ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 demonstrated that there are linguistic expectations for students’ language use at school, and that these expectations reflect the language practices of some social groups, but not others. If only certain kinds of socialization practices are reflected in the tasks that children face at school, it is important to understand what the challenges of these practices might be for students without prior familiarity with them. This chapter, informed by the framework of systemic functional grammar, provides an overview of the linguistic features typical of the language expected at school. It examines differences between the registers of schooling and the registers of informal interaction to develop a framework for analysis in chapters 4 and 5 of the types of texts that students need to read and write at school.1
