Academic discourse is the gateway not only to educational success but to worlds of imagination, discovery and accumulated wisdom. Understanding the nature of academic discourse and developing ways of helping everyone access, shape and change this knowledge is critical to supporting social justice. Yet education research often ignores the forms taken by knowledge and the language through which they are expressed. This volume comprises cutting-edge work that is bringing together sociological and linguistic approaches to access academic discourse.

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a long-established and widely known approach to understanding language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a younger and rapidly growing approach to exploring and shaping knowledge practices. Now evermore research and practice are using these approaches together. This volume presents new advances from this inter-disciplinary dialogue, focusing on state-of-the-art work in SFL provoked by its productive dialogue with LCT. It showcases work by the leading lights of both approaches, including the foremost scholar of SFL and the creator of LCT. Chapters introduce key ideas from LCT, new conceptual developments in SFL, studies using both approaches, and guidelines for shaping curriculum and pedagogy to support access to academic discourse in classrooms.

The book is essential reading for all appliable and educational linguists, as well as scholars and practitioners of education and sociology.