ABSTRACT
Teachers perhaps often assume that their notes and worksheets should focus more or less exclusively, as the textbook does, on the informative functions of written language, and that they should discard idiosyncratic features of written discourse – its local enthusiasms and difficulties. The teacher's dictated notes on the Voltaic pile had a shared social situation to which greater reference could have been made. In one sense any language which is not private and 'communicates' appeals to a shared context of some kind, and often text appeals to social situations shared by writer and reader: notes passed in class do, and letters can, and so on. It would be surprising if teachers did not become aware at times of the way school text foregrounds subject language to the point where ordinary language disappears, and with it pupils' capacity for constructing meaning. It also seems to follow that teachers' criteria for evaluating children's reading should reduce to 'efficiency' and 'reliability'.
