Literacy and Curriculum: Language and Knowledge in the Classroom

Abstract

In contemporary schooling, students' learning is comprehensively and unrelievedly dependent On the development of their literacy capabilities. So mapping the relationship between literacy and curriculum would mean navigating through almost the entire corpus of educational research and theory. However, we can inquire into a more modest, but nonetheless disconcertingly large question: How are students' literacy resources worked up, worked on, put to work day to day - across the school years and across the curriculum areas? In this chapter, we outline two distinct approaches to questions of literacy development and differentiation, one from the linguistic study of language features and the other from the sociological analysis of naturally occurring interactions. We draw attention both to the foundational, stable literacy resources that are recognizable across the curriculum areas, and to those resources that are specific to each curriculum domain. We argue that these curriculum-specific resources, while deeply consequential for pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum organization, are under-represented as focal points for theory, research, policy, and practice. It is their growing specificity, we claim, that is central to the literacy-curriculum relationship, and therefore to our understanding of students' emerging use of language to understand experience and develop school knowledge. The bulk of the chapter is concerned with introducing interactional and linguistic approaches, summarizing some conceptual and empirical works in each, and illustrating key points with exhibits from classrooms. We conclude by drawing out some directions for further research.