Knowledge Structures in Social Practices

To address the issue of education systems that are increasingly multilingual and multicultural, we must look beyond the acquisition of the second language (L2) system and consider education as language socialization into social practices. This chapter models social practices as frameworks of knowledge structures that link cultural meanings of the practice to meanings in discourse. The model is situated within systemic functional linguistics and focuses on field (or popularly, content) of discourse, showing typical relations between meanings of knowledge structures and language form, the role of atypical or metaphorical relations in constructing advanced knowledge, and how graphics and nonlinguistic media generally can be interpreted as knowledge structures. Some educational implications addressed in the chapter include integrated approaches to language and content, the connection of language and content standards in education, bridges between learners’ languages and cultures, and links to strategies for comprehension in reading and discourse awareness in writing. Current concerns include failures of language assessment to deal adequately with the linguistic construction of content in discourse. Future directions include discourse research strategies to support the potential convergence of multimodal literacy, critical thinking skills, and computer technologies; and connections with metaphor and ‘the body,’ and with critical linguistics.