OVERVIEW

In this chapter I will focus on some of the ideas currently underpinning notions of education in order to show how they drive contemporary educational discourse, and also on how the language choice plays a determining role in the construction and negotiation of ‘new’ educational identities. I will then exemplify three different kinds of educational discourse: the language of educational reform, as regards language learning policy in UK and European contexts; the language of primary school job adverts in the UK; and the language of commencement speeches in American universities. My aim is to show how a stylistically oriented approach can provide a useful lens for practitioners and others interested in examining the discourse of this professional domain.

CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE

First, it needs to be remembered that educational discourse, intended here as discourse about education, can be seen from different perspectives. Wells (1999), for example, identifies two distinct ‘languages’ for talking about education: the first embodying the perspective of those concerned with educational planning, administration and provision; the second a more process-oriented perspective favoured by educational researchers. The two perspectives are constructed using quite different discourse frames which for Wells characterise the ‘mismatch [between] the conceptions that each holds about the role of linguistic discourse in learning and teaching’ (1999: 148). The need to reconcile these two conceptions means that much of the linguistic choice in educational discourse has a hybrid nature, in that it is as likely to pertain to administrative and bureaucratic contexts as to educational ones.

Second, contemporary educational discourse in its concern with innovation also has a significant promotional dimension. Indeed, Fairclough had already observed the widespread use of marketisation and commodification in contemporary educational discourse, noting the ‘metaphorical transfer of the vocabulary of commodities and markets into the educational order of discourse’ and commenting on ‘the fact that education is one of a number of domains whose orders of discourse are being colonized by the advertising genre’ (1992: 208–10). This spread of corporate discourse into other social domains is an increasingly pervasive phenomena, as shown for example by Mautner in her (2005) corpus-based research on contemporary higher education discourse across Europe, where she highlights the incidence of keywords such as ‘enterprising’ and ‘entrepreneurial’. It can also be on the political agenda.