ABSTRACT
In some ways this is a book about educational research. Teachers have very good reasons to mistrust such books and regard them with apprehension. Teachers’ fears are not unfounded; so often educational research, by investigating and thereby exposing the problems of schools, has been instrumental in giving them the bad press that they so often receive these days. And all too often researchers have used their perceptions of teachers’ inadequacies to gain grants, publicity and to further their careers. Take for example, the main argument that the editor of a new journal was quoted as giving as the reason for yet another new publication:
There has been a revolution in our knowledge about language in the past twenty years, and it’s highly probable that lots of the practices that are being followed in schools in relation to developing children’s language are quite wrong, misguided, even dangerous in their implications for the education of our kids.
