Aspects of Language and Learning

Book excerpt: This book is based on a series of lectures, which begin with a look at the history of the language that we use in order to encode our knowledge, particularly our scientific knowledge, i.e., the history of scientific English. Prof. M.A.K. Halliday poses the question of how a growing child comes to master this kind of language and put it to his or her own use as a means of learning. In subsequent chapters, Halliday explores the relationship between language, education and culture, again taking the language of science as the focal point for the discussion; and finally he draws these various themes together to construct a linguistic interpretation of how we learn and how we learn how to learn.