Abstract
Although generally studied as a psycholinguistic decoding process, reading can also be studied as a social practice. This chapter presents an analysis of one English language learner’s interactions in literacy events over nine months in a classroom. The participant, “Li”, had little experience with schooling or literacy in any language. The literacy events were opportunities for students to talk with one another about books they had just read. The sequential analysis shows that participants have a number of orientations to accomplishing the work of talking about a just-read book and the practices for doing that work change over the course of nine months. A case is made that repeated performance of the literacy event leads to experienced practice which can be considered evidence of learning.
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Notes
- 1.
I thank HsiaoYun Shotwell and Chenghan Wang for translation work.
- 2.
Two students in each class period at the data collection site volunteered to wear a wireless microphone. Classroom instructors helped ensure a fairly equal distribution of students wearing a microphone. Students who wore the microphone and that student’s seatmate were then the focus of one of two remotely controlled cameras (see Reder et al. 2003 for full details).
- 3.
The fifth transcript from October is not included in this analysis because it did not include the retelling activity that was part of the other four interactions.
- 4.
Li’s reading from the first line of the text is easy to make out (oh no). To understand line 92, one must look at the association between Li’s oral production and the words on the page rather than the transcribed sounds alone. For example, in line 92, Li adds vowels between consonant clusters and letters become syllables themselves so that the /f/ and /r/ combination in Fred are articulated by Li as /fo.ren/. The /d/ in Fred becomes its own syllable, /duh/.
- 5.
A reviewer asked how I know how Li’s articulation relates to the text from the book she has in front of her. The camera sometimes focuses on what Li is pointing to as she articulates those words. Her word-by-word pointing is visible as she articulates in a word-by-word manner. When she says what is transcribed as batoh. lo. beese saytoh u::i. in lines 4 and 6, this aligns with But the bees said “we…” from lines 1 and 2 of the book.
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Appendix: Special Symbols Used in Transcripts
Appendix: Special Symbols Used in Transcripts
| | Indicates the point of overlap of nonverbal conduct with talk |
---- | Indicates continuation of nonverbal activity |
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Hellermann, J. (2018). Talking About Reading: Changing Practices for a Literacy Event. In: Pekarek Doehler, S., Wagner, J., González-Martínez, E. (eds) Longitudinal Studies on the Organization of Social Interaction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57007-9_4
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