ABSTRACT
Think back to your twelfth-grade English class. Do you remember your classmates, your teacher, the books you read? What about the reading and writing assignments? What did it mean to “do” English in that classroom? Now think of your other English classrooms—eleventh grade, tenth grade, ninth grade. How were all these classrooms similar? How were they different? Of one thing we can be sure, as a student of the English language arts, you used reading, writing, speaking, and listening in various contexts for a variety of purposes. The claim that a common discourse community governs (or ought to govern) the practice of the language arts across schools and grade levels is the subject of some debate that we will consider in this chapter
