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Mary J. Schleppegrell, The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2007

Norbert Francis
Norbert Francis
Affiliation:
College of Education, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, 86011 USA, norbert.francis@nau.edu
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Extract

Mary J. Schleppegrell, The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. 190. Hb. $45.00

This is an important contribution to the discussion in the field of educational linguistics on the nature of academic language proficiency. The title itself evokes some of the questions in dispute: What aspects of “language” might the author have in mind? And is there really a different kind that could be said to be “of schooling?” Chap. 1 starts by delimiting the domain of school-related language ability that will be the object of scrutiny: advanced literacy. The skeptic may object that neither “school-related” (in relation to “language”) and “advanced” (in relation to “literacy”) are coherent, well-defined categories. In fact, some educators might go so far as to describe Schleppegrell's analysis as a type of “deficit model” of literacy, a characterization frequently directed toward attempts to differentiate between conversational ability and the kind of language ability required for advanced literacy (see Edelsky 1996). Cummins 2000, for example, has been strongly criticized along these lines.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2007 , pp. 757 - 760
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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