ABSTRACT
Central to the view of language I am building in this book is the image of the thinking, reflecting individual, located in a particular culture, at a particular time, and participating in reading, writing and speaking to others, at home, at work and in a variety of other social situations. Increasingly complex demands may be made on this person as he or she participates in creating texts or reading texts. We cannot know for certain what these demands will be in later life for today’s five-to eleven-year-olds. However, as primary teachers, we can help them to cope by encouraging them to see texts as more than just, as Wray and Lewis (1997: 105) put it, ‘transparent conveyers of meaning’. Texts are constructed in the way they are because speakers and writers have made certain language choices.
