ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the following three chapters we want to show how the knowledge about language that we have been discussing in the last five chapters can be applied to exploring the meanings of texts that might be found in primary school classrooms. We don’t intend to produce materials for direct use in the classroom. There are many books available now that do this, but they assume a degree of language awareness that not all students and teachers have available to them at the moment. Readers may therefore be condemned to following the suggestions on offer without a clear understanding of the underlying language knowledge or of how to adapt the ideas for use with other texts. Our hope is to support teachers in building up their own language knowledge so that they will feel confident in selecting aspects of language work that will usually be text based and planning a variety of interesting activities for their classes drawing on a wide range of texts.
