ABSTRACT
A basic premise of this book is that becoming literate in the schools in most industrial societies involves learning a variety, or register, of what we have called ‘literate’ or ‘school’ language. While we believe that one register is inherently no better or worse than another for the purpose of communicating, learning the school language register seems to be an important precursor to becoming literate in schools. We argue that children’s use of literate language is a very early form of schoolbased literacy.
