ABSTRACT
Teachers play a critical role in arranging the discursive histories from which the children speak. Talk is the central tool of their trade. With it they mediate children’s activity and experience, and help them make sense of learning, literacy, life, and themselves. Although language has its effects in many ways, the most common focus of attention in recent years has been on the explicitness of the language teachers use. Similarly, the way a teacher talks can position students differently in relation to what they are doing, learning, or studying. The implications of talking about reading as “work” are different from referring to it as “fun.” Although these words and phrases are mere fragments of interactions, the author think of them as representative examples of linguistic families, in the sense that, though they have different surface forms, they share some common features and common sociolinguistic genetic material.
