150 Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156

improving the quality of the text, and the social and educational dimensions involved (including the pressure
in professional life to write well).
In the closing chapter (Chapter 10), Christine Pearson Canave tries to shed light on writing pedagogy. Pear-
son tackles a topic which has not been commonly revisited in the field: ‘FL writing teacher education’. Pearson
presents an extensive review of the literature, as well as real experiences in the field, setting out the realities
teacher writing, in order to show the implications that such teacher education in writing might have on writing
instruction. One of the main conclusions of this chapter is that both EFL educators and instructors should
revisit what they really need in their actual instructional settings (different contexts may have different needs),
instead of creating general EFL curricula for EFL writing instruction.
All in all, this book provides an extensive review of the research that has been carried out to date, through
presenting and discussing some of the major research projects in FL writing. The book not only covers what
has already been found and considered, but also reflects on what needs to be researched in the future. While
Writing in Foreign Language Contexts is primarily targeted at researchers who work in the field of writing, it
will also be a valuable resource for FL teachers.

Júlia Barón
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya,
Universitat de Barcelona,
Spain
Tel.: +34 93 403 56 74; fax: +34 317 12 49
E-mail address: juliabaron@ub.edu

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.11.004

Scientific Discourse: Multiliteracy in the Classroom, David Hanauer. Continuum, London (2006), pp. 212

To characterize the discourse of science, Halliday and Martin (1993) offer a coherent, comprehensive and
empirically validated systemic functional analysis of science texts that focuses on three ways in which meaning
is communicated in science texts. First, they explore the means by which mental reality is construed in science
texts. Secondly, they demonstrate the degree of abstractness or concreteness of science texts. Lastly, they un-
cover the rhetorical structure of scientific reasoning that these texts carry. In this ‘applied linguistics’ frame of
reference, these three features correspond, in turn, to (1) the ideational meta-function of language, (2) the lex-
ical packaging that is manifested through grammatical metaphors, and (3) the textual meta-function of
language.
In addition, Halliday and Martin (1993) also recognize three complementary ways in which texts construe
the physical, social and cognitive world around us: (a) texts represent the material processes of the physical
world, (b) they influence the social and cognitive world through verbal and mental processes, and (c) they rep-
resent the world through the relational processes of self-reference.
Very much in this line of scholarship, the express purpose of David Hanauer’s work, Scientific Discourse:
Multiliteracy in the Classroom, as its title implies, is ‘to describe the characteristics of [pedagogical and/or
guided] scientific discourse in an elementary science inquiry classroom’ (p. 203) and demonstrate ‘how this
interacts with early literacy’. The book is a research monograph based on a 2-year qualitative study of literacy
practices and science education in a specific elementary science-literacy classroom. It opens with a vignette of
science classroom life where four second-grade children are very excited at every object they find in a deep
square plastic box, raising fascinating questions about science, literacy and discourse, and the importance
of their link with literacy development and science learning.
The first three chapters of the book put the study in its appropriate theoretical perspective. The first chapter
essentially brings to the fore the theoretical link between science, discourse and literacy development. The
 Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156 151

heart of this exploration is the idea that (1) discourse is contextualized, (2) discourse, literacy and learning are
the result of social practice, and (3) they involve an interaction between specific social contexts and individual
cognitive systems. All these are commendable.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of the concept of cognitive development in the context of science inquiry
and literacy education. The author takes a neo-Piagetian approach to cognitive development and postulates
that discourse, literacy and learning are situated activities that may lead to a context-sensitive development of
domain-specific expert knowledge, emphasizing the way in which this knowledge can then broaden cognitive
abilities.
In terms of pedagogy, Chapter 3 conceptualizes scientific inquiry as a ‘method’ of teaching science. It advo-
cates inquiry-based science instruction that emphasizes the importance of the learners’ direct involvement with
activity-based science learning in order for scientific knowledge to develop. Hence, from a science education
perspective, the book essentially promotes a genre-based, task-oriented pedagogy with an eye to the new social
theories of literacy. In following this approach, it, thus, provides a wealth of very useful theoretical guidelines
and practical ideas that could be of much interest to science teachers/educators and science textbook
developers.
Following the design of a research monograph, Chapter 4 outlines the methodology and data collection
procedure of the study. The data collected for this study comprised the class textbooks, the teacher’s
classroom logs, the multiliteracy classroom products of student work, and a series of videos and transcripts
of science-literacy activities in a second-grade science inquiry classroom in a low income area in the
California Bay region, USA. The class consisted of 20 children, the majority of whom had low levels of
English proficiency. The content of the course was a specific science unit, ‘The Sandy Shoreline’, designed
to develop scientific knowledge of the sandy shore ecosystem for elementary school children, and
team-taught for 5 weeks in the autumn of 2003 by a member of the science unit development team together
with the regular classroom teacher. The unit of data was a specific task being completed. A detailed coding
system was then developed and applied to the video data for a comprehensive analysis of each of the
videotaped tasks.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide a detailed description of the tasks and genres which surfaced in the context
of the elementary science classroom. The true heart of the book is Chapter 5. It offers a thick qualitative
account of the way in which the science classroom tasks and activities related to the science unit were
implemented by a selected group of children and the kinds of responses received from the children.
The scientific inquiry tasks are designed in such a way as to engage students in interesting activities in
the classroom, leading them through the staged learning cycles of noticing, observing, categorizing, infer-
encing, argumentation, drawing pictures, etc., that may develop in student investigators both substantive
knowledge informed by concepts of natural phenomena and procedural knowledge as practiced by real
scientists. Chapter 6 describes in detail the analyses of the representational genres and the cognitive
processes involved in the production of both pictorial and written products produced by children in
the science classroom studying ‘The Sandy Shoreline’ unit: pictures, coloured maps, photograph descrip-
tions, postcard story descriptions, and observation worksheets. This analysis points to and provides some
insights into the development of both scientific and multiliteracy knowledge in the context of the elemen-
tary science classroom.
The last three chapters of the book explore the findings of the study and relate them to its
theoretical underpinnings framed in the first three chapters. Chapter 7 offers a bird’s eye-view of the
progression of meaningful scientific knowledge development, and addresses the issue of how substantive
and procedural scientific knowledge, together with literacy and multiliteracy knowledge of elementary
science develop in young learners. The development of scientific thinking is seen as the movement
from a holistic, authority-based approach to natural phenomena to a form of observation-based
conclusion.
Chapter 8 pointing to the centrality of multiliteracy to the science inquiry classroom, deals with the role of
this multiliteracy in the development of scientific knowledge. Following an in-depth analysis of the classroom
activities and genres (oral, written, pictorial), the author discusses how these modes of communication lead to
the development of scientific knowledge.
152 Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156

The final chapter conceptualizes the characteristics of scientific discourse as manifested in this context, mak-
ing a valid distinction between the forward-looking ‘professional’ scientific discourse and backward-looking
‘pedagogical’ scientific discourse. The former aims at using discourse to find plausible explanations of phe-
nomena in the real world while the latter deals with the presentation of accepted knowledge. To conclude,
Hanauer offers a revised definition of scientific inquiry as simulated ‘guided’ science, which he considers to
be a practical educational solution to the question of how one may teach science to early elementary school
students. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that the success of his multiliteracy approach to teaching science to chil-
dren in elementary schools depends heavily on the ability of the teacher to mediate the science inquiry learning
process.
While the title of book is appealing, it is also the book’s Achilles’ heel. That is to say, in terms of content,
David Hanauer’s work is more of a resource book that provides advice to literacy practitioners on how to
implement ‘science teaching’ than a book on ‘scientific discourse’ as it is understood from the perspective
of applied linguistics. Therefore, I feel I have no hesitation in recommending this book to science teachers,
science teacher training departments, literacy educators, and researchers in the field of science education.
However, with reference to the applied linguistics framework that Halliday and Martin (1993) offer to describe
scientific discourse, this book contributes little of special significance to researchers of applied linguistics, dis-
course analysis, or English as a second/foreign language.

Reference

Halliday, M.A.K., Martin, J.R. (Eds.), 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.

Hasan Ansary
Islamic Azad University (IAU),
Qazvin,
Iran
E-mail address: ansary2877@yahoo.com

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.11.005

Formulaic Language, Vols. 1 and 2, Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali, Kathleen M.
Wheatley (Eds.). John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam (2009). 638 pp.

If recent publications in the area are any indication, the study of formulaic language is now in its heyday.
The current trend seems to have begun with the publication of Alison Wray’s Formulaic Language and the
Lexicon in 2002, and since then has gone from strength to strength, with books on the same subject and of
equally high quality, such as Schmitt (2004), Granger and Meunier (2008), and Wray (2008), to name a
few. Joining their ranks, and sure to be of profound influence, is the two-volume Formulaic Language, a col-
lection of selected papers first presented at the 25th University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Sympo-
sium on Formulaic Language in 2007.
Volume 1, subtitled Distribution and historical change, takes a bird’s eye view of the field, looking at What is
formulaic language? (Part 1), Structure and distribution (Part 2), and Historical change (Part 3), preceded by a
persuasive introduction by Corrigan and company, explicating why formulae ‘must be assumed to be one of
the basic units of linguistic description’ (p. xxiii).
Part 1 appropriately starts with a paper on the place of formulaic language in linguistics by the person who
arguably touched off modern interest in phraseology, Andrew Pawley (cf. Pawley and Syder, 1983). In addi-
tion to providing some unique background into what motivated Pawley to begin investigating formulaic lan-
guage, he argues effectively that what was once considered the ‘periphery’ in language is in fact a sine qua non
of it, underscoring the inadequacies of spurious attempts at purely grammatical accounts of language
structure.