ABSTRACT
This chapter is about language as a medium for education in school. Most of its content is about spoken language, with a discussion of some aspects of written language in the later part.
Classrooms generate some typical structures of language use, patterns that reflect the nature of teaching and learning as a social, communicative process which takes place in the distinctive institutional settings of school. Some features of classroom language, described below, have been found in classrooms across the world; and to some extent at least this reflects the fact that language has a similar function in schools the world over. There are also some local, regional and national characteristics in the ways that language is used in the classroom, and different expectations are made of students in different cultures and even by different teachers within one country’s education system which may also be reflected in language. Moreover, according to their out-ofschool experience, students may find the language of classroom life more or less intelligible or compatible with their out-of-school life. On entering school, every student will have to engage some learning about how to use the language of the classroom. Even for students who have the classroom language as their native or first language, this will involve grasping the conventions of how spoken and written language is normally used in school, taking up the specialized vocabularies of curriculum subjects and becoming able to present ideas within the constraints of the accepted genres or discourses of spoken and written language.
