Language and Literacy: Studying Discourse in Communities and Classrooms

Teachers, parents, and policymakers need an informed understanding of language--of how it is acquired, how it is used, and how we can best support the learning of new languages and literacies. Yet in most language education, whether in the high school classroom or the college linguistics course, little connection is made between formal study and our real world experiences with language.

Language and Literacy makes that connection. It introduces the study of language as discourse--language as it is used by speakers and writers for authentic purposes. It offers prospective teachers of both first and second language learners the formal underpinnings about language that they need for their teaching of language and literacy. And it provides a model for how teachers and students may engage in an active, exploratory approach to studying both the talk and the texts of their own communities and classrooms.

Kutz draws on studies carried out by students and teachers in a range of classrooms--kindergarten through college, urban and suburban, monolingual and bilingual--and in a variety of communities, including the author's own racially and culturally mixed community. Together, these studies shed light on the nature of discourse competence in a multicultural society and the ways in which it can be supported through effective educational practices.

Language and Literacy has broad appeal to students of language and to educators at any level.

Eleanor Kutz is a professor of English and dean of the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where she teaches courses in freshman writing, linguistics, the nature of literacy, discourse analysis, and the teaching of English. She is coauthor of The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers (Boynton/Cook, 1993) and An Unquiet Pedagogy: Transforming Practice in the English Classroom (Boynton/Cook, 1991).