"Bridging Discourses in the ESL Classroom" examines the interactions between learners and teachers in a content-based classroom. It aims to identify patterns of discourse which support both second language development and curriculum learning, and the pedagogical contexts in which they occur. These interactional patterns are bridging discourses in that they build on the everyday language and prior experiences of the student in the process of developing the specialised academic registers of school. The study examines the use of these bridging discourses in two case study classrooms to show how they offer affordances for learning. This book puts forward an innovative new approach to the analysis of classroom discourse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics and sociocultural theory, it argues that the significance of classroom talk for second language development can only be understood when it is examined within its situational, historical and sociocultural context. The book is recommended for academics and postgraduates researching applied linguistics and education.