ABSTRACT
For the majority of children, starting school means confronting new ways of using language. These include using language to accomplish new types of tasks and new expectations for how they will structure what they say. Schooling brings new kinds of interaction, where students are often required to state information that in an everyday context could be taken for granted, and to specify relationships between concepts in some detail. In addition, students are expected to begin using language in a new mode, writing, which brings with it new ways of grammatical organization. These new ways of meaning-making enable participation in a wider range of tasks and contexts, so it is important that all students have opportunities to develop their language potential as they progress in schooling.
