Language and Education: Learning and Teaching in Society

by Ruqaiya Hasan, Jonathan J Webster (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904768388
Publisher:	Equinox Publishing
Publication date:	09/01/2011
Series:	Collected Works Of Ruqaiya Hasan , #3
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ruqaiya Hasan has taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England, America and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career, she has researched and published widely in the areas of stylistics, culture, context and text, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. Jonathan J. Webster is Professor and Head, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and Director, The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. He is also the General Editor of the Equinox journal Linguistics and the Human Sciences and the editor (with Ruqaiya Hasan and Christian Matthiessen) of the two- volume Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective (Equinox, 2007).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

The well-deserved reputation of systemic-functional linguistics as the most education-friendly theoretical paradigm for language analysis is intricately interwoven with and supported by the life-long work of Ruqaiya Hasan. In this third volume of her collected works, readers will have the intellectual pleasure of encountering the astounding breadth of knowledge and spiritedness of commitments she brings to the learning and teaching of languages understood as a social-semiotic process of meaning-making. Whatever their own role in language and education, under her expert guidance they will reaffirm the central position that learning a language – both mother tongue and other tongue – has for socialization into local and global communities and for the many-faceted processes of individual and societal literacies that mark the contemporary world.

Heidi Byrnes, George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German, President, American Association for Applied Linguistics, Georgetown University

This volume is an essential addition to any library collection focusing on the field of linguistics and education.

LinguistList

From the Publisher