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Basil Berstein began to develop his theory of social structure and power relations during the 1950s and 1960s. Early in the 1960s he met M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, who were developing the first formulations of what would become known as systemic functional (SF) linguistic theory. A far-reaching dialogue began. Berstein recognized the significant role that language plays in the construction of social experience and social inequality. Halliday and Hasan were actively seeking a theory of language that would explain the nature of te social. In different ways, they acknowledged the powerful role of language in the social construction on experience. Their resulting enquiries brought both theories and scholars into dialogue. Contributors to this volume (including Hasan and Bernstein) continue this dialogue in a range of papers that draw both on SF linguistic theory (with special reference to genre) and Bernstein's sociological theory, particulary with reference to his later work on pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse. Several authors describe the influence of these theories on classroom practice, including Engligh and mathematics, and literacy teaching in indigenous schools.Pedagogy and the Shaping of Conciousness is an important contribution to the explication of the two theories, the dialogie which they continue to provoke and their contribution to the provision of more equal access to education. Frances Christie is Professor of Language and Literacy Education and the University of Melbourne.
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Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness
Open Linguistics Series Series Editor Robin F. Fawcett, Cardiff University The Open Linguistics Series, to which this book makes a significant contribution, is 'open' in two senses. First, it provides an open forum for works associated with any school of linguistics or with none. Linguistics has now emerged from a period in which many (but never all) of the most lively minds in the subject seemed to assume that transformational-generative grammar - or at least something fairly closely derived from it - would provide the main theoretical framework for linguistics for the foreseeable future. In Kuhn's terms, linguistics had appeared to some to have reached the 'paradigm' stage. Reality today is very different. More and more scholars are working to improve and expand theories that were formerly scorned for not accepting as central the particular set of concerns highlighted in the Chomskyan approach - such as Halliday's systemic theory (as exemplified in this book), Lamb's stratificational model and Pike's tagmemics - while others are developing new theories. The series is open to all approaches, then - including work in the generativist-formalist tradition. The second sense in which the series is 'open' is that it encourages works that open out 'core' linguistics in various ways: to encompass discourse and the description of natural texts; to explore the relationship between linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence and cultural and literary studies; and to apply it in fields such as education and language pathology. Relations between the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are covered in a sister series, Communication in Artificial Intelligence. Studies that are primarily descriptive are published in a new series, Functional Descriptions of Language. Recent tides in this series Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition, M. A. K, Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed.) Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate, Geoffrey Sampson Empirical Linguistics, Geoffrey Sampson The Intonation Systems of English, Paul Tench Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in