Advances in Language and Education

Description

This book examines new functional approaches to language and education, and the impact of these on literacy in the classroom. The first section looks at issues of multimodality, in which the definition of a text is expanded to include not only that which is written down, but also the interaction of writing, graphics, and audiovisual material. The contributors explores ways in which language education can be expanded to deal with multimodal discourse, whether in children's books, in textbooks, or on the web. The second section looks at how critical discourse analysis and appraisal theory can be used as tools for assessing the effectiveness of student writing and literacy achievement, and also for helping developing writers to write more successfully. The final section argues that corpus-based studies of language have changed the way we see language, and that the way we teach language should evolve in line with these changes. This appealing survey of new directions in language and education includes contributions from internationally renowned scholars. It will be of interest to researchers in systemic functional linguistics, or language and education.

Anne McCabe is a full-time professor in the Department of English and Communication, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus. Mick O'Donnell is Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. Rachel Whittaker is Lecturer in the Department of English at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain.

"Demonstates that researchers have made important developments in the understanding of language and meaning production. Its primary audience might be that of the language research community of practice, the book is recommended for all those researchers worried about increasing the dialogue between knowledge about the way we learn, produce, and distribute texts through our pedagogical practices in our highly multimodal contemporary society." Discourse and Society