Language and literacy are highly contested areas of the curriculum. Questions of what should be taught, how it should be taught, and who should control such decisions, are increasingly subjected to public scrutiny, debate and challenge in a manner which is often more reflection of competing social and political values than of theory and research evidence. In recent years there has been a rapid development of new conceptual frameworks for understanding language literacy and learning, from such diverse fields as anthropology, cultural studies, social psychology, and critical linguistics. The papers in this collection have been chosen because they will help readers to consider ways in which these new developments in theory and research may be applied to everyday practice.