What explicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way? Distinguished by its global perspective, its currency, and its comprehensiveness, this book offers a range of theoretical approaches to the issues surrounding this question, and examples of how these approaches are being realized in actual classrooms.

ContentsPreface1. Introduction: "Grammar Wars" and Beyond, Terry Locke Part I: The "Grammar Wars" in context2. Blowin’ in the wind: English grammar in United States schools, Martha Kolln and Craig Hancock 3. The problematics of prescribing grammatical knowledge: The case in England, Urszula Clark 4. The Grammar Wars in Australia, Frances Christie5. Knowledge about language in the English classroom: A Scottish perspective, Graeme Trousdale Part II: The effectiveness of grammar teaching: The research record6. Teaching sentence-level grammar for writing: The evidence so far, Richard Andrews 7. Explicit teaching of grammar: Does it help students to become better writers?, Amos van Gelderen8. Ways of knowing: Writing with grammar in mind, Debra Myhill Part III: Into the classroom: Integrating knowledge about language with learning9. "Language as a system of meaning potential": The reading and design of verbal texts, Hilary Janks 10. Discovering a metalanguage for all seasons: Bringing literary language in from the cold , Terry Locke11. Scaffolding grammar instruction for writers and writing, Constance Weaver12. Primary school children learning grammar: Rethinking the possibilities, Ruth French Section IV: Beyond print: A metalanguage for multimodal texts13. A grammar for meaning-making, Gunther Kress 14. Schemas for meaning-making and multimodal texts, Anne Cloonan, Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope15. Resourcing multimodal literacy pedagogy: Towards a description of the meaning-making resources of language-image interaction, Len Unsworth16. Rules of grammar, rules of play: Computer games, literacy, and literature, Andrew Burn List of Contributors