ABSTRACT
In the numerous and varied contexts of musicking around the world there are many specialised, insider languages and codes of communication. This chapter looks more closely at the role language plays in a praxis of conceptualisation and how conceptualising provides the means for the cognitive development that is required for the development of critical thinking and for enabling interstylistic conversations in the diverse music classroom of the twenty-first century. It is a response to Carroll's observation that ‘exactly how the knower constructs conceptual knowledge, and how teachers can facilitate this process remain largely unproblematised in the music education research literature'. Control over grammatical metaphor ‘is fundamental to the very nature of educational processes in the higher levels of schooling – the construal of experience into specialized domains and the reasoning about experience in abstract, logically developed terms'.
