Stanton Wortham & Betsy Rymes (eds.), Linguistic anthropology of education. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. 288. Hb $69.95.

In his introduction to this volume, Stanton Wortham argues for the value of a linguistic anthropological approach to education. After all, “a society's beliefs about language – as a symbol of nationalism, a marker of differences, or a tool of assimilation – are often reproduced and challenged through educational institutions” (p. 2). So too is language used in schools in ways that, often unwittingly, reproduce the inequities in society more generally; a linguistic anthropological approach is particularly well suited to pointing out the processes by which this happens.