This volume surveys the research on discourse and education, adopting the broadest definition of ‘discource’.
• Discourse as ‘talk-in-interaction’, commonly espoused in studies of classroom discourse since the 1970s.
• Discourse as ‘ways of understanding and constituting the social world’, the critical, post-structuralist view of discourse as a source of power.

Several themes resonate across the four sections and the chapters within them:
• Widening the scope of enquiry, combining approaches to discourse
• Linking the study of discourse with ethnography
• Dealing with the changing nature of contemporary patterns of communication

This is one of ten volumes of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education published by Springer. The Encyclopedia bears testimony to the dynamism and evolution of the language and education field, as it confronts the ever-burgeoning and irrepressible linguistic diversity and ongoing pressures and expectations placed on education around the world.