ABSTRACT
The English classroom, with its working and reworking of contexts, mediates between the pupils' increasing confidence in language mastery and the real world, by providing a laboratory where experiment and improvement can take place. In this way, working with a wide range of communications materials, presented in a variety of media, pupils begin to develop a critical awareness of language processes. This might be more fully explained by the notion of the reflexiveness of language. Language is itself the medium for reflecting critically upon language, so that pupils begin to work out for themselves the rules for effective communication through processes of trial, error and reflection. Developing this thought, teachers might argue further that pupils engaged in this kind of critical reflection in the English classroom, coming to an awareness of language that enables them to understand its processes and consequences, are developing another critical capacity.
