The Language Of Schooling

This book is about how language is used in the context of schooling. It demonstrates that the variety of English expected at school differs from the interactional language that students use for social purposes outside of school, and provides a linguistic analysis of the challenges of the school curriculum, particularly for non-native speakers of English, speakers of non-standard dialects, and students who have little exposure to academic language outside of schools. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective builds on current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic studies of language in school, but adds a new dimension--the framework of functional linguistic analysis. This framework focuses not just on the structure of words and sentences, but on how texts are constructed--how particular grammatical choices create meanings in the different kinds of texts students are asked to read and write at school. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective *provides a functional description of the kinds of texts students are expected to read and write at school; *relates research from other sociolinguistic and language development perspectives to research from the systemic functional linguistics perspective; *focuses on the increasing linguistic demands of contexts of advanced literacy (middle school through college); *analyzes the genres typically encountered at school, with extensive description of the grammatical features of the expository essay, a gatekeeping genre for secondary school graduates; *reviews the grammatical features of disciplinary genres in science and history; and *argues for more explicit attention to language in teaching all subjects, with a particular focus on what is needed for the development of critical literacy. This book will enable researchers and students of language in education to recognize how the grammatical and discourse features of the language of schooling construct the content areas, role relationships, and purposes and expectations of schools. It also will enable them to better understand the nature of language itself and how it emerges from and helps to maintain social structures and institutions, and to apply these understandings to creating classroom environments that build on the strengths students bring to school.

This book is about how language is used in the context of schooling. It demonstrates that the variety of English expected at school differs from the interactional language that students use for social purposes outside of school, and provides a linguistic analysis of the challenges of the school curriculum, particularly for non-native speakers of English, speakers of non-standard dialects, and students who have little exposure to academic language outside of schools. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective builds on current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic studies of language in school, but adds a new dimension--the framework of functional linguistic analysis. This framework focuses not just on the structure of words and sentences, but on how texts are constructed--how particular grammatical choices create meanings in the different kinds of texts students are asked to read and write at school. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective *provides a functional description of the kinds of texts students are expected to read and write at school; *relates research from other sociolinguistic and language development perspectives to research from the systemic functional linguistics perspective; *focuses on the increasing linguistic demands of contexts of advanced literacy (middle school through college); *analyzes the genres typically encountered at school, with extensive description of the grammatical features of the expository essay, a gatekeeping genre for secondary school graduates; *reviews the grammatical features of disciplinary genres in science and history; and *argues for more explicit attention to language in teaching all subjects, with a particular focus on what is needed for the development of critical literacy. This book will enable researchers and students of language in education to recognize how the grammatical and discourse features of the language of schooling construct the content areas, role relationships, and purposes and expectations of schools. It also will enable them to better understand the nature of language itself and how it emerges from and helps to maintain social structures and institutions, and to apply these understandings to creating classroom environments that build on the strengths students bring to school.

Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically deficient, this book aims to bridge the gap between theorizing of language in critical sociolinguistics and approaches to language in education. Carolyn McKinney uses the lens of linguistic ideologies—teachers’ and students’ beliefs about language—to shed light on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, she examines the case of historically white schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex relationships between language and power, and language and subjectivity. Implications for language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded. Providing an accessible overview of the scholarly literature on language ideologies and language as social practice and resource in multilingual contexts, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling uses the conceptual tools it presents to analyze classroom interaction and ethnographic observations from the day-to-day life in case study schools and explores implications of both the research literature and the analyses of students’ and teachers’ discourses and practices for language in education policy and curriculum.

The purpose of Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners: Theoretical Insights, Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices is to bring together educational researchers and practitioners who have implemented, documented, or examined policies, pedagogies, and practices in and out of classrooms and in real and virtual contexts that are in some way transforming what we know about the extent to which emergent bilinguals (EBs) learn and achieve in educational settings. In the following chapters, scholars and researchers identify both (1) the current state of schooling for EBs, from their perspective, and (2) the particular ways that policies, pedagogies, and/or practices transform schooling as it currently exists for EBs in discernible ways based on their scholarship and research. Drawing on current and seminal research in fields including second language acquisition, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics, contributing authors draw on complementary theoretical, methodological, and philosophical frameworks that attend to the social, cultural, political, and ideological dimensions of being and becoming bi/multilingual and bi/multiliterate in schools and in the United States. In sum, we are deeply committed to asserting hope, possibility, and potential to discussions and discourses about bi/multilingual students. We value the urgency around improving the conditions, experiences, and circumstances in which they are learning languages and academic content. Our aim is to highlight perspectives, conceptualizations, orientations, and ideologies that disrupt and contest legacies of deficit thinking, linguistic purism, language standardization, and racism and the racialization of ethnolinguistic minorities.

This volume explores the evolution in language use experienced by children and young people throughout school, and the ways they become more conscious about its multi-functionality and the choices open to them in making meaning. Describes a trajectory of language development in schooling from age 6 to age 18 Draws on systemic functional linguistics to trace changes in the language resources successful children and adolescents use to make meanings in new discourse patterns as they engage in the curricular tasks of science, history, and language arts Explores the way in which content, interpersonal relationships, and textual structure simultaneously evolve over four stages of children’s and adolescents’ development Offers new theoretical insights and practical awareness of the multi-functionality of language

This text brings critical ethnographic perspectives to bear on the negotiation of language, literacy, and power in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, showing how literacy and schooling are negotiated by children and adults and how schooling becomes a key site of struggle over whose knowledge, discourses, and literacy practices "count."

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This bookbuilds on current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic studies of language in school, but adds a new dimension--the framework of functional linguistic analysis.It will enable researchers and students of language in education to rec