edited by Desmond Allison (National University of Singapore) , Lionel Wee (National University of Singapore) , Bao Zhiming (National University of Singapore) , & Sunita Anne Abraham (National University of Singapore)

The central place of “text” as a means of organising language in order to construct what people come to think of as “knowledge” is a phenomenon affecting all educators, students, and citizens of modern societies. This volume offers various voices and perspectives including those of Ron Carter and Michael Halliday on the role of text in education and society. The chapters on text in education explore some ways in which texts can create bonds or raise barriers between educational knowledge and common-sense knowledge, while the chapters on text in society focus on how personalities and societies are themselves constructed through texts. Learning to unpack texts, and to consider alternatives, is a crucial goal for education and growth, especially so in the context of fast-changing contemporary societies.

This book should be of special interest to educators, students of language, and readers interested in the dynamic relationship between text, education and society.

• Text in Education:
  • Discourse Literacy: Rewording Texts, Revising Discourse (R Carter)
  • Language in the Classroom and the Construction of Educational Knowledge in Singapore (J A Foley)
  • The English Writing Classroom, Adolescent Girls, and the Reproduction of Gender Ideology (N J Renman)
  • Putting It All Together? Talking, Learning and Knowledge (D Allison)
  • ‘Endlessly the Same and Endlessly Different…’
  • ' Repetition and Reformulation Re-Visited (A Maley)
  • Functionalism in Education: A Critique of the Communicative Approach to Language Teaching (Z-M Bao & L Wee)
  • Integrating the Theories of Metacognition and Metalinguistics to Help in the Understanding of Literacy Development and to Promote Academic Success (V Hill)
  • Ensuring Quality in Quantitative Studies of L2 Lecture Comprehension: A Review of Research on How L2 Listeners Unpack the Text of Lectures (S Tauroza)
  • Interpreting Corpus Data in the Classroom (C Owen)
• Text in Society:
  • Language and Knowledge: The ‘Unpacking’ of Text (M A K Halliday)
  • In the Beginning There Was Myra: The Role of Language in the Construction of Gender and Power Relations in the Judicial Setting (H H Chng)
  • Unpacking the Nation (W D Bokhorst-Heng)
  • Values and Daily Discursive Practices (C L Ho)
  • Charlotte Lucas Is Being Very Asian: The Foreign in Teaching English Literature (C Carlotn)
  • Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan (T Rahman)
  • Skinner's Razor and the Varieties of Mentalism (A P Saleemi)
  • The Implications of Using Nativised Language Corpora for Lexicography (V B Y Ooi)