroom, and on the other to encourage an attitude of enquiry which creates awareness of the power of discourse in maintaining and/or changing societies.
Author’s preface
Editor’s introduction
Foreword by Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, University of London
I ON LEARNING AND TEACHING
1 On the process of teaching: a perspective from functional grammar
2 Modes of learning, modes of teaching: semiotic mediation and knowledge
3 The implications of semantic distance for language in education
4 Forms of discourse, forms of knowledge: reading Bernstein
(with David Butt)
II LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
5 Literacy, everyday talk and society
6 Globalization, literacy and ideology
7 Literacy pedagogy and social change: directions from Bernstein’s sociology
III MOTHER TONGUE AND OTHER TONGUE
8 Socialization and cross-cultural education
9 Some sociological considerations in second language teaching
10 Learning to function with the other tongue: A systemic-functional perspective on second language teaching (with G Perrett)
11 English process, English tense: foreign learner, foreign teacher
