ABSTRACT
There are three parts to this chapter. In the first part, I draw on a Bernsteinian model (see Bernstein, 2000) to investigate ways in which the pedagogic discourses available to teachers have undergone a shift in a number of settings and why this should be. Putting it another way, I will be asking questions about where the language Emma uses to conduct talk about texts comes from. In the second part of this chapter, I look specifically at the kind of metalanguage teachers might utilize in their conversations with students around the reading and composition of literary texts. In the third part of the chapter, I put myself in Emma’s shoes, as
a teacher beginning her career in English language arts/literacy, and suggest a strategy teachers might adopt in constructing for themselves a metalanguage, useful to themselves and to their students, for making meaning of the texts they read and write.
