This book makes work in the field of sociolinguistics easily accessible to working teachers and to teachers in training. It focuses on the crucial first weeks that children spend in school, and deals with talk as a joint production, in which teachers and pupils are engaged from the earliest stages of the educational process. Using a variety of research methods and observations, Mary Willes captures the reality of what goes on in the classroom, and describes how young children develop both linguistic and cognitive skills in this social context. In addition, she examines classrooms where teachers have to find ways of interacting with young speakers of a mother tongue other than English.