"This book provides a really sound grounding in the theories that underpin successful teaching and learning. Without over-simplification it provides accessible introductions to the key learning theories with which teachers and students are likely to engage, and it has immense practical value."
Professor Sally Brown, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

This landmark text is the first introduction to concepts and issues in critical discourse analysis for educational researchers. The central premise is that critical discourse analysis must be conducted "systematically," which means conducting inquiry into the ways in which language form and function correlate with social practices. Bringing together the work of New Literacy Studies, situated literacy, critical discourse theory and analysis with theories of learning, the text is distinctive in providing not just useful analytic accounts of discourse in classroom and other settings, but going on to identify ways in which these forms of language are connected to theories of learning.

In attempting to understand and explain various behaviour, events, and phenomena in their field, psychologists have developed and enunciated an enormous number of best guesses or theories concerning the phenomenon in question. Such theories involve speculations and statements that range on a potency continuum from strong to weak. The term theory, itself, has been conceived of in various ways in the psychological literature.