ABSTRACT
I suspect that there are still some die-hard exclusively ‘top-downers’ and ‘bottom-uppers’ about, but if so, it is high time for them to each forsake their respective corners and meet in the middle of the ring. I have made plain my own feeling that the ‘top’ level, the text level, is the place to centre almost all language study. However, we need to go much further than we have sometimes done in the past to help children to understand how texts, both written and spoken, are constructed and the significance of the syntactic and lexical choices speakers and writers have available to them to help them put their messages across.
