The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis covers the major approaches to Discourse Analysis from Critical Discourse Analysis to Multimodal Discourse Analysis and their applications in key educational and institutional settings. The handbook is divided into six sections: Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Register and Genre, Developments in Spoken Discourse, Educational Applications, Institutional Applications and Identity, Culture and Discourse. The chapters are written by a wide range of contributors from around the world, each a leading researcher in their respective field. All chapters have been closely edited by James Paul Gee and Michael Handford. With a focus on the application of Discourse Analysis to real-life problems, the contributors introduce the reader to a topic, and analyse authentic data. The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis is vital reading for linguistics students as well as students of communication and cultural studies, social psychology and anthropology.

This fully-updated new edition engages with topics such as orality and literacy, the history of literacy, the uses and abuses of literacy in that history, the analysis of language as cultural communication, and social theories of mind and meaning, among many other topics. It represents the most current statement of a widely discussed and used theory about how language functions in society, a theory initially developed in the first edition of the book, and developed in this new edition in tandem with analytic techniques for the study of language and literacy in context, with special reference to cross-cultural issues in communities and schools. Built around a large number of specific examples, this new edition reflects current debates across the world about education and educational reform, the nature of language and communication, and the role of sociocultural diversity in schools and society.  One of the core goals of this book, from its first edition on, has been to develop a new and more widely applicable vision of applied linguistics. It will be of interest to researchers, lecturers and students in education, linguistics, or any field that deals with language, especially in social or cultural terms.