ABSTRACT
The effective use of language is fundamental to school learning, but the language of school is very different from the language that many children acquire within their families. That difference is experienced in an extreme form by children whose family speak a different language at home from the main language of instruction at school. But even children in a majority language community have to learn to vary their use of language in different environments. This chapter will review how monolingual children learn to communicate in infancy and will examine how the language they learn at that stage differs from the language that they will later need at school. Do differences between home talk and classroom talk inhibit students’ engagement with the curriculum? In the final section of the chapter we will see how ideas from sociocultural theory based on the work of Vygotsky have been applied to help teachers to overcome these challenges.
