Views with the Teacher, Teacher-Student Interactions, the Students’ Artifacts, and the Researchers’ Fields Notes and Research Journals

Home , Kamil (metre), Tetrameter

A MICROETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF INTERTEXTUALITY AND POETICS

IN WRITING PRACTICES IN A KINDERGARTEN CLASSROOM

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Huili Hong, M.A.

*****

Graduate Program in Education

The Ohio State University

2012

Dissertation Committee:

Professor David Bloome, Advisor

Professor Alan Hirvela

Professor Laurie Katz

Professor David Yaden Copyright by

Huili Hong

2012 ABSTRACT

This dissertation reports on a yearlong microethnographic study that investigated the social construction of intertextuality and poetics in young children’s classroom writing practices over time. The participants were nineteen five- to six-year-old kindergarteners from six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Indian,

Venezuelan, Finnish, Russian, Iraqi, and Mexican), as well as their teacher, who attended an elementary school in the Midwestern United States.

The study adopted a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis of the naturally occurring classroom activities and also analyzed interviews with the teacher, teacher-student interactions, the students’ artifacts, and the researchers’ fields notes and research journals.

Examination of the young children’s social construction of intertextuality as a learning heuristic and of poetics in their writing practices yielded two main sets of findings. First, the young children’s writing was found to involve a set of complex intertextual practices. The jointly constructed intertextualities were found to be more complex than the processes of proposing, recognizing, acknowledging, and constituting social significance or consequences found in previous research on the social construction of intertextuality. Rather, the present research found that the social construction of intertextuality involved highly fluid processes with some reoccurring, suspended, and

ii omitted phases. Students’ intertextuality construction was found to be multi-layered and intertwined with each other. The children’s continuous construction of organizational, thematic, and orientational intertextualities became powerful heuristics of their various kinds of learning. Second, a shared poetics was found to be constructed through the

ELLs’ learning, experimenting, and experiences with poetic language uses and devices.

The results showed that the shared poetics constituted part of their classroom culture and the poetics construction processes successfully engaged the children’s imagination and creativity in their writing practices. The findings underscore the potentials of engaging young children in intertextuality and poetics construction as well as the importance of play, pleasure, poetics, and aesthetics as part of children’s classroom literacy learning practices.

iii Dedicated to HIM Also dedicated to Victoria (Ruiya)

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the years in my life so far, my heart has always been full of gratitude. I could never have made it on my own. First and foremost, this dissertation would never be possible without the amazing support from the teacher and all the lovely children in the

English language learner kindergarten classroom. Their participation in, contribution to, and inspiration for this dissertation research is deeply appreciated.

I am deeply grateful to all my committee members: Dr. David Bloome, Dr. Alan

Hirvela, Dr. Laurie Katz, and Dr. David Yaden. It is such a great honor to have you on my committee. I want to express my sincere thanks to each one of you for being part of my graduate school experience and dissertation research process.

My utmost gratitude goes to my advisor, Dr. David Bloome. Words fail me to express my appreciation to you for your inspiring teaching and advising. I gratefully thank Dr. Alan Hirvela with whom I had the privilege to work in the first two years of my graduate study at The Ohio State University. Your work ethic definitely set up an excellent model for me to pursue in my graduate study and in the future. My warm and sincere thanks go to Dr. Laurie Katz for your advice on and crucial contribution to my dissertation research. I gratefully acknowledge Dr. David Yaden for kindly agreeing to be on my committee and guiding me through this study.

v My special thanks go to Dr. Adelaide Parsons and Dr. Fred Janzow who helped me realize my dream of studying in the States. Many thanks also go to my friends: Melissa

Wilson, Marlene Beierle, and Dr. Icy Lee. Melissa and Marlene, thank you for sharing so many research sources and your precious teaching experiences. Icy, thank you for your prayers for me and warm notes. I would like to thank everyone that I ever worked with in the Language, Education, and Society program and Foreign and Second Language

Education program.

I want to thank Dr. Shirley Brice Heath for your feedback on my dissertation and my future research. I want to thank Dr. Judith Green for your generous sharing of discourse analysis and ethnographic study resources.

My biggest thanks go to my other two life-long teachers: my parents. Thank you,

Dad, for the freedom you gave me to make my choices in my life. Thanks to you and

Mom for your unfailing support and love for me and passing your passion for teaching on to me. To my brother, Weiwei, I thank you for being my best friend and supporting me unconditionally all the time. My deep appreciation also goes to Miao. Thank you for being with me through the ups and downs all these years.

Last but most important, I thank HIM for HIS love for me, mercy on me, sharing of wisdom, knowledge, and courage with me and sending Victoria (Ruiya), my best friend and the most precious gift in my life.

vi VITA

2002 ...... B.A. English Education, Hunan Normal University

2006 ...... M.A. English Language and Literature, Beijing Language and Culture University

2008...... M.A. TESOL, Southeast Missouri State University

2008-present...... Ph. D. Candidate College of Education and Human Ecology The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

Bloome, D., Katz, L., Hong, H., May-Woods, P., & Wilson, M. (in press). Methodologies in research on young children and literacy. To be published in J. Larson, N. Hall, & J. Marsh (Eds.), Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (2nd Edition). SAGE.

Hong, H. (in press). Reading goes hybrid: Case study of a second language reader. In Y. Ning & S. Liu (Eds.), Foreign Language Learning in Cross-cultural Contexts. Beijing: Higher Education Press.

Hong, H. (in press). Time to speak out: Looking for the keys to successful Non-native English speaking professionals’ conference presentation. In Y. Ning & S. Liu (Eds.), In Foreign Language Learning in Cross-cultural Contexts. Beijing, Higher Education Press.

Bloome, D., & Hong, H. (2012). Reading and intertextuality. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

vii FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Education and Human Ecology

Areas of Emphases: Literacy studies Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Language Education

Cognate Areas: Discourse Analysis, Ethnographic Study, Qualitative Research

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Vita and Publications...... vii Fields of Study...... viii Table of Contents...... ix List of Tables ...... xii

CHAPTERS: 1. Introduction ...... 1 Statement of the problem ...... 4 Research questions ...... 5 Purposes and significance of the study...... 7 Theoretical framework and assumptions...... 7 Limitations of the study...... 9 Definition of key terms ...... 10 Outline of the dissertation ...... 17

2. Literature Review...... 18 Interrelatedness of children’s writing, talking, drawing and play...... 21 Use of Intertextuality in teaching, learning and research ELL students’ reading and writing...... 45 Aesthetics and playfulness of and in children’s literacy experience...... 48

3. Logic of Inquiry...... 54 Research setting...... 58 Data collection...... 58 Identification and analyses of key literacy events...... 74 Cross-event analyses ...... 77 Analyses of other data sources...... 78

4. Findings ...... 80 Examining Socially constructed intertextuality as a learning heuristic in the ELL students’ writing workshop...... 81 Social construction of a poetics: exploring aesthetics in five-year-olds’ writing

ix practices...... 120 An interpretation of the findings...... 172

5. Discussion and Conclusion...... 176 Introduction...... 176 Contributions to the field...... 184 Implications for future research...... 189

References...... 194

APPENDIX A - Kate’s Artifact in Spring 2010...... 216 APPENDIX B - Classroom Settings...... 217 APPENDIX C - Poem: “The Stapler”...... 218 APPENDIX D - “End-of-Year Poster”...... 219 APPENDIX E - Poem: “Water Fountain”...... 220 APPENDIX F - Classroom Poster “Author” ...... 221 APPENDIX G - First Nonfiction Writing Unit ...... 222 APPENDIX H - Lori’s Story “No Cloe!”...... 223 APPENDIX I - Climax of “Let’s Help Don Fix His Christmas Poem”...... 224 APPENDIX J - Tina’s Story “When you see Eva, You...” in Punctuation Writing Unit.225 APPENDIX K - The Students’ Published Poems in First Poem Writing Unit...... 226 APPENDIX L - Lori, Dean, Bridget and Nina’s Artifacts in Spring Semester...... 227 APPENDIX M - School District’s Kindergarten Simple Story Rubric...... 228 APPENDIX N - Collective Reflection on Their Writing Processes...... 229 APPENDIX O - Survey ...... 230

x LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1. General daily schedule of the ELL kindergarten...... 64 3.2. Writing unit structure...... 65 3.3. Data Corpus...... 70 4.1. Transcript: Whole-class prewriting discussion...... 86 4.2. Varieties of learning...... 107 4.3. Transcript: No Cloe! Lori’s story about her pretend dog...... 115 4.4. Lori’s sotry: No Cole!...... 119 4.5. Set-up of the stage...... 126 4.6. Prelude of their narrative poem...... 128 4.7. Exposition...... 132 4.8. Rising action...... 134 4.9. Climax...... 138 4.10. Falling action and denouement...... 141 4.11. Poem writing “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring”...... 147 4.12. Poetics Construction in a Wow-non-fiction Writing Unit...... 156 4.13. Poetics Construction in Word Family Activity...... 159 4.14. Defamiliarization in Poem Writing...... 164

xi xii CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This study is about the writing of young children in a kindergarten classroom. It is about how young language learners learn to write in English and what they learn from

English writing.

In this dissertation, children’s writing is viewed as a set of complex interpersonal social practices (Heath, 1983, 2012) as well as a set of coherent intrapersonal cognitive and metacognive processes or strategies (Brown, 1978; Flavell, 1979; Flower & Hayes,

1981; Vygotsky, 1978). As Robinson (1987) states,

It will no longer do, I think, to consider literacy as some abstract, absolute

quality attainable through tutelage and the accumulation of knowledge and

experience. It will no longer do to think of reading as a solitary act in

which a mainly passive reader responds to cues in a text to find meaning.

It will no longer do to think of writing as a mechanical manipulation of

grammatical codes and formal structures leading to the production of

perfect or perfectible texts. Reading and writing are not unitary skills nor

are the reducible to sets of component skills falling neatly under discrete

categories (linguistic, cognitive); rather, they are complex human activities

taking place in complex human relationships. (p. 329)

Young children’s writing involves an interactive social construction of meaning, social relations, identities, realities, knowledge, and ideology, constituting different cultural phenomena in different social contexts. This definition of writing derives from theory and research that view writing and literacy more generally as social and cultural processes (Bloome, 1986; Gee, 1996; Street, 1984, 1995). Writing is not restricted to students’ use of pencils to form letters but rather includes social events and practices involving writing that may also involve talking, drawing, playing, and dialogic interactions. Street (1984, 1995) has labeled the view of writing and literacy employed here as an ideological model of literacy and the decontextualized view of literacy as an autonomous model. A more detailed discussion about writing as a set of social practices follows later as part of the definition of key terms and part of the theoretical framing of the study.

The study took place in a Midwestern elementary school with all English language learners. Although the classroom was dedicated to English language learners and had a goal to address English language and literacy learning, this study did not specifically or solely focus on the second language acquisition of the students but rather investigated processes and practices pertinent to all children that engage in writing.

In this study, I was particularly interested in two aspects of the young children’s writing: (1) the students’ juxtaposition, orchestration, and transformation (hereafter called intertextual processes) of texts as complex processes of learning to write, writing to learning, and constructing heuristics for various kinds of learning and meaning and (2) the children’s play with and use of poetic language and poetic devices as a means for

2 engaging in writing of an aesthetic nature. I focused on these two aspects because preliminary analysis of the corpus of the data collected for the dissertation showed that these two aspects were prominent in the children’s classroom writing practices. Further, neither of these aspects has been much studied in research on young children’s writing practices (a notable exception is Rowe, 2000, whose qualitative study of preschool children also suggests the importance of intertextual practices and of children’s aesthetic responses to literature books and their play with the aesthetics of written language).

These are, of course, not the only aspects of young children’s written language practices that are important, but they are the ones emphasized here for the reasons above.

The intertextual and poetic nature of the young children’s writing practices and their aesthetic experiences are constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed in and through children’s ongoing, moment-to-moment classroom interactions and social relationships

(Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005; Bloome, Carter, Christian, &

Madrid, 2008; Cook-Gumperz,1986, 2006; Gergan, 1999, 2001; Green & Wallet, 1981;

Gumperz, 1986; Hymes, 1974). These social and cultural theories of languages opened space for me to explore children’s engagement of imagination and creativity in their construction of meaning potentials (Halliday, 1978) and an aesthetic dimension of their writing. The intertextualities and poetics constructed in the children’s writing practices constitute and are also constrained by the local and broader social and cultural environments. Therefore, the study adopted a microethnographic approach to examine the children’s classroom writing at a micro-level interaction context while also emphasizing the interconnectedness of micro and macro contexts in which their writing practices were

situated (cf., Bloome et al., 2008; Bloome, Beierle, Grigorenko, & Goldman, 2009;

Bloome & Clark, 2006; Gee, 1996; Smith, 2008).

What follow are the statement of the problem and my research questions. I proceed to discuss the purpose and significance of this study, its theoretical framing and assumptions, and then its limitations. The definitions of key terms and outline of this dissertation are provided at the end of this chapter.

Statement of the Problem

Despite a large body of research on the writing of ELL students, there are few studies of English writing of young ELL students in primary grades (PreK–3). That is, studies of ELL students learning to write are primarily located at the secondary and college levels. Although research on ELL students learning to write at the secondary and college levels provides useful insights for exploration of young ELL students learning to write, the differences in the practices, participants, and settings are such that the research cannot be directly imported to the field of young ELL students’ literacy learning and practice.

One of the problems faced by scholars interested in the writing practices of young

ELLs is knowing what questions to ask. One of the functions of ethnographic research is to generate grounded theoretical hypotheses (Green & Bloome, 2005) that can guide what questions to ask, and that is one of the purposes of this study that is discussed later in this chapter.

4 Research Questions

In an ethnographic study, the research questions serve as “guides” that focus the study and that connect the study to the research problem (Bloome, 2005). They act as

“openings”, the entry points, for exploring at an empirical and theoretical level a particular set of social practices, social actors, and social settings (Bloome, 2005).

The overarching research question here is: How are young ELL students’ writing practices socially and discursively constructed in the classroom, and how does this particular set of social practices change and evolve across time and space.

There are many possible areas and topics that can be addressed in and through the overarching research question. As noted earlier, this dissertation focuses on two particular aspects of the young ELL students’ writing practices. The first aspect is the intertextual nature of their writing practice. In part, writing is a social practice of putting together different words, texts, and semiotic sources (signs and symbols) purposefully and artfully. What matters is not only what texts or sources are presented in ELL children’s final written product but also how the texts and the sources get orchestrated during their writing processes.

The second aspect is children’s play with and use of the poetic nature of written language. In my view, children’s play with the poetic nature of language derives from children’s inherent and universal orientation of playing. This inborn nature is presented and practiced as children play in different times and across different cultures (Vygotsky,

1976). Therefore, it is not surprising that play is naturally part of young children’s writing practices and literacy learning (Cook, 1997; Gee, 2011; Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Roskos

& Christie, 2000, 2001; Rowe, 2000; Wohlwend, 2011). In the ELL writing workshop from which much of the data for this study was derived, the children engaged in playing with language(s) in funny, creative, and poetic ways. Examining the construction of a particular poetics in the children’s language-in-use and its nature is a useful approach to enriching our understanding and appreciation of young children’s writing processes and practices over time.

There has been a need for a systematic and in-depth examination of the playfulness, aesthetics, and artfulness of ELL children’s languages-in-use in their school or non-school literacy practices. Indicative of the importance of this dimension of writing, the latest edition of The Handbook of Language Socialization (Duranti, Ochs, &

Schieffelin, 2011) devotes a section particularly to aesthetics and imagination as an effort to invite more research foregrounding aesthetics, imagination, and creativity in the language socialization of children, whose various playful practices constitute parts of our social worlds (pp. 423-424). Long before the call for more research on aesthetics and imagination made in the above handbook, Bauman and Briggs (1990) pointed out that

“poetics, the aesthetic uses of language, has long been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists whose work mainly devoted to core areas of linguistics, phonology, syntax, semantics, or anthropological fields as economy and social organization” (p. 59).

To address the research needs discussed above, this study explored the following two sets of research questions in particular:

1. How is intertextuality socially constructed as a learning heuristic in ELL students’

writing workshop?

6 2. How is a poetics constructed and used in ELL students’ writing practices? What is the

nature of this poetics?

Purposes and Significance of the Study

This microethnographic study aims to add to our understanding of the complex processes and richness of young children’s learning to write and writing to learn through reconceptualizing their writing as a particular social practice discursively constructed over time. In doing so, this study calls more attention to the intertexual and poetic nature of young ELL children’ literacy experiences and their writing processes that have not been sufficiently explored or accounted for in (second/third/foreign) language learning theories or various standardized assessments.

The significance of this research lies in its microethnographic study on the intertextualities and poetics in young ELL students’ writing practices, which have not been fully explored in the field of young ELLs’ literacy practices and development.

Examination of the intertextual and poetic nature of writing practices deepens our current understanding and appreciation of their literacy practices and the associated learning. The findings derived from poetry analysis and plot analysis of the children’s interactive writing process offer an alternative view of young ELL students’ writing processes and add an aesthetic dimension to the theories of second language learning and literacy experience.

Theoretical Framework and Assumptions

In researching young children’s writing as a set of social practices, this study draws upon social constructionism (Gergen, 1999, 2001; Gergen & Gergen, 2010) and

interactional sociolinguistics (e.g., Bloome et al., 2005; Cook-Gumperz, 1986, 2006;

Green & Wallet, 1981; Gumperz, 1986; Hymes, 1974; Volosinov, 1929/1973). The site of meaning making and knowledge construction is located in the ongoing, moment-to- moment interactions and social relationships among interactants in particular events. The

ELL students and the teacher’s classroom interactions constitute particular events and cultural phenomena, reflecting broader social culture and ideologies. Through their “co- action” (cf., Gergen, 1999) in their writing practice, the students and their teacher proceeded to create new relationships and meaning potentials but presented a

“pastiche” (Gergen, 2001) of substantial language, texts, action, and relations scattered over time and circumstances. In essence, their writing (both process and product) carried multiple voices (Bahktin, 1986), multimodal texts (Wohlwend, 2011), “intertextual links” (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993), and social relations and cultures.

What follows are the basic theoretical and methodological assumptions that guided this study.

1. People’s daily lives (including writing) are socially and discursively constructed

(Bloome et al., 2005; Cook-Gumperz, 1986, 2006; Green & Wallet, 1981; Gumperz,

1986; Hymes, 1974). Likewise, truth, realities, meaning, learning, and knowledge are

not predetermined but co-constructed by people in a particular time and place (Gergen,

2001).

2. Meaning potentials and learning opportunities are not only accomplished in

individuals’ minds but also socially constructed (Gergen, 1999, 2001) and realized

8 through people’s ongoing multimodal and multidimensional action and reactions to

each other and to a common world (Bloome et al., 2005).

3. The social and relational generation of meaning and knowledge not only employs

language and actions of the interactants but also calls forth contexts with which to

construct meaning in any given relationship (Bloome et al., 2005; Cook-Gumperz,

1986, 2006; Gergen, 2001; Gumperz, 1986; Green & Wallet, 1981; Hymes, 1974). The

students’ actions and reactions to each other constituted the interpersonal context for

their writing (Bloome, 2005; Green & Wallet, 1981).

4. Language is only one component of the performed actions (Gergen & Gergen, 2010).

Written language is only one of the modes to display learning and complex thinking

(Pappas et al., 2009; Varelas et al., 2008).

5. Students’ prior knowledge and experiences can be viewed as texts for their literacy

practices (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Gee, 1985; Volosinvov, 1929/1973), as

can their spoken language, drawings, gestures, playing, and writing. Their use of such

texts can be characterized as a simultaneous and successive intertextual process within

and across contexts (Goldman & Bloome, 2005).

6. Texts, as rhetoric, are juxtaposed and recontextualized to build favored relations and

realities with certain social effects and consequences (cf., Bloome & Hong, 2011).

Limitations of the Study

This microethnographic study on the beginning writing practice of ELL students in a particular kindergarten classroom has the following limitations.

First, this research studied only one particular kindergarten classroom with a focus on ELL students’ writing. The findings may not be generalizable to other literacy practice domains or the writing practices in native English-speaking students’ classrooms or mainstream classrooms with a certain number of ELL students.

Second, this microethnographic study mainly focused on the classroom interactions in the writing workshop. The primary data was collected from their writing workshop session. In future research, observation in and data collection from other domains of the students’ school life may help construct a broader context to understand the students’ writing practices. For instance, more data can be added from observation or recording of their reading aloud sessions, their daily five choices, their library reading, the phonics session in the afternoon, and other students and people’s reactions to the children’s work exhibited in their cafeteria. Data corpus enlargement can also enable the researcher to further explore the interconnectedness of the students’ various sets of particular social practice and how they may be orchestrated to improve the students’ overall learning experience in school.

The third limitation of my study is the scripts about the ELLs’ diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and their exposure to different literacies. I did not collect data about the children’s first language uses and scripts related to out-of-school literacy practices or their first literacy competence. Both of these areas may influence first language and second language literacy practices. Another limitation of this study is that the relationship between their school and non-school literacy practices has not been further explored. In the end, this study is limited regarding the representation of the in

10 situ children's interactive writing practice. Many poetic features and dramatic elements fabricating their school literacy practice and experiences were not fully represented or analyzed. Multimodal or multiple symbolic representations of the selected video data may improve the richness of the above aspects (personal communication with Dr. Judith

Green, June 4th, 2012; personal communication with Dr. Karen Wohlwend, June 3rd,

2012).

Definitions of Key Terms

Context: Contexts are constituted by what people are doing and where and when they are doing it (Erickson & Schultz, 1977). Within a social constructionist perspective, all contexts are not socially predetermined but constructed. The students and the teacher’s actions and reactions to each constitute an interpersonal context (Bloome et al., 2005;

Erickson & Schultz, 1977; McDermott, 1976). There is also intrapersonal context existing in an individual’s mind (Vygotsky, 1978), which was not the focus of this study.

How the students and the teacher interact with each other is based on their shared understanding of broader social contexts, including the broad social and cultural structure they have lived, and influences the broader contexts as well (Bloome et al., 2005).

Deep learning: Deep learning is defined as children’s internalization of their jointly constructed knowledge in their daily social practices (particularly their literacy practices in this study), which relates their prior knowledge to new knowledge to deepen and define their thinking and understanding about their beings (personhood) and doings in the world. Deep learning is often associated with abstract concepts and the underlying social,

cultural, and ideological conventions that constitute and guide the learners’ learning and interactions.

Event: An event is defined as a bounded series of actions and reactions that people make in response to each other at the level of face-to-face interaction (Bloome et al., 2005). An event is marked off from others by some degree of thematic coherence and by detectable shifts in content, prosody, and stylistic or other formal markers (Gumperz, 2001). The transcribed events become interactional texts and are often used to discover patterns of interactions containing empirical evidence to test an analyst’s assumption or confirm or disconfirm the interpretations (Gumperz, 2001).

First language writing: First language writing refers to children’s writing in their first language(s).

Intertextuality: Stated simply, intertextuality is the juxtaposition of texts (Bloome &

Eagan-Robertson, 1993). It refers to (a) dialogic interrelations among varying texts (the potential intertextual links/substance; Bloome, 2005) and (b) the socially-constructed and culturally-situated juxtaposition of texts (intertextual practice or intertextual rights and consequences; Bloome, 2005; Bloome & Hong, in press). In this sense, writing is not only a product of text juxtaposition but also a situated socially and discursively constructed process of juxtaposing texts. Therefore, the study of writing needs to be complicated as an inquiry into how people use and refer to texts to construct and enact meaning in their writing practices and how their text juxtapositions are interrelated across different contexts.

12 Intercontextuality: Intercontextuality conceptualizes the social construction of relationships among contexts in the past, present, and the future, including the contexts in which specific events are embedded and the contexts that are referred to in those events in the past and future (Bloome et al., 2005).

Language socialization: Language socialization involves socialization through language and socialization to use language (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). In this microethnographic discourse analytic approach to literacy acquisition, language socialization consists of the processes and patterns that the language learners acquire and the social, cultural, linguistic, and pragmatic knowledge necessary to become participating members of a certain social group (Cook-Gumperz & Kyratzis, 2001; Duff, 2010). Drawing on an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, this study views writing as a dynamic, evolving process during which the students get socialized in discourse communities. In this study, the socialization process includes the ELL children’s English writing practices, exploration and construction of their writer identities and social relationships, and reflection and refraction of the associated social culture and ideologies.

Literacy: Literacy is defined in this study as a set of social practices that are observable in events (Barton & Hamilton, 2000).

Literacy event: A literacy event is a social event in which written language plays an important role (Heath, 1983). It is defined as “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes” (Heath, 1983, p. 3). Also, as Barton and Hamilton (2000) have described:

“Events are observable episodes which arise from practices and are shaped by them. The

notion of events stresses the situated nature of literacy, that it always exists in a social context” (p. 8). That is, it is always situated in people’s interactions, social relations, and the associated ideology. Literacy events are empirical and bounded space where students and teacher(s) are actors and agents performing, creating, changing, and transforming different literacies that come into play in the classroom (Bloome et al., 2005).

Literacy practice: According to Street (1995), literacy practice should be understood as

“literacy-in-practice” (p. 103). Literacy practice is “the general cultural ways of utilizing literacy that people draw upon in a literacy event” (Street, 1991, p. 5). It captures the inseparable relationship between the concrete reading and writing activities in particular events and the social culture and ideology they are associated with (Barton & Hamilton,

2000; Street, 1984, 1995).

Poetics: A poetics is defined here as the children’s playing, learning, experiencing, and experimenting with the poetic language uses and devices. It arouses their own and other participants’ aesthetic responses to their writing processes and products and contributes to the formulation and evolvement of their aesthetic perspectives and values over time. The relevant participants include their current, future, and potential readers. My interest lies in how a poetics is socially constructed by the youngest children in their early literacy practices and becomes a path of enculturation and of their doing literacies and thinking and being literate.

Second language acquisition: Second language acquisition is children’s acquisition of a language beyond their first language. It also refers to the study of how language learners

14 learn to create a new language system with various exposures to a second language (Gass

& Selinker, 2008).

Second language writing: English writing of young ELL students is not automatically assumed in this study as their second language writing because of the young ELL students’ different exposures to their first language literacy. For some ELLs without, or lack of exposure to, their L1 literacy, their English writing may be viewed as part of their

L1 literacy practice. For some with sufficient and continuous exposure to L1 literacy, writing in English is their second language writing. For some others between, English writing is a type of interliteracy practice (Gort, 2006). Additionally, their ethnolinguistic backgrounds may produce cross-linguistic and cross-cultural influences upon their

English writing.

Social event: A social event is a particular set of social practices guided by cultural models or general norms, displaying the particular ways that a particular group of people do particular things on particular occasions. In educational research, the construct of a social event is a heuristic for inquiring into how students interact with each other and their teachers to construct their learning, identities, and social relationships within a social event and how they transform certain practices over time.

Social practice: Social practice is not one way but a set of ways that people do their lives through interactions, participations, and exchanges in particular circumstances. It is not fixed but influences how specific events play out and evolve over time. Social practice is not the same as cognitively shared cultural models but rather is socially oriented and embedded in social contexts (Street, 1985, 1994). In a certain social setting or context,

people hold each other accountable for acting out a certain social practice (Bloome et al.,

2005). Being the actors of the practice, people become a context for each other and a context that can be used to interpret each other and their engagement in the practice

(Bloome et al., 2005).

Text: Bakhtin (1981) defined texts as a “coherent complex of signs” (p. 103). Some scholars have broadened the concept by incorporating people’s knowledge and lived experiences (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Collins & Green, 1992; Harris et al.,

2004) and texts varying in modes, substances, voices, genres, and types (Santa Barbara

Discourse Group, 1992). The operational definition of text in this study is not confined to the written text but extended to the relevant knowledge, social life experiences, and various signs and semiotic sources that have been textualized and orchestrated by the students into their writing practices to make coherent meaning and construct knowledge.

Writing as a social practice: Writing is a particular set of social practices. It is more complicated than a composing process of planning, translating, and revising/reviewing in an individual’s mind (Flower & Hayes, 1981) or an “independent” physical action of someone. As people write and use texts, they enter into a dialogue with others (cf.,

Bakhtin, 1981) and into their social interactions, social relationships, social identities at different institutions, and embedded social contexts and ideologies. As such, writing is a dialogic and historical co-construction process participated in by people in particular times and contexts. Adapting Halliday’s three aspects of language learning (1979, 1980), this dissertation describes children’s writing practice as learning to write and writing to learn.

16 Writing development: From a social-constructionist perspective, writing develops through the students’ engagement into meaningful and purposeful social practices of writing together with peers, teachers, and other relevant participants. That is, their writing development is not a linear trajectory but a dynamic and evolving process situated in their continuous social interactions. This process is tied with and shaped by the involved social relationships, culture, and ideologies.

Writing socialization: Writing socialization, in this dissertation, is viewed similar to language socialization defined by Schieffelin and Ochs (1986). It includes both socialization through writing and socialization to use written language. Writing can hardly fit in a predetermined structure or model but can only be viewed as a dynamic socialization process in which writers learn to write in, through, and about their interactions with others and various life experiences so that they can construct their writing and their readers can consume the writing in socially and culturally appropriate ways.

Outline of the Dissertation

This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter two, which immediately follows, is a review of literature. I first extensively review what is known about young children’s (PreK–3) writing and then the studies informed by intertextuality and focused on children’s play and the poetics of their language uses in particular. In chapter three, I discuss the logic of my inquiry and the dialogical relationship between my theoretical framework and microethnographic discourse analysis of the ELL students’ interactive writing processes. My theoretical framework is built upon interactive sociolinguistics,

social constructionism, and Bakhtinian and Shklovskian literacy criticism theories. The interconnectedness between the micro-level analysis of the students’ in situ classroom interactions and the macro contexts that their interactions comprise and are constrained by is also underscored in this chapter.

Chapter four reports two sets of findings from exploring the two sets of research questions about socially constructed intertextuality as a heuristic for children’s various kinds of learning and the poetics shared in their literacy practices and experiences. The first set of findings further illuminates the fluid and complex process of intertextuality construction that has been identified in Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s study (1993) and presents three interrelated lines of learning that occurred during the ELL students’ intertextual writing processes. The second set of findings shows how a poetics is constructed and shared both in the children’s poem writing but also in other kinds of writing and literacy-oriented activities. The poetics is found to be transformative to their writing and literacy learning practice. A remarkable phenomenon, defamiliarization, is identified from the ELL students’ poem writing practice.

Chapter five recapitulates the purposes of this study, the research questions, and the key findings. It further discusses how the findings of this study build upon the prior studies and make further contributions to the field. This dissertation concludes with implications for future research areas and possible follow-up research questions.

18 CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Children’s literacy development, learning, and practices have been a robust research territory. My review of literature concentrates on the corpus of research that has been conducted since the “social turn” in language learning theories and research since the 1980s and the 1990s (see Gee, 2000, for a discussion of the social turn). This body of sociocultural and context-sensitive research primarily draws on social cognitive, social constructivist, or social constructionist theories, employing qualitative (case study or cross-cases study), ethnographic, and/or discourse analytic approach(es). In particular, I review the series of studies that have examined a child’s or children’s writing as part of his/her/their social practices with emphases on the interconnected linguistic and cultural learning processes, children’s identity development, their structured interaction patterns/ routine, and the cultural models in different communities.

This chapter consists of three sections. To provide an overall picture of what has been known about children’s writing (mainly PreK–3), the first section is an extensive review of literature on the following areas: a) the interrelatedness of children’s writing/ reading, talking, drawing, and play; b) in-school and out-of-school writing and popular culture; and c) emergent biliteracy. The research located in the first area revolves around an overarching question regarding how talking, drawing, and play are orchestrated into children’s reading/writing practices to help them achieve literacy competence or

accomplish their literacy tasks. The primary concern of the second research area is about young children’s school and out-of-school literacy practices and how contemporary popular culture has had an impact on children’s learning and socialization into writing communities. The research on emergent biliteracy or “emergent bilingual writing” (cf.

Gort, 2006) investigates the complicated issues of interference/mutual influence between children’s first language and second/third/foreign language and their ethnolingustically diverse backgrounds that more or less influence their writing practices in different languages.

The rest of the literature review focuses on the particular topics related to the two sets of research questions explored in this dissertation research. The second section of my literature review focuses on childhood/adolescent literacy research informed by intertextuality. The other line of research examines the poetics of writing, aesthetic dimensions in literacy learning, children’s speech play, repetition, and other related topics. Overall, the review of literature in this chapter illuminates that children’s talking, drawing, play, and writing are orchestrated together in their writing practice. It further suggests the need for an in-depth investigation of how young ELL children may enjoy playing with written languages and texts and sources made available to them to construct meaning and learning and to bring their imagination and creativity into the meaning- making and literacy-learning processes.

Beside the studies reviewed in this chapter, there is also a wide range of research on second language socialization (Duff, 2001, 2010; Willet, 1995) and on adult/mature or adolescent ELL writers, their writing, and writing relevant issues (i.e., agent, voice,

20 selfhood, subjectivity, etc.) (Cheong, 2010; Cox, Jordan, Ortmeier-Hooper, & Schwartz,

2010; Fernsten, 2008; Hirvela, 2005; Hirvela & Belcher, 2001; Hirvela & Sweetland,

2005; Hirvela & Yi, 2008; Ivanič, 1994, 1998; Kabuto, 2010; McKay & Wong, 1996;

Shen, 1989; Yi, 2009, 2010). These studies provide useful insights on second language or multilingual writers’ construction and transition of identity, voices, their voices-related issues, and their transition in different writing communities and between different cultures and ideologies. However, the relevant studies on youngest English language learners or writers, especially in primary grades (PreK-4) have remained insufficiently examined. Meanwhile, the students in our current classrooms are getting more and more linguistically and culturally diverse across all grades in both school and non-school learning communities. Although this dissertation primarily focuses on the intertextual nature and playful and aesthetic nature of (ELL) children’s writing practice, I will continue to discuss future relevant research areas and possible follow-up research questions of this study in chapter five.

Section 1. Children Writing: Interrelatedness of Children’s Writing, Talking,

Drawing, and Play

Talking writing and writing talking. Talking is central to children’s writing

(Baghban, 1984, 2007). Children’s talking and writing are always interwoven with each other working in concert to let children communicate their ideas with others (Dyson,

1981; Baghban, 1984). In a report from a series of action research studies involving ELL students, Haneda and Wells (2000) found that talking is a powerful factor in ELL

students’ composing processes and further that writing is a useful tool and medium for their collaborative learning. As such, children’s writing can be viewed as a dialogic meaning-making process in both spoken and written languages.

Talking is a special social phenomenon in young children’s writing (Bakhtin,

1986). It is vocalization or an oral externalization of their thoughts (Dyson, 1987b), a narrative context (Dyson, 1981), or a narrative text or performance (Bloome, Champion,

Katz, Morton, & Muldrow, 2001; Bloome, Katz, Champion, 2003). Children’s talking may not only represent, adapt, and reflect their writing content but also influences their writing style (Daiute & Dalton, 1993; Dyson, 1987b; Graves, 1983; Kress, 1997;

McGillivray, 1994; Sulzby, 1985). In most occasions, children’s talking enables them to negotiate their ideas and meanings with peers and teachers (Chapman, 1994; Cioffi,

1984; Cox, 1994; Frank, 2009) and transform their negotiated ideas into narrative (both spoken and written) forms (Quintero, 2010).

Moreover, talking is found to mentor children’s writing processes. This mentoring function is operated on the basis of children’s audience awareness explicitly articulated in their talking and reflected in the writing process and products. There is a wide range of studies (Bizzell, 1982; Bulckwalter, 2006; Calkin, 1983; Dyson, 1982b, 1997b; Graves,

1983; Graves & Hansen, 1983; Hudelson, 1984; Hink, 1985; Nistler, 1990; Kreeft et al.,

1984; Perez, 2001; Rowe, 1997; Urzua, 1987; Vukelich, 1986; Walshe, 1980) with a shared concern about the children’s “audience awareness.” A finding shared in common is that talking can help children consider their readers’ or potential readers’ needs and/or realize the “gap” between their writing (or ideas about writing) and social expectations

22 and those of their readers. Further, children’s talking during their writing process is also found to be beneficial to their own and their peers’ growth as readers through reading each other’s work and providing and reacting to peers’ feedback (Calkins, 1983; Phinney,

1998; Rowe, 1989; Urzua, 1987; Wollman-Bonilla, 2001). Haneda (2000, 2005a) and

Gibbons (2003) studied ELL students’ talking in classes other than language arts and also found that the children’s good oral interactions with peers and teachers functioned as an important media to transform content knowledge into content writing, as in their laboratory reports in science classes.

The above research on children’s talking writing and writing talk informs this dissertation study that talking and writing are inseparable in young children’s writing practice. Their findings provide important entry points into understanding the dialogic nature of children's writing. Talking can be a reflexive process tied to their writing such that “everything said can be seen either directly reacting to preceding talk, reflecting a set of immediate circumstances, or responding to past events” (Gumperz, 2001, p. 221).

Further, this large body of literature illuminates various roles and social functions of talking in children's writing practice and puts emphasis on the children's talking/ interactive conversation in my study.

Parallel between writing and drawing. As young children start to write, they display a “graphic urge” (Dickinson, Wolf, & Stotsky, 1993). Kress (1997) also noted that children’s first play with the visual mode of written text is their effort to give shape to their ideas and writing. As a visual art that involves composing with colors and lines

(Korzenik, 1977), drawing moves children’s writing from visual to written texts or from

visual to spoken and then to the written texts (Short, Kauffman, & Kahn, 2000; Sidelnick

& Svoboda, 2000). These are their first steps in textualizing their planned or semi- planned ideas and/or life experiences. During the textualization process, drawing may serve as a prompt or a strategy that makes their ideas visible when young writers lack sufficient writing knowledge and skills (Baghban, 2007; Dyson, 1986b).

Drawing is found to help children explore new ideas for their writing (Short,

Kauffman, & Kahn, 2000). Children may draw some symbols and not know exactly what the symbols stand for. But when they are asked to share and interpret the symbols together with their writing, their talking about their drawing may help them better articulate and understand the meaning of their graphic symbols and their stories/writing

(Powell & Davidson, 2005). This process can motivate them to seek more graphic and orthographic symbols to transcribe their talking and thinking (Clay, 1975; Dyson, 1983).

During the process of articulating ideas and exploring ways to express ideas, children learn through experimenting with their writing in combination with other various modes of language and semiotic uses. They can continuously test their hypotheses about what and how symbols and other modes of language and texts can be used to present their ideas appropriately for different purposes and audience (Baghan, 1984, 2007; Bissex,

1980; Dyson, 1984a, 1984b; Huss, 1995).

Further, drawing is crucial for children’s development of authorship and early literacy development and practice (Haney, 2002). Young children usually draw something meaningful to them first, like their names and family members (Baghban, 1984; Bissex,

1980; Champion, Katz, Muldrow, & Dail, 1999; Haney, 2002) and spend a large amount

24 of time on illustration rather than on writing (Bissex, 1980). Many scholars, such as

Millard and March (2003), advocate that children’s drawing needs to be respected and valued. Their study (Millard & March, 2003) on young pupils’ (ages 5-7) writing shows that drawing is an iconic repetition in their writing. Of particular interest is that drawing reflects uniqueness of each child’s personalities and gender differences in varying extents that helps students, especially boys, take risks. As Baghban (2007) has noted, drawing makes children feel that they are able to produce something. And it is usually not a simple copying or imitation but a creative and complex design with and for specific people in specific circumstances (Dyson, 2010; Kress, 1997).

In a partnership with writing, drawing occupies an important stage of children’s writing development (Baghban, 1984, 2007; Bissex, 1980; Clay, 1975; Kress, 1977;

Powell & Davidson, 2005; Short, Kauffman, & Kahn, 2000; Sidelnick & Svoboda, 2000).

To use Short et al.’s study (2002) as an example, it was found that in two of the authors’ fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms that the students’ writing was significantly boosted by their drawing. Their findings also showed how drawing helped the children represent their aesthetic responses to literature used in class and visually intertextualize their literature texts and different life experiences to construct their understanding. Drawings are interchangeably used and/or simultaneously presented in children’s writing at children’s will (Calkins, 1986; Dyson, 1981; Edelsky, 1986; Ferreiro, 1990; Graves,

1983; Sulzby, 1986). Based on their case studies, Graves (1983) and Calkins (1986) have suggested that drawing of children in preschool and elementary school be a “rehearsal” for their writing and different from writing. In the cases of young bilingual writers,

Edelsky (1986) found that drawing did not contribute extensively to their writing development in the target language.

Informed by the lines of research above, my study gives attention to the important role of drawing in children’s writing practice. Drawing is viewed a means for the ELL students’ to textualize their ideas and life experiences, a heuristic to explore new ideas and test hypothesis about writing, and a catalyst to their sense of authorship. A child’s iterative and recursive movement back and forth from talking, drawing, playing, writing, and thinking not only promotes the development of each of them but also changes the interrelations among them (Vygotsky, 1978; Dyson, 1982a). Part of the changing process of the relationships is described by Dyson (1981) as a process of differentiating and consolidating drawing and writing and distancing talking and writing. All activities

(talking, drawing, play, writing) are viewed as constituents of young children’s writing.

Play as a social context. Because of its pervasiveness in children’s social practice, play takes a significant role in their writing (Roskos & Christie, 2000; Rowe, 1989;

Sherzer, 2002; Wohlwend, 2011). In this particular body of research as well as in this dissertation, play specifically refers to children’s self-initiated, literacy-related, and naturally occurring play. Children’s play here constitutes or represents different social contexts. Play is a medium and a social context per se in children’s writing practice

(Dyson, 1987a, 1989, 1995; Graves, 1983; McGillivray, 1994; Neuman & Rosko, 1991,

1992, 2000; Rowe, 1989, 2000; Scharder, 1989; Vukelich, 1993; Wohlwend, 2011).

Play represents children’s needs for writing for pleasure (Vygotsky, 1978). Their play is often reflected in their writing both at home and at school (Bissex, 1980).

26 Children enjoy playing with writing through activities such as drafting grocery shopping lists, lists of favorite restaurants, checks, office notes, etc. Doing so may help them realize unsatisfied desires in their real life (Graves, 1981; Goodman, 1984; Roskos, 1988;

Schrader, 1989; Taylor, 1983). Meanwhile, the forms and functions of the adult and workplace literacy are tested, modified, and transferred in their children’s writing in an enjoyable way (Roskos, 1988). From this point of view, children’s playful writing is not passive mocking or copying of adult’s literacy activities but creative manipulation of the available literacy sources, texts, and body languages to make meanings in their own ways

(Dyson, 1987a, 2010).

As aforementioned, in children’s playful writing, play is a social context per se and also a medium. Through play, children can have fun with their own language uses, test their understanding or hypotheses about writing, and navigate social relationships (cf.

Graves, 1981; Rowe, 1989). Therefore, it can be said that children’s play not only

“fulfills” their unmet needs but also reflects their competence of developing and manipulating various semiotic resources as well as social relationships.

Play-writing is a common social phenomenon in young children’s writing practice. During children’s “play-writing” processes, peers can provide plenty of feedback on each other’s writing through their oral comments; adding lines, colors, or pictures on each others’ writing papers; jointly acting out the characters in their stories; or helping with word spellings. Their “exploratory” play constitutes part of young children’s collaborative writing and formulates writing communities (Dyson, 1987a;

Wohlwend, 2011). Their participation and membership in a “community” offers the

children opportunities for learning to write to read and taking on writer-reader roles in their writing processes. Further, Rowe’s (1989, 1994) ethnographic studies on preschoolers as authors, Phinney’s (1998) study on kindergarteners’ writing, and

MacGillivary’s (1994) study on ethnolinguistically and socioeconomically diverse first- graders’ writing all illustrate that in the play-mediated writing practice, children negotiate and formulate their shared understanding, expectations, and interpretation of each other’s writing and their social values and positioning in their writing community. In this sense, play is a path for children to get socialized into a writing community (Vygotsky, 1978).

The accounts provided by MacGillivray (1994), Phinney (1998), and Rowe (1989) are in tune with the Vygotskian idea (1978) that the social community’s assumptions and expectations may be internalized into children’s minds and writing through their playing.

Scholars, such as Bissex (1980) and Neuman and Roskos (1992), from an ecological perspective, advocate that a literacy-enriched surrounding environment should be created for children to enhance the valuable roles of play in their writing.

Play is one of the modes adopted by children to participate in their writing activities and should not be viewed as “childish” or a random mixing of drawing, talking, and play. It is a complex and creative multi-modal presentation of their thoughts (Dyson,

1986a; Wohlwend, 2011). Kress (1997) has noted that “children naturally act multimodally, both in the things they use, the objects they make, and in their engagement of their bodies: there is no separation of body and mind” (p. 97). Further, Harste,

Woodward, and Burke (1984) have pointed out that children’s individual differences may

28 influence their varied preference in using certain mode or media in their composing process.

Taken together, these prior studies illuminate play-writing connections and play as a supportive medium of literacy practice. It is a shared finding that children’s play revolving around their writing activity can create access to their participation and meaning construction in different discourse communities.

In- School and out-of-School writing and popular culture. Writing also involves composing a writer’s place in a society and positioning him or her in a social network with other community members (Dyson, 1989). Being a participating member in communities, a child writes with and for an understanding of who he or she can be in the society (Dyson, 1995). The following studies with different foci on children’s writing content, genres, styles, forms, and communities all emphasize that literacy learning and socialization do not occur in “a universal sequence” or in one place (Sulzby, 1986) but in a changing process involving various social groups, relationships, sources, and local cultures. What follows is a review of research on children’s in-school writing and classroom interactions, their literacy practices at home with parents and siblings, and the influence of popular culture.

In school writing. Children’s writing can be used as a tool to build a collaborative community of learning and knowledge construction in school (Haneda & Wells, 2000).

The construction of a collaborative learning community is not accomplished by a certain individual, like the teacher, but through the teacher-student and student-student interactions and active involvement in their writing practices (Vygotsky, 1978).

Children’s learning in this community (classroom/school) may be facilitated and achieved through the modeling and scaffolding provided by the teacher and more capable peers in their interactions, like their interactive writing workshop.

However, the teacher’s or peers’ modeling or scaffolding in writing cannot be oversimplified as a kind of direct teaching or misused to homogenize children voices into a single voice, like the teacher’s authoritative or text author’s voice or a “typified” voice

(Dyson, 2006). That is, scaffolding and modeling need to aim to construct the

“polyvocality” (Bakhtin, 1986) in children’s writing and to explore and activate their

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978) rather than “homogenize and hierarchicize” their language uses (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 425). As Dyson (2006) has stated, the “new basics” of collaborative writing or peer collaboration should concentrate on expression and expansion of children’s experiences rather than “fit” their writing to perfect grammar or spelling.

In the line of research on in-school writing, peer collaboration plays a role in children’s writing processes and has become one of the main areas that has been widely investigated (Chapman 1994, 1995, 1999, 2002; Dauite & Dalton, 1993; Vass, Littleton,

Miell, & Jones, 2008; Wollman-Bonilla & Werchadlo, 1995, 1999). Chapman’s successive longitudinal studies (1994, 1995, 1999, 2002) have revealed that the genres from stories, poems, cartoons, books, and personal experiences shared in the classroom have been creatively adapted by children in their writing through their active negotiation and collaboration with their peers in their writing workshop. This finding is supported by

Dauite and Dalton’s (1993) comparative study of third graders’ individually and

30 collaboratively completed stories. Their results show that 95% of the elements in students’ stories added after their collaboration could be traced to their talking during their collaborative writing process. Vass et al. (2008) reported a similar finding from their longitudinal studies of the third and fourth graders’ collaborative writing—namely, that peer collaboration stimulates and enhances students’ creative writing. Their findings are in line with Wollman-Bonilla and Werchadlo’s (1999) study on the peer role in scaffolding first graders’ responses to literature. Both of the studies indicate the significant role of emotions and the mutual inspiration during idea generation, composing, reviewing, or sharing writing with and among peers. It is also shown that collaborative writing not only motivates the students to write and read but also helps them develop their writer as well as reader roles.

Computer-mediated classroom interactions is another widely researched area of young children’s in-school writing. Some early studies in the 1990s found that computer- mediated writing creates a relatively stress-free collaborative form of learning and the computer may be a useful tool to empower students’ learning (Chang & Osguthorpe,

1990; Labbo, 1994, 1996; Riel, 1990). Labbo’s (1996) yearlong ethnographic study in a kindergarten classroom is one of these illustrations. Her study showed that the computer monitor is like a screen land where the children can access and employ appropriate mutlimodal symbols to compose various genres of texts. Later studies in the 2000s further indicated that good knowledge about use of computers and practices of popular learning programs or games has become a key component of peer culture. For instance,

Chung and Walsh (2006) examined, in a kindergarten classroom and a first-grade

classroom, how computer writing may impact kindergarten and first graders’ classroom interaction and writing. Empowered by the computer tool, some less competent writers could take up more demanding writing tasks and transform their observer role to the leader role in their computer-mediated collaborative writing. All these studies suggest that children’s shared interests of using computers influence their thoughts about writing, the themes, format, and contents of their writing, and also their growth as writers, readers, and social members.

Another area related to children’s in-school writing is the teachers’ role in children’s literacy development. One of the interesting findings from this line of research is Hudelson’s study (1989) on young English language learners’ classroom writing.

Hudelson (1989) found that the ELL students seemed to be more willing to share their stories with their teachers. It was found that compared with their peers, their teacher was viewed by the ELL students as able to “transcribe” or interpret their stories in a more comprehensible way.

Teacher’s professional training is another factor related to influence upon children’s literacy development and practice in school. Martin et al.’s (2003) report of a large professional development initiative that helped 100,000 K-12 teachers integrate technology in their curriculum illustrates a correspondence between children’s growing interest and engagement in writing and teachers’ professional training. That is, the training helped the teachers improve teaching and their students’ learning and, in turn, the children’s success encouraged their teachers to continue improving their teaching practice. Some other studies have addressed the effectiveness of teachers’ use of literature

32 to facilitate students’ writing. Wollman-Bonilla and Werchadlo (1995, 1999) examined kindergarten and first-grade students’ reflective journals on selected literature and reported that the students were not retelling or copying the literature work but reflecting upon the key events in it through drawing on their personal experiences and feelings. Dix and Amoore’s (2010) study in a New Zealand primary school also showed that the selected literature provided children with models of quality writing and good literary techniques. The researchers further argued that classroom discussion about literature not only develops children’s metalanguage to talk about writing but also motivates them to transfer the genre and/or writing techniques into their own writing.

School is a special social context where children’s writing is mainly situated and jointly constructed by students, peers, and teachers. In classrooms, children grow as writers, readers, audience, classmates, friends, and students. The student-student and teacher-student interactions in the classroom provide rich opportunities for children to build and practice their writing knowledge and to discover and manipulate the social relations related to each of the above roles. Meanwhile, their literacy practices and knowledge building also take place out of school when children grow as daughters, sons, siblings, and members of other communities.

Out-of-School writing. When children enter school, they bring “a private frame of reference with them from their past experience” (Clay, 1973, p. 13), which is not necessarily shared or recognized by peers, teachers, or the school literacy in school. “Past experience”—built upon their personal stories, literacy practices out of school, and different local cultures—shapes children’s thoughts and language uses and is often

“fabricated” into children’s writing (Dyson, 1984a). However, the process of transforming their “past experience” into writing may not always be successful and sometimes may be challenged (Dyson, 1993a, 1993b; Heath, 1983) when it does not match the school literacy. Heath (1983) used the term “cultural bridge” to describe the aid needed in children’s transition from home culture and literacy practices to school culture and literacy practices, as children do not always smoothly “grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88) in school due to the divergence between school and home literacy practices. One such illustration is found in Champion, Katz,

Muldrow, and Dail’s (1999) study on the storytelling and storymaking of urban African

American preschoolers. The researchers noted that evaluating the preschoolers’ narrative by using alternative approaches (i.e., content and event analysis) could broaden our understanding of children’s repertoire of narrative structures and bridge their home culture and school culture.

Parental involvement and roles in children’s literacy development is a growing research area. Immersed in family literacy environments since their birth, children are significantly influenced by their family’s language uses; parents’ values, beliefs, and expectations; their education levels, social economic status, and school interventions; etc.

(Genesee & Riches, 2006). A powerful example is Bissex’s (1980) ethnographic study on how her son (Paul) read and wrote at home and then at school. A recent study by

Neumann, Hood, and Neumann (2009) documented how a mother (one of the researchers) incorporated the home literacy environment in teaching her son (from his age two to six) the names, letters, sounds, shapes, etc., and guided him to copy and learn

34 the environmental print. Their findings confirm numerous prior studies that parents play an important role in scaffolding children’s emergent literacy learning,

Parents who have bilingual children may pay more attention to children’s inheritance of their home language, culture, and ideology. In Zhou and Kim’s (2006) study of Asian parents in California, they found that parents often send their children to private weekend schools to provide supplementary education on children’s home language learning and on their living as a bilingual in the United States. Parents in middle-class homes are often concerned about structuring learning for their children in ways legitimized by the school (Brooks, 1989, cited in Cook-Gumperz, 2006). For parents from immigrant and low social economic status (SES) families, who are illiterate by the definition of school literacy, they may need their children’s scaffolding in their daily literacy practice in particular situations and want their children to be merged into the dominant literacy and culture at least in educational settings (Cook-Gumperz, 2006).

Their children may take the role of “language broker” (Haneda, 2006b) or

“paraphraser” (Orellana et al., 2003) to help their parents (or other family members) process some federal written documents in the target language.

Increasing attention has been given to students from low SES or minority families. Yaden, Madrigal, and Tam (2003) implemented a three-year book lending program among 3- to 4-year-old Spanish-speaking children and their parents. This program and the reading and writing intervention provided by the researchers significantly enhanced the parental involvement in their children’s literacy practices and facilitated students’ performances on standardized tests (Yaden et al., 2000). Recently,

more researchers and teachers have begun to empower parents with technology to help them more actively involve or facilitate their children’s home literacy learning. Baskwill and Harkins’ (2009) pilot study involved a group of single mothers and their four- to five- year-old children in their project of using photography to improve their literacy learning experiences. In an attempt to combine the typical family activity of taking pictures with the typical school activity of writing, the researchers found that authentic parent-children communication and the authenticity of the photos effectively bridged children’s real life experiences and their writing and contributed to their improvement in writing. Their findings are in agreement with many prior studies (Labbo, 1996; Labbo et al., 2002;

Gooch, 2002), confirming the potential facilitative role of photography and other digital software in children’s literacy practice. Both Labbo et al. (2002) and Gooch’s (2002) studies show that the integration of digital photography into children’s literacy experience helps them sustain their memory about their home activities and enrich their language experiences in class so that their sequencing skills, communication skills, and independence in story writing can be largely increased.

Compared with parental involvement in children’s literacy development, the role of children’s siblings and siblings’ literacy practices have been much less explored even though siblings assume the same important family relations. Gregory (2001), Williams and Gregory (2001), and Hawkins (2005) conducted studies on young bilingual or multilingual children, investigating when and how the children could transfer some learning strategies or models from their “formal” (English) literacy classroom to other community literacy practices and vice versa. A unique type of reciprocal learning

36 between siblings is identified as a “synergy whereby siblings act as adjuvants, stimulating, mediating, and fostering each others’ development” (Gregory, 2001, p. 301).

The significant partnership between siblings in children’s home writing or literacy practices needs further exploration in the future.

Influence of popular culture. Popular culture is rarely viewed as valuable to children’s writing development. The bias against popular culture and its role in children’s literacy development should be interrogated since popular culture and media are “an integral part of contemporary childhood” (Dyson, 2003b). Popular culture and media like popular literature, movies, songs, live shows, video games, and cartoons provide children with miscellaneous information sources. Children from various social classes are all consumers of popular culture and media and tend to transform and recontextualize them in their writing (Newkirk, 2007). For instance, little boys may “characterize” themselves as Ironman or Superman, the characters in popular cartoons, to legitimatize their access to a peer community with shared interests and to collaborate in the construction of texts relevant to their shared interests (Dyson, 1997b).

Appropriately accommodating popular culture and media in school literacy/ writing can open a space for children (Dyson, 1997b, 1999, 2001, 2003a, 2003b) where their school writing is not typified but “hybridized” with different non-school writing/ literacies (Dyson, 2001). During this hybridization process, children have rich opportunities to mesh up various kinds of social cultures and media that they find attractive and related to their real lives in writing as their new ways to participate into both school and non-school literacy practices. What is more, with the increasingly

diversified student population in elementary schools, popular culture and media may reduce the tensions caused by the linguistic, social, cultural, and ideological diversities in children’s’ lives (Dyson, 1999).

My literature review on children’s school and non-school writing shows that their writing and its development is a collaborative project between school and non-school communities. It points to a limitation of my study that no data have been collected from children’s literacy practices out of school and from their parents, siblings, or other relevant participants. In pedagogical practice, this review implies that students’ literacy practices in school and home communities should complement each other. Administrators and teachers in school need to respect and value their students’ home literacies and provide some training for both parents and students to combine their home literacies with their school literacy (Volk, 1997; Volk & De Acosta, 2001). Through the joint construction and participation into the practice of literacies, the participants of children’s writing practice can exchange and increase their “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) and literacy experiences.

Emergent biliteracy. A critical difference between children’s first language (L1) writing and second language (L2) writing is that L2 writing is mediated by their multilingual and multicultural backgrounds and more complicated social contexts.

Therefore, second language writing is a more complex process of orchestrating multiple systems of languages, cultures, and ideologies (Edelsky, 1982). One thing at issue has been whether children’s L1 literacy knowledge and skills are transferrable or facilitative to their L2 writing.

38 According to Cummins’ (1979) linguistic interdependence hypothesis, the more proficient a writer is in his or her first language (L1), the more proficient the one will be in an L2. When bilingual children learn through the medium of both languages, their L1 writing experiences can help them understand what writing is and what writing can do

(Drawford, 1987). Edelsky (1982, 1986) and Hudelson (1987, 1989) have further argued that L2 young writers usually feel more confident when they learn literacy in their native language and then apply the literacy knowledge in their L2 writing. In doing so, bilingual children gradually develop the sense of authorship (Edelsky, 1986) and see themselves as writers in the target language (Hudelson, 1987).

Cummins’ linguistic independence hypothesis (1979) was tested by Edelsky’s

(1982, 1986) studies of young bilingual writers, which confirmed that young writers’ writing knowledge in L1 can support the formation of children’s hypotheses about L2 writing. Varieties of L1 linguistic features as well as cultural and ideological features were found to be represented in children’s L2 writing. The transfer of abstract social and ideological features was also identified but found to be challenged in Moll et al.’s (1992) case study of a bilingual kindergartener’s and a first grader’s socialization into literacies in the two languages. Interestingly, Buckwalter and his colleague (Buckwalter, 2006;

Buckwalter & Lo, 2002) find in their exploratory case studies on Chinese-English preschoolers that children had great understanding of the hypotheses they made about orthography in both languages, which did not interfere each other, and their literacy development in both languages produced positive effects on the other. Meanwhile, the researchers pointed out that their findings need to be interpreted in a language-specific

context because the particular two languages (Chinese and English) are obviously different in orthographies and were unlikely to confuse the language learners.

Durgunolgu (1998), who conducted a three-month study in a first-grade transitional language program on two “similar” languages (Spanish and English), reported that ESL students’ L1 literacy development stages were similar to monolingual children. Some of their L1 linguistic skills and cognitive capabilities promoted the corresponding abilities in L2. A broader bidirectional transfer of structure and content in

Spanish-English children’s writing was identified in another study by Durgunoglu and her colleagues (2002). Similar mutual transfer between two languages also appeared in

Gort’s (2006) study. Gort analyzed the similarities and differences in children’s cross- linguistic skills and defined children as “Spanish-dominant” or “English-dominant” bilinguals according to their preferences to a primary literacy. Seen from above, what is applied from children’s first language or second language to the other language may also be varied due to language differences and the children’s different language proficiency, personalities, and learning styles (Hudelson, 1989).

Another strand of research on biliteracy or emergent L2 writing takes a social, historical, and ecological perspective, focusing on the following areas: a) the

“directionality” (Reyes, 2001) of the transfer between children’s L1 literacy and L2 literacy, which is called two-way immersion or transformation; b) the

“dynamic” (Blanton, 2002) of social interactions between children and other participants; and c) the site (Blanton, 2002) where the writing and literacy-related interactions occur.

40 Reyes is one of the scholars who has attended to the biliteracy development or

“interliteracy” (Gort, 2006) phenomenon among bilingual immigrant children since the

1990s. Her comparative study of two focal children in a bilingual and a monolingual group showed the parallel development of children’s L1 and L2 literacy and how their invented spelling in L2 relies on L1 due to the symbol-sound correspondence between two languages (Spanish and English). Blanton’s (2002) ethnographic study on five- and six-year-olds in a multilingual kindergarten pointed to the importance of the social contexts and interactants involved in children’s parallel biliteracy development. Blanton described the dynamic teacher-student interactions as the distinctive feature of a classroom where children can progress in both literacies at an extraordinary pace and further proposed a new concept called “synchronicity.” The concept combines the

“dynamic” and the “site” of the teacher-student interactions to foreground the contextuality and complexities of the student “affective-intellectual” transfer occurring in and through social interactions.

Researchers have further expanded their attention from institutional contexts and classroom interactions to other sociocultural contexts and community members because they also play an important role in shaping the development of children’s biliteracy and cultural identities. Reyes (2006) reported from her case study of three four-year-old bilingual students’ school and home literacy practices that the children formulated their

“own” concepts or theories about their L1 and L2 and used their metalanguage to discuss what they read and wrote in both languages. Her study revealed that children’s conversations with teachers, families, and neighbors in different social contexts have

profound influence on their conceptualization processes. A similar finding was reported by Connery’s (2006) dissertation research on five- and six-year-old children’s emergent biliteracy development in non-academic settings. With careful documentation and analysis of the sociolinguistic history of the focal children’s family members, their personal educational experiences, and the chronology of children emergent biliteracy skills, Connery found that numerous signs and speech forms from children’s family literacy practices have been applied by children into the meaning-making process in their writing.

Later, Reyes and Azuara (2008), in their longitudinal study of twelve four- or five- year-old Mexican Spanish-English students, found that the development of children’s metalinguistic awareness about their L1 and L2 was facilitated by their intergenerational communications with family members, who created supportive learning environments for their children. Based on their series of studies on children’s dynamic biliteracy socialization and development processes, Reyes and her colleagues (Reyes & Azuara,

2008; Reyes & Moll, 2008) developed an ecological model to address the varieties, complexities, and significance of the social interactions, contexts, and relations involved in children’s biliteracy development and transformation of their cultural identities.

When the first Symposium of Second Language Writing was held in 2000,

Matsuda and Silva brought up L2 writing as an under-researched field (Matsuda & De

Pew, 2002). In recent years, this field has attracted a rapidly increasing number of studies devoted to bilingual or multilingual children’s writing and the development of their literacies (Leki, Cumming, & Silva, 2006). At the same time, it is worth mentioning that

42 most of the research sites in bilingual and biliteracy education research are transitional bilingual programs, which may ultimately uproot children’s L1 language and culture.

Another potential danger is that children’s primary language other than English might be viewed as lower-class, irrelevant, useless, or even as a hindrance to their writing and socialization in L2 if their home language and culture have not been valued in school and society (Cummins, 2006).

To summarize the first part of my literature review above, an underlying assumption of these studies is that children are complex people (Dyson, 1995) who want to write and can write (Graves, 1983; Hipple, 1985; Walshe, 1981). Writing is one of their tools in constructing learning, knowing, thinking, being, and doing. Many of the studies provide insights to different areas of children’s writing and make a similar contribution in showing that writing should be understood and interpreted in a unique social and cultural space occasioned by interactions of particular individuals in particular contexts (cf.

Volosinov, 1973). That is, children’s writing is a context-sensitive dialogic process of meaning-making and knowledge construction. Written products of this process are not a

“naked corpse of words” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 292) but are different sets of stories/texts that children juxtapose out of their past, present, and envisioned future life experiences (cf.

Bloome & Hong, 2011; Haneda, 2005, 2006). The product will continuously be consumed by different readers and writers in different ways and for various purposes

(Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). As such, research on children’s writing needs to extend beyond an individual’s planning/reflecting, translating/text generation, and revision/text interpretation paradigm (Flower & Hayes, 1981; Hayes & Flower, 1980) and

also attend to the complex social, cultural, historical, political, and economic contexts and relationships, in which their writing practices occur, change, and evolve.

The ethnographic and qualitative studies reviewed in the first part provide useful information to understand children’s writing practice in and out of school; the interconnectedness of children’s talking, drawing, play, and writing; the mutual influences of their L1 and L2 language and cultural backgrounds; and the importance influence from popular culture and media. These studies point to the study of literacy as

“literacy-in-practice” (Street, 1995, p. 103) and call forth more quality ethnographic/ longitudinal studies to examine children’s real languages within and across local contexts and to illustrate the development and evolvement of their writing and writer identities over time. This dissertation research views the particular kindergarten writing class as an intellectual site for ELL students learning to write and read and interactively create their understanding of disciplinary knowledge, their selves, social relations, and social cultures and ideologies. And this socialization process of ELL students’ writing goes hand-in-hand with their socialization to use their writing for other social purposes both in and out of school (Cook-Gumperz, 1986/2006; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1986). As such, this study specifically examines how children enter into the dialogic writing processes, take texts from other people and other contexts, and then make them their own to serve their communicative intentions in new contexts with new meaning potentials and social and material consequences (Bakhtin, 1981). Young ELL students’ (PreK-3) writing is not a passive knowledge transmission; rather they actively construct their learning during their learning to write and writing to learn by maneuvering their linguistic, social, and cultural

44 texts and sources in their writing practice. What follows in the second section of this chapter is a review of studies particularly informed by intertextuality (the rationale for a focus on intertextuality can be found in Chapter1).

Section 2. Use of Intertextuality in Teaching, Learning, and Research of ELL

Students’ Reading and Writing

This part of the literature review focuses on intertextuality-informed studies of children’s writing or reading as constituent of their literacy learning. Reading to write, writing to read, and reading and writing to learn are given prominence in current common core standards and the curriculum for children’s literacy development. Highlighting the importance of viewing reading and writing as interconnected, Meek has stated (1998), “If we want to see what lessons have been learned from the texts children read, we have to look for them in what they write” (p. 38). One of the early studies of intertextuality was

Cairney’s (1990) investigation of intertextuality as a literacy phenomenon among eighty

6-12 year old children. His interview data showed that the participants, readers of high and low proficiency levels, made intertextual links at various levels (text, plot, character, genre) and in diverse ways. Influenced by Cairney’s study, Bearse (1992) conducted a 6- week genre study on fairy tales in a third-grade class and found that the students either consciously or unconsciously synthesized several literature mentor texts into their own fairy tales.

The intertexts that children make in their writing have been found to come from both the literary texts they read and from their lives (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993;

Dyson, 1997; Kamberelis & McGinley, 1992; Pantaleo, 2006, Short, 1992; Sipe, 1993,

2000). More recent studies have begun to attend to the reader’s agency in the intertextuality construction and the interaction of text, readers, and contexts. Short’s

(2004) long-term collaborative studies on literature circles in first- through sixth-grade classrooms showed that children in a collaborative learning environment could make wide and in-depth intertextual links between their reading texts, writing, and life experiences and in and across disciplines and sign systems. Similarly, Kamberelis and

McGinley’s (1992) yearlong collaborative researcher-teacher study on fourth graders’ voice in writing revealed that the students’ voices imitated, stylized, parodied, and polemicized various voices of family members and members in different communities.

The polyvocal nature of students’ writing has also been reflected in Sipe’s (1993,

2000) series of studies on children’s literature understanding in classroom, which investigated in depth children’s complex responses (analytical, intertextual, personal, transparent, and performative responses) in their read-alouds of literature works. For instance, Sipe’s study (1993) of sixth graders’ reading and writing showed that the students integrated pop music elements and their rich ideas and experiences into their reading of classic fairy tales, transforming the old tales into modern tales, such as a rap style Goldilocks. Dyson (1997, 2007) also conducted a wide range of studies on children’s use of pop culture, such as movies, comics, cartoons, and pop music, into their writing. Recently, in Pantaleo’s (2006) case study of an Australian fifth grader, it was found that the student juxtaposed multimodal texts, different genres, and styles from both

46 literary text and life experiences in her writing and purposefully included, interpreted, and articulated the intertexts of her writing in particular contexts.

Although the majority of the prior studies aforementioned have yielded rich scholarship on the intertextual connection types and functions in school settings, they lasted only 6-11 weeks. As Sipe (1999) has pointed out, few studies have made the time commitment needed to describe the genesis of children’s literary interpretive community.

Longitudinal studies (e.g., Short, 2004; Sipe, 2000; Dyson, 1997) have shed further insight on the fluid processes of children’s literary interpretation, uses of intertextuality for making meaning, and personal meaning-making processes in their writing practices.

Fewer studies have focused on the description and analysis of intertextuality construction as a fluid, dynamic process (as opposed to a static phenomenon). Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) study provided an in-depth view of the social construction process of intertextuality and added to our understanding of intertextuality both as an outcome/product and as an interactional process of proposal, recognition, and acknowledgement with social consequences. Building upon their study, the first part of my data analysis further explores the complex intertextuality construction process in young children’s writing process, the nature of the constructed intertextualities, and various kinds of learning occurring during the social construction process.

There is a paucity of literature on intertextuality and young children’s writing in a second or foreign language. Some recent intertextuality-informed scholarship on second language writing has begun to attend to the controversial debate on the interrelationships between plagiarism and intertextuality in postsecondary L2 academic writing (Abasi,

2008; Chandrasoma, Thompson, & Pennycook, 2004; Moody, 2007). However, such studies do not address the complex issues involved in young children’s learning to write in a second language.

Section 3. Aesthetics and Playfulness of and in Children’s Literacy Experiences

Research in the fields of early childhood literacy and English as a second/foreign language writing have been largely focused on the cognitive processes involved in the students’ language acquisition, the effectiveness of certain treatments/intervention events, and official learning and achievement test scores and implications. However, in recent decades, scholars have attended to the varieties and variants of the forms of students’ learning, like “playful learning” and collaborative learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Rogoff

1990), peer play (Cekaite & Aronsson, 2005), the third (virtual) space for learning and computer-mediated or game-based learning (Price et al., 2003; Gee, 2011). All these studies, grounded in various theoretical perspectives and adopting different methodologies, have provided wide and deep insights on children’s language and learning processes and achievement in different environments (i.e., natural activities or experimental control activities, etc.).

However, there are important aspects of language and literacy learning that have been overlooked, including the inherently playful and aesthetic nature of language. As

Cook (1997) has stated, “There are languages for enjoyment, for the self, for its own sake, and they are often fantasies, not about the real world, but about a fictional one in which there are no practical outcomes” (p. 230). These funny or sometimes even silly

48 language uses are not necessarily oriented to meaning making or focusing on tasks but are nonetheless a remarkable feature of children, especially young children’s authentic language uses in their daily life. Fillmore (1979) found in her analyses of language learning styles among second language learners that playful formats or being amusing helped students gain access to the learning community. Only a limited number of studies have been conducted on this important constitutive feature of children’s language learning and uses. Studies by Ervin-Tripp (1981) and Cathcart-Strong (1986) echoed

Fillmore’s finding that the entertaining elements, like joking, were frequently used by young second language learners to be co-participants with their peers in learning or playing. Cook (1997, 2000) and Cekaite and Aronsson (2004, 2005) have also illustrated through their series of studies that it is time for researchers and educators to “take non- serious language more seriously” (Cekaite & Aronsson, 2005, p. 169).

Interestingly, there have been relatively more studies focused on adult learners and on teachers’ role in language play (Sullivan, 2000a, 2000b; Van Dam, 2002). These studies on adult learners are not reviewed in detail here. A number of studies (Broner and

Tarone, 2001; Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004, 2005; Cook, 1997, 2000; De Leon, 2007;

Fasulo, Liberati, & Pontecorvo, 2002; Jakobson, 1988; Peck, 1977; Price et al., 2003;

Wohlwend, 2011) have been particularly focused on young children’s language play, playful learning, play activities, or language uses with poetic features in different cultural contexts (Swedish-, Arabic-, Spanish-, and Russian-speaking countries). These are also the key features of children’s interactions in both school and nonschool settings (Duranti

& Black, 2012).

Cook (1997) pointed out natural and authentic language can be funny, playful, and fictional without being purpose-orientated. Children’s playful language uses are their ways of doing their business of childhood (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998, as cited in Danby

1999, p. 209). Cook’s study focused on children’s language play of creating fictional world or carnival reality.

Baroner and Tarone (2001) have provided an illustration of children’s language play. They employed both Cook’s notion of ludic language play and Lantof’s (1997) notion of rehearsal in private speech in their study of fifth-grade Apanish learners’ interlanguage. Their findings suggest that these two types of language play constitute different roles in students’ second language acquisition. Rehearsal in private speech helps

L2 learners internalize the language in a safe manner, while the ludic language play may play a role in the development of the learners’ interlanguage. In tune with Baroner and

Tarone’s finding, Cekaite and Aronsson’s (2005) study on young second language learners’ form-focused language play in peer conversations also illustrated the supportive role of language play in children’s L2 language learning. The language play was found to be a student-initiated collaborative affair which became a kind of information language lesson on the repeated forms. Another contribution of their study to children’s L2 learning is that they attended to the children’s artful performance in their joke events and the collaborative aestheticism, including alliteration, parallelism, laughing, and artful variation in their intonation contour.

This aesthetic layer of the scholarship on language learning and socialization can be traced back to the 1960s. Jackobson (1960) addressed the relationship between

50 linguistics and poetics as the inseparable relation between word and world. Sacks and

Jefferson (1996) researched poetics from an ethnomethodological perspective, focusing on poetics in people’s daily talk. Fasulo, Liberati, and Pontecorvo’s (2002) study focused on the poetics in children’s conversations in their family dinner. Their approach to defining poetics in people’s conversations is somewhat different from but complements the definition of poetics generally held by conversation analysts. They view poetry as an effect rather than any substantial feature of a series of words that matters more to the receiver than to the sender.

A number of studies have examined particular aspects of children’s language play.

One of the most obvious features of children's language play under investigation is repetition. Repetition is not only simple imitation but a channel that children learn, appropriate, and transform or even subvert the adults’ language forms, the pragmatic functions, and cultures in their children’s social world (Jefferson, 1996; Keenan, 1983).

Moore (2011) summarized a great deal of research on repetition in children’s language uses that has been conducted in a wide range of communities all over the world. These studies foreground the pervasiveness of repetition in children’s social life and illuminate that this particular language play form is “a resource for the children’s communicative competence development, their negotiation of social orders and identities, and formation of their learners’ community ” (Moore, 2011, pp. 216-7).

Among the early studies on repetition in children’s language play, Peck (1977) adapted the set of terms for linguistic forms used in L1 learners’ language play from

Keenan and Klein (1975) into her study on two ELL Mexican children’s interactions with

their English-speaking peers. Peck found that the children’s language play was rule- bound and their repetition and slight modification provided the L2 learners’ opportunities of practicing phonological and syntactical forms in L2 with their intensive feeling. In the same line of research, Cekaite and Aronsson (2004, 2005) conducted research on recently immigrated children (grades 1-3) in Sweden. They studied the children’s second language conversations with peers and teachers in the classroom, which was characterized by two kinds of recyclings/repetition: intertextual play and role appropriation. Children were found to explore prior classroom conversations and recycle and appropriate the teacher’s

“authoritative discourse” (cf. Bakhtin, 1981) in their joking and repetition. The children’s playful manipulation of discourses (especially the language structures and forms) and early control of dialogic repetition to explore or challenge the social roles and hierarchy was also illustrated in de Leon’s (2007) study of two Mayan sisters. The shared findings among these studies are that the various repetitions (i.e., format typing, recycling of prior talk) in children’s L2 conversation supported their participation into various social activities and helped to establish social relations with peers and their membership in the community (c.f. Moore, 2011).

Any discussion of aesthetics in the field of literacy has to acknowledge the role that Rosenblatt played in exploration of aesthetic as a major theoretical and pedagogical issue (1978) and the emphasis she put on readers’ full participation into the poetic experience of literature or literacy practices in this study. Following the ludic trend revealed in the above studies on childhood literacy research and being influenced by

Rosenblatt’s transactional theory (1978), this study examines ELL children’s writing as a

52 set of playful activities oriented to writing and aesthetic experiences in a school setting.

Their writing practices are characterized by the teacher’s and students’ intertextual and stylized rhythmic speech and playful or sometimes dramatic tone or intonation contour.

My study shifts the analysis and foci from children’s linguistic or psycholinguistic readiness, writing achievement, or products in countless previous studies to the construction and enactment of a poetics that is jointly constructed, negotiated, and shared during their playful writing activities. Building on the line of research on native English speaking children’s literacy learning and practice, I intend to foreground the creativity, aesthetics, and the artfulness of ELL children’s writing and social performance as language players.

CHAPTER 3

LOGIC OF INQUIRY

The discussion of the logic of my inquiry here starts with a theoretical discussion about the nature of the study and the participants, the events, and social and cultural phenomena described and analyzed in this study. Specifically, the methodology of this study is driven by social constructionism (cf. Gergen, 1999, 2001; Gergen & Gergen,

2010), interactional sociolinguistics (Bloome et al., 2005; Cook-Gumperz, 1986, 2006;

Gumperz, 1986; Green & Wallet, 1981; Hyme, 1974; Volosinov, 1929/1973), and discourse analysis in classroom that bridges both the micro and macro contexts of students’ lives in and out of school communities (cf. Bloome et al., 2009, 2008; Bloome

& Clark, 2006; Gee, 1996; Smith, 2008).

In a social constructionist perspective, ELL students’ learning, meaning making, and knowledge generation are located in the actions and reactions between and among the students and their teacher, originating in their jointly constructed relationships. In interactional sociolinguistics, the students’ writing practices are socially and discursively constructed and embedded in the moment-to-moment classroom interactions in and across the local literacy events. Both the construction of relationships and the realization of learning, meaning making, and knowledge generation in and through their interactions are completed primarily through the students’ and the teacher’s uses of languages and

54 relative semiotic tools and sources in, from, and across different contexts. During their interaction and relationship construction processes, the participants develop strategies to signal to each other to interact, to make their communicative intentions visible. In doing so, they become contexts for each other and negotiate, challenge, change, maintain, or expand the existing social and power relations (cf. Bloome et al., 2005; Cook-Gumperz,

1986, 2006; Erickson & Shultz, 1977; Green et al., 2007).

The signaling process is guided by the conversational inferences dependent on the participants’ perceptions of verbal and nonverbal cues that contextualize their daily writing activities (Cook-Gumperz, 1986, 2006; Gumperz, 1986). With an understanding of the co-constructed and shared contextualization cues (cf. Gumperz, 1986), the participants can recognize, to different extents, their interactive conversations as a wider sequence of talk because the local meaning in a certain conversation may be referenced and thematically coherent to other local meanings created in other conversations in other events and contexts (Cook-Gumperz, 2006). The participants thereupon can recognize the connections between and across contexts and further build up a specific inferential chain of meanings and understandings (Cook-Gumperz, 2006). That is to say, the students’ conversations with certain characteristics signaled to each other during their interaction and relationship construction processes are public, visible, and can be understood and described by the participant researcher (Cook-Gumperz, 1986). The signs are not only an embodiment of the material characteristics of language, reflecting realities, but also themselves are segments of realities, functioning as ideological signs (Volosinov,

1929/1973). The signs, “a phenomenon of external worlds” (Volosinov, 1929/1973, p.

11), and the effects they produce make this study empirical, as it can provide warrants for how people act and react, what their actions and reactions mean, what counts as appropriate actions and reactions, how these actions are related to prior and future activities, how events and the participants’ social relations are built over time, and what local and general knowledge and ideologies are constructed, shared, or contested

(Bloome, 2005; Green et al., 2007).

Consistent with the theoretical framing, a microethnographic approach is appropriate to my study of young ELL students’ writing practices in this particular kindergarten class to foreground the sociality of their writing based on the analysis of their discourses/language-in-use in their writing practices. This microethnographic study did not treat the ELL students’ writing class as an undifferentiated system wherein the children are unrelated individuals acquiring psycholinguistic skills or cognitive capabilities but as a particular social group—a microcosm where participants, in and through their interactions, co-construct their writing, learning, knowledge, relations, and particular social and cultural phenomena (Cook-Gumperz, 2006). This approach required me to enter my research site as an attendant/participant (Bloome, 2005), doing video recording and other data collections for an academic year in order to document and thickly describe the naturally occurring speech and activities over time and across different literacy events. In this way, I could attend to the contextualization cues often lying below the surface of participants’ consciousness but co-constructed and shared by the participants. Further, I was able to describe how the students juxtaposed texts made available to them, their interaction patterns, and the cultural norms and values realized

56 and reflected through, in, and across specific events (Cook-Gumperz, 2006). Those literacy events, the intellectual sites of meaning making, knowledge construction, and cultural practice (Green & Bloome, 2005), did not occur randomly but in an explicit or implicit structure or sequence (Bloome et al., 2005). Knowledge of the events and what is accomplished by them was common to the participants (including the researcher) (cf.

Cook-Gumperz, 2006). So, key literacy events, the primary unit of analysis of my study, were identified first to examine the ELL children’s intertextual writing practice and then the learning potentials and their playing with different languages (particularly the poetic languages and devices). There were such things as private languages or single authoritative texts. The children used different languages and semiotic sources adopted and adapted from and for others in their interactions with peers, the teacher, their potential and actual readers, the writers they read before, or others (Bloome et al., 2005,

Bloome & Clark, 2006, Bakhtin, 1986; Gergen, 2001; Wittgenstein, 1953). In this sense, intertextuality is a heuristic of meaning making and learning. The identification and analysis processes of the key events are discussed in detail in stage three and stage four of my research design in this chapter.

Rather than focus on a sign, an action or reaction, or a written product in isolation, the focus of this study was on the relationships of the signs in a semiotic system and the participants’ actions and reactions within and across events and on how the participants constructed interpretive frameworks for their writing across languages and social, cultural, and ideological contexts (Bloome et al., 2005). By doing microethnographic discourse analysis in this particular ELL kindergarten class, this study pursued a theory of

communication and classroom learning to show how second language writing/literacy may be acquired in multiple ways in the classroom (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2006), how the teacher’s and children’s linguistic, social, and cultural backgrounds play together in their interactive writing and learning and knowledge construction processes, and how social and cultural factors—and local ideologies or ideologies in general—affect the dynamic processes.

Research Design

This section describes the five stages in the design of this dissertation research.

Stage 1. Research Setting

The first stage was to locate my microethnographic study of students’ writing in a suburban ELL kindergarten class. To begin my study, I spent approximately two months

(from late September 2009 to early November 2009) observing an L2 writing classes as a participant observer so that I could become acquainted with the nineteen five-year-old

ELL students and their teacher, Mrs. Young (a pseudonym, as are all names and locations), who is a White Anglophone. I gradually constructed a stable, social relationship/friendship with them. My observation occurred approximately three times a week and often lasted about one and a half hours. My proposal for this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) on November 16, 2010. I then moved forward into my data collection stage.

Stage 2. Data Collection

In this section, I provide some contextual data of the school, the teacher, the students, their classroom, and their curriculum and daily schedule.

58 Contextual Data

The School

Ivy Elementary School serves grades K-5 in a city school district. It is located in the outskirts of a major metropolitan area with an increasing number of new immigrants.

One indication of the academic context of the school itself is that the students’ reading and math achievement test scores met the school districts’ requirement of Adequate

Yearly Progress (AYP) in recent years. According to the mission statement and vision statement published on the school’s website, Ivy gives prominent emphasis in their curriculum to academic content standards. It is also dedicated to promoting collaborative work among the students, teachers, families, and communities.

In line with academic standards, the district curriculum emphasizes teaching for student understanding and holds the constructivist theory of learning as the foundation for their schools’ teaching and learning activities. Although neither the district nor the school provides literacy/language arts curriculum particularly tailored to English language learners, the school articulates the English language proficiency standards (listening, speaking, reading, and writing standards) for ELL students.

The school also conducts the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment – Literacy

(KRA-L) on kindergarten students at the beginning of the year. The assessment is a state- mandated assessment that complements the district-developed and administered assessments. Results are used to inform the instructional planning for each individual student as well as the class as a whole. The assessment results were obtained for this research.

The Teacher

The home teacher of this English language learner kindergarten classroom, Mrs.

Young, is a middle-class white woman in her thirties. She had three years of teaching experience at the time of the study. English is her first language. According to my observation data, the video recording, and my personal communication with her, Mrs.

Young speaks some Spanish and uses it to communicate with some of the Mexican children in the writing workshop on some occasions.

Her teaching philosophy is as follows: “I believe each child should be taught as an individual. It is not about the programming being offered but the type of instruction taking place. Children strive in environments that are inclusive settings and instruction is differentiated to meet all individual needs.” Before this dissertation project, she received professional training from a writing project provided by a large Midwestern university located in the local city. Her teaching is highly valued by her colleagues.

The Students

The number of five- to six-year-old children in this kindergarten class varied from sixteen to nineteen. The number enrolled kept changing due to the relocation of children’s families and newly enrolled students. As aforementioned, from the students represent six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Indian, Venezuelan, Finnish, Russian, Iraqi, and Mexican). Based on my participant observation all through the academic year, the majority of the students in this kindergarten could orally and effectively communicated in

English with the teacher and their peers. Occasionally some Mexican children communicated in Spanish. Only two students—Montour, an Iraqi male student, and Kate,

60 an Iraqi female student—joined the class with very limited oral English language skills.

Montour joined near the end of 2009 and Kate joined this class shortly after Montour.

Based on my observation data and the video recording, Montour was a more outgoing child and seemed to acquire the oral language skills quickly through playing with other male students. Kate was more introverted and seemed to enjoy quiet reading and independent writing. Her beginning writing practice largely consisted of her drawing with beautiful coloring. She grew from an ELL with very limited English language knowledge to a beginning writer who could spell some words and produce some writing mixed with words, texts, and drawing (see Appendix A).

There was an assessment given to the students to qualify them for the ELL program and a Test of English Language Acquisition conducted prior to entering first grade to determine their growth as English language learners. All kindergarteners were given a

Fountas and Pinnel reading assessment (2010) and other assessments three times through the year to show growth. The assessment results were not obtained in my data collection.

The children in this kindergarten were integrated with native English-speaking kindergarteners for an average of 90 minutes per day—with one day at 60 minutes, another day at 200 minutes, and all other days at 90 minutes. English-only is not an official state, district, or school policy. But English was promoted to be spoken in the classroom most often and viewed as a best practice adopted within the district program for young ELL students.

Not all the students’ educational backgrounds prior to kindergarten were known, as my data collection only occurred in the classroom. I was not able to visit the students’

home communities or interview their parents or siblings. A couple of students had preschool experiences, although kindergarten was the first exposure to a formal educational setting for most of the students. No official statistics of the students’ families’ economic situations or information about free lunch or reduce price lunch was obtained from this class. Per my observation prior to their lunch time, most of the students either brought their own lunchboxes or bought lunch in school.

Their Classroom

Their classroom (see Appendix B) was a literacy-rich environment designed to provide rich inputs for the students. A variety of cultural and linguistic inputs and sources were available and taken by the students. The classroom was located at the right wing of a single-story school building. The outside wall of the classroom in the hallway was an area for exhibition of students’ published artifacts in different writing units (see the right upper picture in Appendix A). When I walked in their classroom, I was facing an ABC chart (the left upper picture in Appendix A) with colorful pictures and a teaching wand usually put beside the teacher’s chair. The appendix shows that two students are using their teacher’s teaching wand to learn the alphabet together. The chart was frequently used by the teacher and the students when they did their interactive writing, teacher- student writing conferences, and the students’ independent writing. Standing near the door of the classroom, I could see the letter wall with capital and lowercase letters and corresponding rhyming words at my right hand. The letter wall shown in the right corner

(see Appendix B) was usually used when the students practiced their spelling skills in their interactive writing or in their afternoon phonics class. This wall was filled with more

62 and more rhyming words under each letter throughout the academic year. At my left hand, there were several tables and many chairs for the students’ group or independent writing activity.

Walking further into the classroom, I saw the students’ cabinets and the teacher’s working table, classroom computers, and their bookshelf with various kinds of mentor texts. The teacher’s table was usually the place for the teacher to work with smaller reading groups consisting of four or five students each time. Based on my participant observation in this classroom, I could tell the students showed strong interest in using computer and internet sources in their literacy practices. In their first writing unit, the nonfiction unit, the teacher and students used their computers to research facts about turtles and other kinds of animals. The teacher also used the computer widely to publish students' artifacts digitally. On my right hand, there was a sink, a closet for teaching materials, and a “hidden” bathroom. Usually different kinds of posters related to their writing or behavior and manners were hung next to the “letter wall” on the right side—a for instance, the “Choices” poster in Appendix A. Facing the door of the classroom, a TV hung from the ceiling. There was a CD player that was used as one of their daily five choices, listening to reading. Beside the TV, there was also a national flag hung on the wall. Overall, the classroom setting presented a wide range of multimodal input sources for the students and opened a space for them to enjoy playing with various kinds of literacies, which constitutes part of their classroom culture.

Curriculum and Daily Schedule

Table 3.1. shows the literacy curriculum and the ELL kindergarten daily schedule.

The class curriculum and the teacher’s actual teaching incorporated the kindergarten state standards for Ohio by the Department of Education Ohio (DEO) (http:// www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDetail.aspx page=3&TopicRelationID=1699&ContentID=86942). The ELL students did not receive systematic intervention than than what was provided within the classroom. Students with low English language proficiency or high English language proficiency could be pulled out by an assistant teacher to work with them individually or as a small group. As aforementioned, the instructor also stated that there was no curriculum especially tailored for the ELL kindergarteners.

Table 3.1.General Daily Schedule of the ELL Kindergarten

Time Activity 8:50-9:10 Arrival and breakfast 9:15 Morning routine 9:25 Reading Workshop Option 1. Whole group: Read aloud, word work, shared reading Option 2. Independent: Reading to self Option 3. Whole group: Share strengths from reading conferences Option 4. Daily Five Choice Time: Each student chooses or is given two depending on student. (The guided reading group is pulled at this time.) 11:00 Writing Workshop: Mini-lesson, independent writing, sharing, and/or publication 12:00 Recess 12:30 Lunch 1:00 Specials 1:10 Math Workshop: Whole group activity with math stations based on ability 2:15 Science/Social Studies/Free Choice Activity 2:45 Phonics 3:30 Pack up for dismissal

64 My data was primarily collected from the ELL students’ interactive writing workshop after their reading workshop. Sometimes, I attended part of their reading workshop and stayed until their recess. The students were given the “prize” of eating lunch together with Mrs. Young if they were awarded “prize tickets” for their participation or good performance in their classroom. Their specials included gym, music, and arts. The math, science, and phonics classes in the afternoon were not observed in this dissertation project.

Based on the interviews and my participant observation, four phases were identified in each writing unit of their interactive writing workshop (see Table 3.2). But the time to finish each unit varied according to the children’s writing progress and their decision about “publication” of their work or not. Phase four, publication, was optional in some writing units.

Table 3.2. Writing Unit Structure

Phase Activities 1 Mini lesson Step 1 Reading aloud (use mentor books or sample writing) Step 2 Teacher-student discussion about mentor books/sample writing Step 3* Teacher and students may generate some ideas about their own writing from the mentor books/sample writing Step 4 Teacher-student interactive writing (write down their shared ideas down) 2 Independent writing/focal group writing conference 3 Sharing time 4* Publishing

*Optional activity

Phase One

In Phase one, a mini lesson would often start with reading aloud on their reading carpet. Students sat in a circle, and the teacher sat on a chair near a standing white board.

The teacher usually read some mentor books or her or the students’ sample writings.

Sometimes, the students would retell what the teacher read depending on their familiarity with the mentor books or writing sample used on the day. In the second step, the teacher introduced writing genres (e.g., poem, nonfiction, personal narrative, wow-nonfiction, etc.), abstract concepts (author, audience, reader, illustrator, setting, time, context, culture, onomatopoeia, ending line, structure, etc.), basic writing conventions (spelling, sound- letter match, finger space, capital and small letters, punctuation uses, etc.), and/or discussed with the students how the writing concepts, conventions, and skills could be adapted or adopted in their own writing. Step three was not necessarily operationalized in every writing unit. If it occurred, the students and teacher would generate some ideas about their writing based on their discussion about mentor books, which is similar to the mentor book usually in the aspect of topics or style—like the painting, patterns, and styles in E. Carle, J. Butler, or M. William’s books. Then, the teacher and the students would move on to Step four and further discuss what and how they could put their orally discussed ideas into their own written language uses. Visual texts, like pictures matching their writing content, were created by the students to co-construct their desired wholeness of meanings of their writing.

Phase Two

66 In this phase, independent writing was the ultimate goal of their workshop. A simultaneous parallel activity was teacher-student, one-on-one writing conferences. In each class session, there was a group of students assigned in different weeks to work individually with the teacher with their idea expansion, spelling, and other various writing-related needs for about five minutes. Other students were asked to work in pairs or in a small-sized group and write independently. It was observed that the peers often helped each other with spelling, picture drawing, and idea generation, expansion, or revision in their independent writing.

Phase Three

In Phase three, sharing time called the students and the teacher to sit in a circle on their reading carpet. The students could have their complete or incomplete writings in their hands. This sharing time could start with some students voluntarily sharing their own writing or with a student’s complete work selected by the teacher. The incomplete work could also be selected to be shared in the class or to elicit their discussion about how they could help the writer improve his or her writing. In this case, the teacher invited the students to help the author of the incomplete work revise his or her work.

Phase Four

In this phase, publishing of the students’ work was dependent upon the students’ writing process and their general class schedule. In the publishing phase, the teacher would ask each student to sit with her at one of their classroom computers and to orally narrate their stories. At the same time, the teacher would type the oral stories up on the computer and/or print them out so that the students could draw pictures on it or

“decorate” the cover page. For one writing unit, the teacher compiled their stories into a digital storybook.

Data Collection

Besides my participant observation and video recording of the naturally occurring classroom activities, I took field notes about the classroom setup, atmosphere, my informal chats with the students (who were not formally interviewed in this study), and other dynamics that might not be captured in video tapes. To get to know the teacher’s perspectives on the students’ writing and the design of her class, I, based on my research report in January 2010, conducted two semi-constructed interviews with Mrs. Young in

February 2010. Built upon continuous data analysis and preliminary findings, another semi-constructed interview with the teacher was conducted in April 2010 and, for the interest of time, a survey was designed and distributed to her at the end of May 2010. The students’ artifacts of different writing units were collected all along the academic year.

The teacher also provided me with reference books and articles from her professional development training and the syllabi and assessment criteria. Additionally, I kept a reflective research journal from March 2010 to March 2012 to reflect upon my role as a participating observer and a researcher, the ethical issues, and the theories that drove my data collection, data analysis, and the data processes over time.

The corpus of data shown in Table 3.3 illustrates what kind and how much data I collected from the middle of November 2009 to the end of May 2010. (Xs indicate the area of data collection during the school day.) In total, the data corpus includes 81 video clips (approximately 811 minutes), three audio recordings of the interviews with the

68 teacher (36 minutes and 56 seconds), a two-page survey, 24 pages of field notes, a 5,402- word reflective research journal, 255 photocopies of students’ artifacts and classroom documents, and 237 hard copies of students’ artifacts and classroom documents.

During the collection of the corpus of data, I reviewed all the video segments and maintained a log of video data indicating initial identification of data with high potential for initial data analysis. A majority of the video segments were included in the log and transcribed for the purposes of systematic and comparative analysis of the literacy events documented over time. The log numbered the video segments, dated writing units, and documented literacy events, emerging themes, and analytic memos. The first two of the interviews with the teacher were conducted in February. The third interview was conducted after a survey administered in April 2010. The three audio clips were also transcribed for qualitative analysis together with the survey, my field notes, and research journal. Hardcopies of the students’ and teacher-student artifacts were digitalized and used to triangulate my data analysis and findings with the purpose of illustrating the students’ growth in their English writing over time.

Table 3.3. Data Corpus

Date Themes of Observation Video Teacher Artifacts/ Reflective writing activities (Field notes) taping interview document research /survey collection journal

11/16/2009 Independent X writing (nonfiction), word spelling exercise, peer practice: ABC chart 11/30/2009 Thanksgiving X X X stories 12/7/2009 Independent X X X writing sharing; poem reading and writing 12/11/2009 Culture in/and X X writing; independent writing sharing 1/15/2010 Mentor book X X X reading; discussing an example poem; focal group conference 1/22/2010 Punctuation X X X writing 1 1/25/2010 Punctuation X X writing 2 1/29/2010 Story writing and X X editing 2/1/2010 Authorship X X (publish); collective writing; rereading, editing, (punctuation) 2/5/2010 Drawing pictures X X for their stories; publishing their books continued

70 Table 3.3. Data Corpus (continued)

Date Themes of writing Observation Video Teacher Artifacts/ Reflective activities (Field notes) taping interview/ document research survey collection journal

2/6/2010 Sharing their X published book 2/8/2010 Finding patterns in X X X X independent writing interview 2/19/2010 Discussion on time X X issue; focal group conference; peer collaboration among boys 2/22/2010 Word family X X X X interview 3/1/2010 Goodbye winter, hello X X spring poem writing; group reading 3/4/2010 X X 3/5/2010 Rereading and editing X 3/30/2010 X 4/5/2010 X 4/9/2010 X 4/10/2010 X 4/11/2010 X X 4/12/2010 Sharing nonfiction X X writing; mentor book reading; discussion about author and illustration; watching a video about authoring and illustration; focal group reading 4/13/2010 X 4/14/2010 X

continued

Table 3.3. Data Corpus (continued)

Date Themes of writing Observation Video Teacher Artifacts/ Reflective activities (Field notes) taping interview/ document research survey collection journal

4/16/2010 Discussing and X X X X writing codes of interview “good behaviors” and collaborative writing; independent writing and sharing independent writing 4/19/2010 Class discussion/ X X

reflection about their writing processes and write the processes down; focal writing group conference; sharing of their wow non fiction books; discussion about the relations between the picture and “your” thinking 4/20/2010 X 4/22/2010 X 4/23/2010 X 4/25/2010 X 4/27/2010 X 4/30/2010 Review characteristics X X X of wow-nonfiction; talking about publishing it; a baby’s visit to the class; talking about writer’s audience and the relationship between writers and readers; focal writing group continued

72 Table 3.3. Data Corpus (continued)

Date Themes of writing Observation Video Teacher Artifacts/ Reflective activities (Field notes) taping interview/ document research survey collection journal

5/6/2010 Sharing of X independent writing; mentor book reading and discussion 5/7/2010 Writing a card for X mom on the mother’s day; publishing her former book; sharing independent writing and sharing 5/9/2010 X 5/10/2010 X 5/11/2010 Mentor book reading X X and discussion about audience; sharing of independent writing; focal writing group conference; independent writing and sharing; peer mentoring; researcher participating into a student’s writing process 5/13/2010 Whole class X X X collaborative writing; personal narration; story sharing in pairs; talking about publication 5/18/2010 Mini lesson; X X independent writing; story editing; sharing edited independent writing continued

Table 3.3. Data Corpus (continued)

Date Themes of writing Observation Video Teacher Artifacts/ Reflective activities (Field notes) taping interview/ document research survey collection journal

5/21/2010 Mini lesson on X X personal narrative; independent writing 5/24/2010 X 5/28/2010 Writing stories: X X (survey)X X “when I was little”; mini lesson on and help with word spelling; independent writing and sharing; group reading 6/2/2010 X 6/3/2010 X

Stage 3. Identification and Analyses of Key Literacy Events

This section describes what data were chosen to answer the research questions. As described above, the ELL students’ writing class I observed consisted of different writing units, some of which are identified as particular series of key literacy events. The primary data for analysis were drawn from the second, the third, and the fourth phases of each writing unit. The whole-class discussion for idea generation, the subsequent interactive whole-class writing, and the sharing of students’ independent writing are viewed as the most useful sources (events) to represent the socially and discursively constructed learning and meaning-making processes in their English writing.

74 What follows is a description of why and how I analyzed the chosen data. To reconceptualize ELL students’ writing as a set of social practices and explore the complex learning that occurred during their writing practices, my analysis focused on key literacy events to explore students’ dialogic writing processes. Analyses of the key events focused on both teacher-student/student-student discourses and the contexts of their discourses as the principal site for language and culture learning (Gumperz, 2001). The aim is to reveal how students adopt and adapt texts varied in modes, voices, genres, and substances from their school life experiences and other social practices into their writing to learn and learning to write. Moreover, analyses of the specific key events can shed light on how social and cultural phenomena and ideology shape and are shaped by their L2 writing.

Concretely, the analyses of key literacy events included the following steps:

1. I transcribed the videotaped key literacy events to provide a thick description of the participants, their actions and reactions, and the events in situ. The participants’ uses of contextualization cues (cf. Gumperz, 1986) were identified from the emic views gained from my participant observation (my field notes) or the perlocutionary perspective

(Bloome et al., 2005).

2. The data and their transcriptions chosen for analyses in chapter four were parsed into “message units” (Green & Wallet, 1981) through identifying the contextualization cues, including the use of pausing, stress patterns, intonation patterns, volume changes, speed of delivery, and stylistic changes, etc. (cf. Bloome et al., 2005,). In this way, I could identify how repetition, reformulation, expansion, transformation, validation, indication, etc. were proposed and/or taken up by the participants.

3. The message units formulated larger units of analysis but the “smallest units of joint social activity” (Bloome et al., 2005, p. 26), or “interactional units” (Green &

Wallet, 1981), and were analyzed for the purpose of understanding how the students and teacher socially and discursively constructed meaning of and from their uses of contextualization cues with other cues, like symbolic grammatical and lexical cues in their interactions. The analyses of interactional units illustrate how boundaries of phases of an event and boundaries of events are signaled or named by participants (Bloome et al., 2005). This procedure enabled me to detect and understand the recurrent interaction pattern and form-context relationships (Gumperz, 2001). Further, the cross-event analyses yielded more general hypotheses about students’ (re)contextualized writing practices (Gumperz, 2001).

4. Participation structure was identified in sets of interactional units to examine whether the students used their agency to engage in meaning making and knowledge construction processes.

Each key event was mapped out to examine the features of texts used by participants and whether and how these features were referenced to the agents (the students and/or the teacher) and related to other texts used within and across the events.

In this way, the intertextual processes was made visible and represented. Each text juxtaposition was coded, proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and socially realized and then categorized into various kinds of learning according to the nature of the patterned intertextual practice (Lemke, 2004). I also identified the relations among texts,

76 intertextuality, and potentials of thematic coherence, which signals the social identity and relation-construction processes (Bloome et al., 2005).

In sum, the first step reflects how the data were transcribed; step two, on message unit, shows what is going on; step three, on international units, shows where the things happened and how; step four, on participation structure, shows who made things happen and why; step five, on text features/juxtaposition, shows learning and the social effects and consequences of the social events.

Stage 4. Cross-Event Analyses

The key events were not isolated but occurred in a series of interrelated and continuously changing and evolving events. The events at different phases of each writing unit and across different writing units and contexts were analyzed systematically to identify the classroom interaction patterns and the patterns of students’ text juxtaposition. Examining the events prior and after a key event can provide more details of the key event and how it is related to other events, its intercontextuality, and how they together constitute a particular set of literacy events. Cross-event analyses, then, can reveal how a particular series of literacy events reflects and constitutes an ideology specific to the particular time and place and a broader context.

While analyzing each selected literacy event, I identified its explicit and implicit reference to other events and the signs of intercontextuality and discussed their relationships. The events with similar relationships were categorized into and named as particular sets of events. My analyses demonstrated how intertextuality was proposed, acknowledged, recognized, and socially realized in and across literacy events.

Stage 5. Analyses of Other Data Sources

This section explains how I analyzed the interview and survey data and teacher- student and students’ artifacts over time. I transcribed the interview audio data and coded the interview transcriptions into different themes, which are referenced in my microanalysis of the key events in chapter four. The themes constructed in each interview and in the survey were compared together to identify the potential changes or evolvement of the teacher’s perspectives on the students’ English writing. It is worth mentioning that the students’ native language and cultures are valued and allowed to be used in their literacy practices.

The students’ artifacts were analyzed within the contexts of events that the written products are embedded. I mainly looked for references and thematic coherence between the students’ written products and their interactive writing processes, which constitute the key events that I analyzed.

Taken together, the study design included five stages. They are presented here as linear but actually overlapped each other in the recursive research processes, which is part of the process of microethnographic discourse analysis of classroom literacy events

(Bloome et al., 2005). The overall research processes may be affected by the researcher’s bias caused by my limited point of view and particular ethnolinguistic background.

Therefore, I often communicated my data collection process with a colleague who did her dissertation study in a first-grade classroom of the same school. She possesses rich elementary school literacy teaching and coaching experiences. In my data analysis and

78 interpretation process, I involved the peer researcher and the classroom teacher in my study to enhance the interrater reliability of this study.

CHAPTER 4

FINDINGS

The current chapter examines English language learners’ writing practices in the kindergarten classroom via a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis of the moment-to-moment classroom interactions in and across different literacy events. In doing do, this dissertation aims to shed light on the social and discursive construction of young ELL students’ writing practices in the classroom and the change and evolvement over time.

As discussed in chapter 1, I present findings from using the following two sets of research questions:

1. How is intertextuality socially constructed as a learning heuristic in the ELL students’

writing workshop?

2. How is a poetics constructed in the ELL students’ writing practice? What is the nature

of this poetics?

Although the findings are presented in two sections, it should be underscored that the two closely connected areas worked in concert to construct the ELL students’ daily school writing practices.

80 Section 1. Examining Socially Constructed Intertextuality as a Learning Heuristic in the Interactive Writing Workshop

Children’s writing is viewed here as an inherently intertextual process. That is, their learning to write is examined as a skillful “juxtaposition” (cf. Bloome & Egan-Robertson,

1993), transposition (cf. Kristeva, 1986), and transformation (cf. Wohlwend, 2011) of various texts (and semiotic sources). What counts as texts and what and how texts can be juxtaposed cannot be predetermined (Bloome & Hong, 2011). It requires the text users and other relevant participants to propose, recognize, acknowledge, and constitute social significance (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) in and through their actions and reactions to each other (Bloome, 2005). Further, this construction process “both influences and occurs within a cultural ideology that constrains what texts may be juxtaposed and how these texts might be juxtaposed” (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). Examination of the construction process affords a deep understanding of what kinds of learning may be occurring in the ELL writing workshop classroom and what counts as good writing and good writers in this local writing community.

My data analysis focused on both manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality (Fairclough, 1992). Examining both provided insights on the intertextual practices of children’s writing practices. Before sharing my data analysis, I provide an overview of the videotaped poem writing unit, part of which has been chosen for data analysis in this section. Further, I explain why the prewriting discussion video segment was chosen for the microanalysis of intertextual writing processes. I proceed to describe the five steps involved in the data analysis, followed by analysis of intertextuality

construction processes and patterns and then synthesis of the various kinds of learning constructed in and through the teacher-student intertextual writing processes.

An Overview of the Chosen Poem Writing Unit

There were a series of video recordings that documented the naturally occurring classroom writing activities in the first poem-writing unit, which was the second writing unit in the ELL students’ first semester. Their first writing unit was a nonfiction unit on facts about turtles. The teacher mentioned in the first interview that starting with a nonfiction writing unit on turtles was an adjustment she made for the whole English language learners class she had this year. The collaborative work exhibited in the hallway and photos of the students’ individual writing showed that the teacher helped the students type up all the facts the students orally communicated with each other and the students basically copied the pictures and words from their mentor texts (see Appendix G). The teacher further explained that she usually started with a poem-writing unit with native

English-speaking children in a mainstream classroom. But she wanted to let the ELL students start with some facts, something they could see or find in their real life. In the first writing unit, two pet turtles were brought to the classroom for the students’ observation. The students furthered their research on turtles and found facts about them through reading books and on the Internet with the help from the teacher.

They started the first poem-writing unit by reading some mentor texts and some exemplary poems written by the students of Mrs. Young’s previous year’s class. These poems were bound and published as “books” and shared as “exemplary poems” with the

ELL students. The students were asked to find the patterns in these poems and compare

82 them with nonfiction stories. The students were told that their poems would also be kept by the teacher and shared with next year’s students. The teacher and the students further discussed that a writer could be a poet. Their discussion also touched upon poem organizational and rhetorical structure, the spatial arrangement, rhythmic patterns of poem lines, and different kinds of poems. At the end of the first poem-writing sessions, the students “published” some of their own poems, mainly pictures with several unconventional words. Their works were exhibited in the school’s cafeteria so that the students of higher graders, other teachers, and staff in their school could read their poems.

Chosen Data

The data chosen for analysis of intertextuality construction was a video segment from the series of video recordings made in the aforementioned poem-writing unit in

December 2010. It documented the naturally occurring teacher-student free discussion in the classroom about how they could write a poem about an ordinary classroom supplement, a stapler. This prewriting discussion video segment was chosen because it documented a core interactive writing phase in their poem-writing unit bridging their mini lesson, the phase of collectively writing their speeches down, and significantly influenced the students’ subsequent independent poem writing. According to the interviews with the teacher, these beginning English writers in her class felt more comfortable and did a good job in the whole class interactive writing processes.

Moreover, the preliminary findings of this study showed that teacher-student and student- student joint intertextuality construction is a widely existing phenomenon in this classroom and analytically meaningful in examining in-depth the children’s writing

processes and the evolvement over time. The transcript below represents a whole class discussion, during which the teacher and the students play with the language, their ideas, various texts, and semiotic sources to construct potential intertextual links to create various kinds of learning and aesthetic responses to their writing processes and products.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the intertextuality construction during children’s playful writing practice is the focus here. The aesthetic nature of their writing practice will be analyzed in the latter section of this chapter.

Scenario of Prewriting Discussion of “The Stapler”

This whole class discussion follows the first part of their mini lesson, in which the teacher first read some poems written by her students (kindergarteners) in 2008. Then the teacher led the students to recall what they learned about poetry and read a few more poems from their mentor texts. Before starting their discussion, the teacher put a stapler on a table and moved the whole class from the reading carpet. The teacher and the students circled around the table where the stapler was put. The teacher knelt down and folded and put her arms on the table and her chin on her arms. Some students also knelt down. All of them looked at the stapler at the center of the table. They first recalled what they knew about poems, poets, and how poets write. The students were also encouraged by the teacher to think and look at things like a poet. They discussed how differently scientists and poets would look and describe the stapler and what would be possible ideas for their poem, “The Stapler.”

84 Data Analysis Procedures

1. I transcribed the chosen video data, following the combined discourse analysis

conventions modified by Bloome et al. (2005) and Dubois 1(2006).

2. I examined my field notes taken in the particular class, the mentor book(s), the

students’ written work subsequent to the discussion, and class documents (see

Appendices B and F)

3. The transcripts were parsed into message units, the smallest meaningful conversational

messages (Green & Wallet, 1981).

4. I examined interactional patterns in the chosen transcript (Bloome & Egan-Robertson,

1993) to illuminate the flow of the teacher-student intertextuality construction

processes.

5. Various kinds of learning identified during the children’s intertextual processes were

presented according to the four principles of intertextuality construction (cf. Lemke,

2004).

Following the above steps, my data analysis began with setting up the transcript shown in Transcript 4.1 below. I located the proposal, recognition, and acknowledgement of intertextuality and realization of its social significance within this particular poem writing event and across related events. Transcript 4.1.consists of five columns. The first column is line number; each line is a message unit or description of contextualization cues. The second column is speaker. The linear displaying of speakers can illustrate which kind of interaction is going on, either teacher-students, student-student, or whole

1 Retrieved from http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/projects/transcription/A04comparison.pdf.

class interactions. The third column represents message unit, the smallest meaningful conversational unit (Green & Wallet, 1981). The fourth column displays interactional unit

(IU). The fifth column shows the construction process of intertextuality proposal (P), recognition (R), acknowledgement (A), and social realization of significance (S) or consequences of intertextuality. Each attempted proposal, recognition, acknowledgement, or realization of social consequences made by the students and the teacher were numbered.

Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting discussion (5:37)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 001 T >You are gonna think.↓< IU 1 Proposal 1 002 = And we are gonna talk about it ｜LIKE POETS, Ok↑ 003 I want you to start thinking of the stapler. 004 When I looked at it, I think... 005 It is going to EAT the paper (0.3). 006 Does anybody else see that? 007 A No. 008 The teacher holds the stapler, showing it before the class and clicking it to make sounds. 009 Ss laugh 010 T You kind of see the mouth.↑ IU 2 011 Will scientists say that it is going to eat the Proposal 2 paper?↑ 012 Tina Yeah.

013 T = No. They’ll just say the facts. 014 POETS. IU 3 015 They can use cool words to describe it. Recognition 2 016 Sam They’ll just staple the paper. IU 2 Acknowledgement 017 T They’ll just staple the paper. 2 018 =You are right. Social realization 2 Continued 86 Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 19 But poets will, IU 3 Re-proposal 2 20 = They are going to say it munches like a WHAT? 21 What kind of animal it looks like that? 22 Sam Like tigers. 23 Tina Like a hippo↑ 24 Sam A hippo can xxxx 25 Tina Hippo xxxx 26 Tina uses a hand gesture to describe it. 27 Ss xxxx IU 4 029 T turns her head to look at Tina. 030 What makes you think like that? 031 Tina xxx a hippo likes.. 032 [xxx a hippo likes ] 033 T [Ok↑] 034 What else it looks like to you? IU 5 035 Teacher looks at the whole class. 036 Lori It looks [like.] Recognition 2 037 T [Oh], 038 Lori raises her hand very quickly. 039 T I like xxx raise her hand. =Lori IU 6 040 Lori Like a crocodile. 041 T Like a:: crocodile, Acknowledgement 2 Social realization (teacher’s validation)

042 Do you hear that? ↑ IU 7 043 The teacher pushes the stapler down to make loud sounds. 044 It CHOPs like a crocodile. Social significance 045 I like it 2 46 =That thinks like a good poet. Acknowledgement 1 Social realization 1,2

Continued

Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 47 Nice job. 48 =Raise you hand, Joe IU 8 49 = Share what else you could write about Re-proposal 2 the stapler? 50 What else↑ 51 T looks around the class. 52 What else (2.0), 053 Joe (2.0) ↑ IU 8 054 >Would we call it something else too?< 055 You call it crocodile too. DEAN↑ 056 D Uhm.. (19.0) 057 T looks at the girls at her right hand. Ana shakes her head. 058 T Do you wanna share your ideas?↑ 059 D Uhm... I 060 Dean puts two fingers under his jaw. 061 I know her…like this. Acknowledgment 2 062 Dean opens his fingers like a mouth, seeking for a word to describe the action. 063 T: (Hhh...), it moves like this.↑ (The teacher copies D’s finger gesture.) 064 How could we write this back into words? IU 9 065 Should we help Dean put this into words? ↑ 066 T looks around the class. 067 It is like a crocodile. 068 You could say. 069 It has two fingers. 070 (laughs) We can call these [Fingers.] 071 John [I am counting.] 072 I am counting the fingers. Proposal 3

073 T A crocodile munching,

Continued 88 Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 74 TWO fingers pushing up and down. 75 Joe It makes noises. IU 10 Proposal 4 76 T Oh (hhh...), it Makes noise. 77 What does this noise sound like? IU 11 78 T pushes the stapler to make clicking sounds as a type cue. 079 Tina I think it likes a leopard. IU 11 Proposal 4 080 Sam It looks like a leopard. 081 D It likes this. 082 Dean uses his right fist to hit his left palm to imitate the sound. Montour does the same. 083 T What kind of noise? IU 12 084 Joe↑ 085 It makes noise, doesn’t it? 086 It is not quiet. 087 IT makes noise when it SNAPs down. 088 T uses the stapler to make clicking sound again. 089 Tina Oh [hhh…] 090 T You wanna say that? ↑ 091 Joe Yeah. 092 T Very cool. 093 Anything ↑ IU 13 094 = what else could you say about the stapler? 095 EVA. Re-proposal 2 096 Eva And xxx, 097 T And that could be your ending line. 098 Hou hou... to the paper 99 That is called >onomatopoeia 100 = that is when we make an object have a sound. 101 Ho:w could we↑ write that, hou hou? IU 14 102 What does it do when it pushes on the paper?

Continued

Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 104 Tina it xxxx it. 105 T Ok, I’ll take a piece of paper 106 We will use cut up papers. 107 Oh, it is not... oh... 108 >This has things on it.< IU 14 109 >We used it.< 110 Ready? ↑ 111 Watch what happens when I hou... 112 T staples the papers together and shows the stapled papers before the students. 113 What they do? IU 15 114 A [It is stapled together.] 115 S# [They stay together.] 116 T What we use to staple, IU 16 117 What did they do to them? 118 S# It is stapled together. 119 T It does what? Joe↑ IU 17 120 Joe Stays together 121 T [It stays, together.] 122 Stays still. 123 D [and xx] 124 T When it hou hou down on paper 125 It sticks them [toge:ther fore:ver.] 126 D [and you xxx] goes...can… IU 18 Pre-Proposal 6 127 It can go off. 128 T We can flip the staple off. 129 T tears the stapled papers apart and looks at the students. 130 I like it, yes. 131 T lifts and shows the stapled papers to another student. 132 Sam Could be like a turtle in the water ｜ IU 19 Social realization 133 jump and snap? 5 134 T Sam could write that,

Continued 90 Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 135 when the turtle, 136 = looks like a turtle jumping gout of water, 137 and JUMP and SNAP. IU 19 138 And the paper is stapled. 139 Great, that will be a good poem about [the Social realization 5 stapler.] 140 Tina [and. And…] IU 20 141 T And I love all the ideas. Recognition 1 142 Yes, you guys are great poets. Acknowledgement 1 143 Tina =And the staple IU 21 Recognition 6 144 =and staple can cut somebody, like Dean. IU 21 145 It could xxx somebody. 146 It could be xxx it. = 147 Tina touches Dean's hand. Recognition 6 148 Eva =And it can bleed. = 149 = If it gets your skin. Acknowledgement 150 T It could make you bleed. 6 151 It is like the sharp teeth inside the mouth. IU 22 152 Lori then then then our Acknowledgement 6 153 T sharp teeth like a shark come out of [his mouth] 154 Tina Oh [hhh…] 155 T = to get the paper together. 156 >If you think,< IU 23 157 or like Sam said, 158 sharp teeth like a snapping turtle.] 159 D [Mrs. Mrs. Young, I] IU 24 Proposal 6 (2nd) 160 T [GRAB onto it.] IU 23 161 D [I... I’ve been… IU 24 162 It can go up and go into your eyes. Acknowledgement 163 Dean points to his eyes and rubs them. 6 164 Then you will be blind. 165 T Oh, yeah, Continued 91

Transcript 4.1. Whole-Class Prewriting Discussion (5:37) (Continued)

Line Spr Message Unit Interactional Intertextuality Unit (P.R.A.S.) 166 >It’s xxx a lot too.< 167 Ok, that is how we look at things [like a IU 23 Recognition 1 poet.] Acknowledgement 1 168 D [Because], because. Because… IU 24 169 T =Let’s go back there and write. IU 23 Social consequence 1

Transcript 4.1. is parsed into one hundred and sixty-nine message units and twenty- four interactional units. At least six attempts of intertextuality construction are identified in the microanalysis of the teacher-students prewriting discussion of their poem “The

Stapler.” The intertextuality construction processes and various types of learning that occurred during their discussion were analyzed based on the sequence of the proposal of intertextuality and the evidence drawn from the message units and interactional units.

(Transcripts of other phases in or out of this poem writing unit are also referred to as supporting evidence.)

As shown in the transcript, Mrs. Young, the teacher, starts the class’s prewriting discussion with three requests. This is an interesting and analytically significant conversational opening. She first requests the students to think, which echoes a leading theme in their daily writing activities, “thinking as a writer.” It can be observed from the above transcript that line 001 “you are gonna think” is an incomplete sentence spoken by the teacher at a fast speed and in a low voice. There is a hidden social relationship

92 between the students and the writer/poet. Moreover, the second latching line indicates that the teacher immediately realizes the difficulty that the children may have with their independent thinking as poets and the importance of constructing a “We (the teacher and the students)-writers/poets” relationship. In line 002, the teacher shifts to the collective first pronoun “we,” signaling a shared community and their collective action. The second request invites the whole class, “we,” together to talk like poets. The third request on line

003 suggests the third layer of the social relationship “I (Mrs. Young, the teacher)-You

(the students)” that is embedded and constrains their following interactions. This third request also functions as a statement of the teacher’s authority, a facilitative role in their discussion, and as topic initiation: “thinking and talking about the stapler like poets.” On the three starting lines, the teacher proposes the first intertextuality between the children’s English language learner’s identity and poet/writer identity.

I need to point out here that the young children’s English language learner identity is a highly complex issue in this study. According to the interview with the teacher on

April 16, 2010, and follow-up personal communications after class and through email, most of the children in this class came to kindergarten without first language literacy knowledge or prior preschool experiences. In other words, they were ELLs in spoken

English but used English as their first language in their reading and writing. The teacher mentioned in the interview that the children got little support for their English reading and writing after class. As introduced in the session of contextual data in chapter three, the children in this ELL kindergarten spent an average of ninety minutes each day with the native English-speaking children. The video data on January 15th, 2010, documented

a peer group writing among several female students (Thai, April, Lori, and later Katie).

Lori was discussing her ideas with me (the researcher) and drawing the pictures for her story “No Cloe!” When April shared some information about her brother’s dog in Lori’s ear, Thai reminded them that “we’re not supposed to speak English in class.” These data indicate that the children were aware that they were learning English as a target language because they used their native languages different from English with at least one side of their parents. Moreover, speaking English was “a best practice to learn the language” as their teacher mentioned in our email communication. Speaking English only is not an official state, district, school, or classroom policy though.

The first intertextual link proposal is implicit and challenging for the five-year-old

English language learners to recognize or acknowledge in their beginning school literacy practices. This proposal seems to be suspended temporarily. The following analysis shows that the rest of the teacher-student discussion could be viewed as their continuously joint efforts to construct and socially achieve the first proposed intertextual link between ELL identity and writer/poets. This complex and challenging process of identity construction process is not particularly addressed in this dissertation but analytically significant for further investigation in the future.

As shown in line 005, when Mrs. Young claims that she thinks the stapler will eat the paper, she launches their play with the language and poetic devices, personification in this case. This language use was taken by the students when the teacher attempts to invite the class to use their poet eyes and asks them whether they “see” the stapler eat the paper or not. Apple (a female student) responds with a quick positive answer, which does not

94 count as an appropriate answer to the teacher’s question. The students’ laughter (line 009) after Apple’s response to the teacher’s proposal shows a local social culture that has been operated there. Their laughter maintains the enjoyable learning atmosphere, reflecting and constructing a friendly and sometimes playful classroom culture. To make more texts and semiotic sources for the students to play with, the teacher uses other kinds of signs, holding the stapler close to the students’ face and pushing it down to make sounds. On line 010, she uses the word “(the animal’s) mouth” to describe the stapler’s opening arms.

This metaphor is not recognized by the students until the end of interactional unit one.

The second proposal of intertextuality occurs on line 011 where the teacher gears their conversation to comparing the scientists’ and poets’ description of a stapler. Prior to this writing unit, this class finished their first nonfiction writing unit. In the nonfiction unit, the teacher or the teacher’s colleague brought two turtles to their classroom and the students researched various facts and published their works on the two turtles and other species of turtles. The teacher expects that the proposed intertextuality between nonfiction and poetry writing can help students bring their knowledge about nonfiction into their learning to write poems. However, on line 012, Tina’s quick positive answer to the teacher’s question—“Will scientists say that it (the stapler) is going to eat the paper?— reflect more so the repeated practice of a classroom question-answer routine in which the teacher raises an interrogation or suggestion and the students likely answer “yes.” The teacher quickly shifts the ritual classroom practice back to their intertextuality construction process. She corrects Tina and increases her voice to stress the word “poets” on line 015 and further articulates how scientists and poets may describe the same object

(like the stapler) by using different words in different ways. Sam’s response (a male student) on line 016 indicates his understanding of the difference between poetry and nonfiction writing. Taking Sam’s response as a starting point for his recognition of the proposed intertextuality between genres (poem and nonfiction), the teacher confirms his response through repeating his sentence and providing positive comments. She frames two more concrete questions on lines 020 and 021, using the phrases “munch like, look like” and the word “animal” to better guide students’ poetic thinking about the stapler and particularly their recognition of how to play the language by using metaphor and the second proposed intertextual links between nonfiction and poetry genres. Across interactional units two and three, it is found that their practice of learning to play with poetic language is intertwined with their construction of the second intertextuality. Sam’s and Tina’s responses on lines 022 to 023 show their recognition and acknowledgement of poetic language uses such as the stapler’s opening mouth is like animals “eating” and

“munching.” On lines 024 and 025, they juxtapose their relevant natural science knowledge and life experiences to legitimize their answers, which are followed by many more students’ responses to what the stapler looks like or munches like. The teacher- student language play started by the teacher currently turns into a multiparty play, a collective learning in the whole class. Seen from the above analysis, the practice of playing with poetic language is initiated in line 005 and gradually taken up by the students in lines 022 to 027.

The incomplete construction process of the second proposal intertextual link between nonfiction and poetry is resumed in interactional unit four, starting from the

96 teacher’s question on line 028. Then Mrs. Young reframes another related question

—“What makes you think like that?”—and assigns it to Tina, turning her head to look at

Tina. There are two analytically meaningful underlying assumptions in the teacher’s questions: first, “Think like that” suggests the teacher’s confirmation of Tina’s thinking like a poet; second, the pronoun “you” implicitly positions Tina in the role of a student poet. This challenging question also echoes the first proposed intertextuality between the students’ language learner identity and writer identity. However, Tina does not recognize the second intertextual link between nonfiction and poetry nor her identity as a poet. The teacher reframes another question in line 034 to help the students recognize the second intertextual link between poem and nonfiction writing and reopens the floor to the whole class at the beginning of interactional unit five. Lori’s quick reaction to the teacher’s question is suspended by the teacher’s vocal signal “oh” on line 038.

In interactional unit 6, the teacher legitimizes Lori’s use of the metaphor “like a crocodile” as her recognition of the second intertextuality between poetry and nonfiction and her initial experiment with a poetic device. Mrs. Young raises a self-answered question on line 042 and pushes the stapler hard to make loud sounds and provides richer texts (audio text and visual text). Then she articulates that “it (the stapler) CHOPS like a crocodile,” putting stress on the word “chops.” The deliberately accentuated word

“chops” is used by the teacher to foreground the feature of poetic language and the difference of poetic language and the language used in nonfiction writing. Further on, in line 046, the teacher indirectly addresses “that” (Lori’s particular utterance of poetic language) rather than re-request all other students to think like a good poet. Finally, the

teacher uses a comment “Nice job” to end the sixth interactional unit with a sort of implicit acknowledgement and indication of the social consequences of the second intertextuality.

More students begin to participate in the intertextuality construction process as well as their language play as shown in line 061 when Dean (a male student) responds to the teacher’s further question about what else they (the students) can write about the stapler. Dean tries to juxtapose kinesthetic text (holding his right fist and hitting his left palm to make sounds) and spoken text (it likes this) to show his ideas about the sound the stapler is making. His intent of using onomatopoeia here to describe the stapler’s sound is not realized by his peers. Dean’s performance is used as a visual cue by the teacher to ask the class to put Dean’s body language into oral/written language. It is also taken by John

(a male student) as a cue in line 070 to propose the third intertextuality between the candidate poem writing texts and his finger counting (a kind of mathematical text).

Although John makes a clear statement in line 071 that he is counting his fingers as an effort to make this proposal recognizable to his peers and the teacher, this seemingly off- task intertextuality or a kind of interdisciplinary learning is not legitimized but ignored by the whole class at this particular moment. The whole class’s unanimous reaction to John’s proposal reflects and constitutes the rest of the class members’ shared consensus about what counts as texts and appropriate intertextuality in a particular context.

The teacher ignores the third intertextuality proposed by John and moves on to help students transform Dean’s kinesthetic text into words. A new multimodal (the fourth) intertextuality between actions of the stapler/the animal (the kinesthetic text) and the

98 accompanying sound of the actions (the audio text) is proposed by Joe in line 075. It is immediately recognized and acknowledged by the teacher who makes her typical confirming vocal sign “Oh” and repeats John’s proposal. She further initiates a new question in interactional unit 11 in line 077 to help Joe seek for acknowledgment from his peers. Tina soon recognizes the multimodal intertextuality and validates it through playing with a simile or a poetic idea—“sound like a leopard”—in line 079.

Joe’s intertextuality proposal on line 075 is taken up by Tina and Sam as an opportunity of using similes to describe the stapler by borrowing animals’ actions and shape. They attempt to intertextualize their current observations of the stapler and their prior knowledge or life experience related to the above animals into their current poem writing. Sam’s and Tina’s responses are ignored because Dean continues to hold the floor in line 81 and maintain the class’s attention by using a similar gesture of punching his fist to emphasize the fourth intertextuality between the actions and the sound of the stapler and animals. Dean’s gesture is also copied by John, which may indicate John’s recognition of Dean’s intertextuality and his difficulty of acknowledging it orally in

English. Moreover, the teacher, an authority in this class, chooses to help the students finish constructing the fourth intertextuality. Noticing many children having difficulty transforming their intended audio text into verbal texts, the teacher stresses the word

“snap” on line 087 to scaffold their basic vocabulary building. It cannot be told from the transcript whether Tina, who imitates the teacher’s confirming vocal sign “oh,” recognizes the intertextuality or not. Meanwhile, it seems that Eva (a female student) comes up with something (inaudible) representing the fourth intertextuality and is

authorized by the teacher to be used as her ending line, which to some extent realizes the social significance of the fourth proposed intertextuality and authorizes it to be transformed into Eva’s written poem. In addition, Eva and other listeners may also learn that the poem is structured writing with ending since there is an ending and must be an ending. In the transcripts made from other video data, the teacher’s explicit instruction and the class’s discussion about the organization and structure (beginning, middle, and ending) of their writing, like in their personal narrative, further enforces the students’ practice of structuring their writing.

The teacher’s first-time explicit instruction on a poetic device, onomatopoeia, occurs in lines 098 and 099 as the students and the teacher move their discussion towards the end of their poem. Mrs. Young keeps encouraging the students to share their ideas about describing the stapler. She provides multimodal semiotic cues (showing the object, making the clicking sound, using different facial expressions) and concrete words/ examples to help the students intertextualize the relationship between the stapler and animals’ actions and sounds. Then she introduces the abstract terminology, onomatopoeia. Although the students have been playing with their body language to initiate their ideas about the sounds of the stapler, the teacher’s explanation about the term “onomatopoeia” and her three follow-up questions obviously do not help the students further play or understand the use of the poetic devices from interactional unit 13 and interactional unit 17. The ELL students’ responses indicate that their play with language uses may play a more powerful role than the teacher’s explicit instruction (on the poetic devices) in helping them learn to use the language to make meaning. It can be

100 seen from interactional 16 that the children’s play with language and multimodal texts is respected and promoted in this class. Additionally, the teacher uses the stapler to staple two sheets of used papers and calls the students’ attention to what happens and what it sounds like. Before doing this, she lets the students know that they are using the used papers to do the demonstration, which is another layer of the students’ learning about saving paper and being environmentally friendly.

Of interest is that the seemingly miscommunication between Dean and the teacher from line 126 to line 130 is taken as a cue by Sam. We can know from the following lines that Dean on line 126 means that the staple can go off and go into their eyes. The teacher tries to maintain their talk on writing the poem about the stapler rather than writing about

Dean’s maybe fabricated “experiential facts.” When she tears the papers off, Sam says what happens here is like a turtle in the water, jump and snap. His language play on lines

132 and 133 foregrounds their local classroom culture of welcoming the children’s engagement of imagination and creativity when his idea is highly valued by the teacher and accepted by many other peers.

At the same time, the fifth intertextual link between the current poem writing unit and their prior nonfiction writing unit is proposed. Sam successfully intertextualizes the facts that they learn about turtles in their prior nonfiction writing unit and the observation he conducts on the stapler in the current class period. Sam’s authorship of this part of their poem is immediately validated by the teacher, which suggests that the teacher acknowledges his proposed intertextuality and the social significance of this intertextuality is achieved in their shared writing community. Then the teacher explicitly

101

acknowledges the intertextuality between current poem and prior nonfiction writing units by repeating Sam’s words and further validates their good ideas in writing poem and their identity as great poets.

The teacher-student interactive conversation near the end of this transcript is of particular interest. In line 143, Tina attempts to propose the sixth intertextual link between the stapler in the poem writing and the stapler in the students’ real or fabricated life experiences. She orally explains the intertextuality and uses visual text, touching the hands of Dean, who mentioned that the staple could go into the eyes in line 126. This intertextuality is recognized and further elaborated by Eva. Then the teacher seems to have to acknowledge the fact that the staple that goes off can make them bleed but also keeps using poetic languages to describe their experiences of observing and using a stapler. Their following interaction becomes even more interesting. The students (Lori and Dean) keep narrating some “facts” in a nonfiction style (i.e., cut, make you bleed, you’ll be blind, because) or their experiences in personal narrative style (then, our, I’ve been xx). And the teacher deliberately responds in a way about how a poet may look at and describe about the stapler (sharp teeth like a shark; grab onto it/skin). It is an intense, negotiated intertextuality construction process, during which the teacher plays the role of gate keeping. In lines 151, 153, 158, 160, 167, and 169, the teacher’s strategic responses to the sixth intertextuality proposed by the students function as reemphasizing the

(second) intertextuality between nonfiction and poem writing and a broader (the first) intertextuality between the students’ ELL identity and their poet/writer identity.

102 Meanwhile, the students learn what texts counts as relevant to their writing and what intertextuality can be successfully proposed and accepted in this particular literacy event.

Findings

The findings in this section are organized into two parts. The first part reports the findings about the complex processes of intertextuality construction based on my above data analysis and discussion. In the second part, I adapt Lemke’s (2004) “pattern of intertextuality” (organizational intertextuality, thematic intertextuality, and orientational intertextuality) in my presentation of the various kinds of learning identified in the teacher-student patterned intertextual practice. In doing so, I intend to emphasize young children’s learning in and through their writing practices and highlight the deep learning constructed through their orientational intertextual practice.

I. Complex Processes of Intertextuality Construction

First, intertextuality, which needs to be proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and socially realized (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993, 2004; Bloome et al., 2009), not clear cut but a complicated dynamic construction process that can be overlapped and intertwined with other intertextuality construction processes within or across different analytic units, message units, and interactional units. The intertextuality construction process adopted in my study to analyze the children’s writing practice consists of four basic steps: intertextuality proposal, recognition, acknowledgement, and realization of its social significance and/or consequences. Microanalysis of the naturally occurring classroom interactions in the children’s writing workshop shows that the intertextuality

103

construction process can be a few of the four steps. For instance, the teacher’s initial proposal of the intertextuality between the children’s English language learner identity and their writer/poet identity is not fully recognized by nor publicly acknowledged by the students. The analysis of students’ creative play with poetic language and devices in creating their poem about the stapler shows the ELL children’s emerging writer identity.

But during their beginning writing practice, only the teacher makes her acknowledgement of the students’ good ideas, their thinking like poets, and their performance as great poets.

Therefore, it is argued that the construction of the intertextuality between the children's

ELL identity and writer/poet identity is incomplete, changing and continuously evolving in their subsequent interactional units.

Second, intertextuality construction can be an iterative and/or parallel process. That is to say, if a certain intertextual link is potentially and substantially contributive to the achievement of students’ learning goals, which is their observing and thinking as poets in this poem writing unit, it can be proposed and reproposed to involve more students in their construction of more fruitful learning. For instance, the construction of intertextuality between their poem writing and nonfiction writing and between their language learner identity and writer/poet identity co-occupies the center of the teacher- student interaction represented in transcription 4.1. The genre-related intertextuality is explicitly proposed by the teacher once on line 11 and then implicitly mentioned by the students twice on lines 143, 148, and 161. During the iterative construction process, the teacher and students negotiate and jointly construct what counts as appropriate text and appropriate intertextuality in writing a poem. The social significance of such iterative

104 process lies in the change of the proposers and addressees. That suggests more students’ active participation into the construction process.

Third, the intertextuality construction process in this ELL’s poem writing event is intertwined with their poetic language and poetic devices play and learning. When the teacher proposes the intertextuality between their poem writing and prior nonfiction writing, she further asks the students two questions “They (poets) are going to say it munches like a what?” and “What kind of animal it looks like that?” These two follow-up questions provide the opportunities for the students to engage their imagination and creativity in their language play. The first question intrigues the students’ interest about the similar actions (eating, munching) of the stapler and of a certain kind of animal. The second question triggers their imagination about the “similar” appearances of the stapler and other animals. Both this intertextuality and the associated language learning serve the core intertextuality between the children’s ELL identity and writer/poet identity because the students’ play with language is validated as a good idea as is thinking as poets by the teacher and then gradually taken up by the students.

II. Various Learning in Patterned Intertextual Writing Practice

In the second part, I present the various types of learning constructed in and through the teacher-students intertextual practice by adapting Lemke’s (2004) “patterns of intertextuality.” Lemke (2004) claimed that “the members of a particular community make connections of some kinds, but not others; between some texts, but not others. Or at least we are much more likely to construct these patterns” (p. 4). The first pattern adapted in this study is called organizational or structural intertextuality, focusing on the most

105

obvious interrelations among linguistic and genre structures and some basic writing conventions in the information organization process. The second pattern is called thematic intertextual relationship, focusing on similar conversational content, interaction events, or interactants’ similar experiences involved in the construction of the same topic. Evidence for this pattern of intertextuality should be drawn from the similar ideational and experiential resources beyond the syntactic or other structure boundaries.

The third adapted pattern is called orientational intertextuality, built upon social, cultural, and ideological conventions in local and broader contexts that configure the interactants’ discourses and interpersonal social relationships (attitude, positioning, etc.), what counts as valid texts (intertextual substance), how the texts can be appropriately juxtaposed (intertextual process), and who can be involved in the intertextuality construction process and whose propose of intertextuality can be accepted and yield social significance (intertextual rights) (Bloome, 2005; Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993;

Lemke, 2004). Compared with the first two patterns, the orientational intertextuality is more abstract and less visible. Language is material (Volosinov, 1973), which makes the third pattern observable and empirical, as it is grounded on linguistic texts and other multimodal semiotic resources.

The three patterns of intertextuality adapted in this study afford a way of systematically presenting my findings about what kinds of learning are constructed in the

ELL students’ patterned intertextual practice and how different intertextualities and learning are interrelated or “co-actional” (Lemke, 2004). More importantly, they are employed to illuminate how deep and complex the young ELL children’s learning can be

106 and how their learning can be deepened and made visible when educators and researchers give their full consideration to the powerful imagination and creativity shown in and through the students’ play and experiment with the poetic language and devices and to the social, cultural, and ideological conventions that constrain and constitute the teacher- student and student-student intertextuality construction and learning process.

In table 4.2, the first column presents the number and nature of the proposed intertextuality, the second column indicates the pattern(s) of the proposed or constructed intertextuality, and the third column shows the students’ various learning generated from their patterned intertextual writing practice.

Table 4.2. Various Kinds of Learning

# Proposed Pattern of Various Kinds of Learning Intertextuality Intertextuality 1. Intertextuality between Thematic Social relationships between the teacher kindergarteners/ Orientational and the students, the ELL students, and language learner identity writer/poet identity and poet identity Setting up a writing object and learning goals in this writing unit 2. Intertextuality between Organizational Different genre features and their language poem and nonfiction Orientational uses genre Learning and enforcing kindergarten classroom culture Learning to defend intertextuality proposal with evidence or rationale 3. Intertextuality between Organizational Learning what counts as relevant texts and poem writing candidate Orientational as appropriate intertextuality texts and finger counting Learning local culture and ideology that in math class constitutes and constrain their learning

Continued

107

Table 4.2. Various Kinds of Learning (continued)

# Proposed Pattern of Various Kinds of Learning Intertextuality Intertextuality 4. Intertextuality between Thematic Learning to juxtapose multimodal texts actions of the stapler/ and use rhetorical devices to express their animals (the kinesthetic ideas text) and the accompanying sound (audio text) 5. Intertextuality between Thematic Learning to relate their prior learning the current poem writing experience with current learning unit and their prior experience nonfiction writing unit Learning to juxtapose appropriate intertextual link 6. Intertextuality between Thematic Learning to explore potential intertextual the students’ real life and Orientational relationships fabricated life experiences Learning what counts as relevant text and appropriate text juxtaposition

Table 4.2 shows that the first proposed intertextual link between the kindergarteners/language learners and poets/writers is both thematic and orientational. It was already known from transcript 4.1 that looking at things and thinking like a poet was one of the main topics of their prewriting discussion. From this proposed intertextuality between their ELL identity and their poet identity, the students learned that they needed to talk and think like poets as their teacher, the authority in the class, requested. The students did try to follow the teacher’s instruction and complete the intertextuality construction process in their subsequent discussion. The teacher’s proposal of intertextuality created a potential opportunity for the students to learn the embedded three

108 layers of social relationships: 1) the students and writers, 2) the teacher, students, and poets, and 3) the teacher and the students. The shift in pronouns (you, we, I, you) in the first three lines suggests to the students that they, as a team guided by the teacher, are going to talk, think, and write like poets, which is a primary goal for the students’ learning in this writing unit.

All the teacher-student discussion revolved around the similar features between the stapler and animals. This discussion opened the space for the students to engage their imagination and creativity in apprenticing their “poet eyes.” The students learned from the teacher and each other to employ a wide range of texts to make visible the similar features of the stapler and different animals. At the second proposal, the teacher intertextualized their poem writing and nonfiction writing through comparing the languages used differently by scientists and poets to describe the same object, the stapler.

In such, this proposal is organizational, focusing on the genre features and linguistic structures of the languages used by scientists and poets. Of interest is the students’ reaction to this proposal. Tina’s quick positive answer to the teacher’s question in line

011—“Will scientists say that it is going to eat the paper?”—allows two possible interpretations. One is that Tina has not realized the difference between nonfiction writing and poem writing. The other is that she knew the kindergarten classroom culture well and likely agreed with what the teacher said or provided positive answers to the teacher’s questions. Tina’s response in some way reflected, constituted, and enforced their classroom culture in this situation. Therefore, the second intertextuality was also orientational. During their continuous construction of the second intertextuality, the

109

teacher purposefully challenged Tina’s proposal of the connection between the stapler and hippo and Tina’s attempts to explain her ideas indicated she was learning to warrant her ideas or proposal with evidence and rationale.

The various types of learning are also well reflected from the association of their academic learning and discipline learning. When the children got their ideas about what kind of animal the stapler looked like (teacher’s question on line 021), they felt excited to share and bid for their turns through speaking their ideas aloud. On line 036, Lori started throwing out her ideas as her peers did. Then she immediately held her answers and raised her hand to bid for her turn when she received the teacher’s vocal sign “oh.” In this particular classroom, such vocal sign, as a type of common classroom management strategy, is usually employed by the teacher to call the class’s attention to her. The rapid adjustment in Lori’s reactions to the teacher’s signal indexes her good knowledge about what it means to be good students in this class. Such disciplined learning she gained in this classroom may also benefit her as a social citizen out of the classroom. At the same time, Lori also gained academic learning when she recognized the similar physical features of the stapler and the crocodile and learned to create a more vivid image of the stapler through her use of a particular poetic device, simile.

The intertextuality between poem writing candidate texts and finger counting in math class proposed by John seemed to be organizational regarding what words could be used to describe the opening “mouth or fingers” of the stapler. However, the class’s unanimous ignorance towards Joe’s seemingly off-task proposal foregrounded the students’ shared and censored knowledge about what counted as relevant texts and what

110 counted as appropriate intertextuality, which also reflected and constituted their local culture and ideology in the class. So, the third intertextuality between poem writing candidate texts and finger counting in math class was both organizational and orientational. The thematic intertextuality between “actions” of the stapler or animals and the accompanying sounds of the actions was an important nexus of students’ poem writing and learning to talk and to think like poets. The students demonstrated their learning through employing a wide range of texts (spoken text, facial expression, hand gestures, sound text) and juxtaposing them in their articulation/acknowledgement of their recognition of the proposed intertextuality. Similar to the fourth intertextuality between the actions of the stapler or animals (the kinesthetic text) and the accompanying sound

(sound text), the fifth proposed intertextuality between their current poem writing unit and the prior nonfiction writing unit was also thematic, focusing on the movement/ actions aspects of the connections between the stapler and animals. These proposals jointly supported the animation of the stapler’s image and the establishment of the intertextual link between the students’ learning identity and poet identity. During this construction process, the students learned to use several rhetorical devices, simile, metaphor, personification, and onomatopoeia.

The explicit poetic device (onomatopoeia) and its application was a challenge attempted by the teacher to let the students think and write like poets. The long complicated word may sound challenging to the five-year-olds. Introduction of a couple of formal academic words could help the students understand what the teacher and they were talking about in this particular context. Their learning of its application was

111

scaffolded by the teacher’s explicit definition on line 100 and the subsequent three enlightening questions. To further provide visual and audio aid for the students to apply this rhetorical term into concrete language utterances, the teacher tried to demonstrate how the stapler stapled the papers and what noises were made at the same time.

The last two proposed intertextualities (fifth intertextuality between current poem writing unit and prior nonfiction writing unit; sixth intertextuality between their real life and imaginary or fabricated life experiences) varied in their construction processes but made similar contributions to students’ learning. During the two processes, two groups of proposers/students learned to bring texts from other domains of their life experiences into their poem writing. The first group of students intertextualized their poetic description of the stapler with knowledge about the scientific facts about turtles they gained from their research in prior nonfiction writing unit. Their intertextuality proposal got accepted and successfully realized. The other group of students made their efforts to explore the potential intertextual links between the stapler in their poem writing and the stapler in their real or fabricated life experiences. The sixth proposal may not count as a type of learning in the particular poem writing context but was at least an attempt made by students to learn more. This finding echoes Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s study (1993), in which the students also identified and validated previous events as knowledge construction sources. Compared with their intertextuality construction largely scaffolded by their teacher in the beginning, at this point, the students became more independent in identifying multimodal semiotic sources that were potentially useful for their writing.

Although only the first group’s proposal got validated and their texts got successfully

112 transposed into their writing, for the particular group of students as well as peers, it was another learning opportunity for them to learn what counted as relevant text and appropriate text juxtaposition. The other layer of learning (see Appendix D, “End-of-year poster” of what they learn from the kindergarten), as aforementioned, constitutes their classroom culture and ideology and constrained their intertextual practice.

My findings about the young ELL students’ learning imply that among the various kinds of learning, some of the learning was obvious and independently gained by the students. Some learning was scaffolded by the teacher, some of the learning was still ongoing, and some learning was just proposed for the students’ future continuous learning. The different learning results among individual learners further reflected the

ELL students’ different paces of and paths to literacy learning in and through their writing practice here (Hudelson, 1989). Meanwhile, it should be pointed out that framing my presentation of various learning in the three patterns of the ELLs’ intertextuality construction (Lemke, 2004) did not intend to enclose their learning in one of these

“boxes.” On one side, setting up the “boundaries” of their intertextual practice helps us understand the nature and patterns of their writing practice. On the other side, the analysis shows that many of the proposed intertextuality and the students’ learning could be both thematic and orientational or both organizational and orientational. In the subsequent video clips and transcripts made in the following phases of the poem writing unit, the thematic intertextuality was more closely tied with organizational intertextualities when the teacher and the students wrote their speech and ideas down. Therefore, all three patterns of intertextuality were not isolated but at interplay with each other all through the

113

students’ writing and learning processes. Taken together, intertextuality and the adapted patterns of intertextuality offered a way of understanding the young ELLs’ writing as a patterned intertextual practice and their rich learning made possible by their intertextual practice full of their creative use of poetic devices and imagination.

III. Intertextuality Construction in Individual2 and Peer Group Writing Practices

I have chosen the transcript of Lori’s story writing with her peers as one illustration of intertextuality construction in the students’ peer and individual writing practices. This transcript was made from one of the two video recordings made on

February 5, 2010. Selection of this transcription was based on its inclusion of both the peer writing group’s discussion and the individual student’s (Lori’s) retelling about her writing and thinking process. The focus is examination of intertextuality construction in

Lori’s story writing and illustration. This chosen video segment includes the students of different language proficiency according to the teacher’s assessments (Katie, low; Thai, mediate; Lori and Apple, mediate-high). None of the students had prior preschool experiences. The segment documents part of the students’ “independent writing” phase when the above girls and the researcher (I) sat beside and stood around a table to talk about and illustrate their to-be-published stories. The stories were not written in their original handwriting. The teacher asked the students to read their story drafts to her line by line and page by page as she typed their stories into the computer, printed them out, and bounded the stories into books for their subsequent illustration.

2 That I use individual rather than independent writing here is because the teacher said in both the interviews in February and April 2010 and the survey in May 2010 that one of the challenges or difficulties her students had in their reading and writing was independence. 114 In the chosen video clip, Lori and Apple are sitting and using their pencils to illustrate their stories or “books.” Kate is standing beside Lori and looking at Apple’s drawing. Speaking in a low voice and using her gestures, she provides her suggestions to

Apple on where to draw a butterfly and to Lori on what should be drawn on her story book. Thai is standing beside Apple and ready to share her own story. What happened before the following discussion represented in table 4.3 is the girls began to talk about a dog of Apple’s brother in Mexico as Lori was talking aloud and trying to organize her ideas about her dog, Cloe. The girls’ discussion about Apple’s brother and his dog can be interpreted as this peer group’s attempt of constructing intertextuality between their peer’s (Lori’s) writing and their relevant life experiences. It should be noted that some parts of the transcripts related to Apple’s talking about her brother’s Mexican dog and other life experiences with other girls were deleted in that the focus of this part is the intertextuality construction in Lori’s story writing and illustration.

Table 4.3. No Cloe! Lori’s Story About Her Pretend Dog

Line Speaker Message Unit 1 Lori NO Cloe, don't pee in my bed. 2 Researcher: That's bad. 3 Did he, did he really do this in your bed? 4 He pees in your bed. 5 Lori: Yeah. But it's a pretend dog. 6 I don't have dog. 7 It's a pretend. 8 Researcher: Oh, I see, it's a pretend. I see. 9 Good story. 10 Apple comes over to see what L draws. 11 Lori: Right here. Right here.

Continued 115

Table 4.3. No Cloe! Lori’s Story About Her Pretend Dog (continued)

Line Speaker Message Unit 12 Thai: Look, I am a nurse. 12 Thai: Look, I am a nurse. 13 Thai comes over to Lori and Apple’s table. 14 Researcher: Oh, you are a nurse. That’s cool. 15 Apple: Let me see. 16 L continues to draw her picture. 17 L points to the word, scratch, on her typed pages and asks R. 18 .... 19 Lori: What's the word? 20 21 Researcher: Scratch my bed. 22 R uses her hand to "scratch" Lori's arm. 23 Lori: No Cloe, don't scratch my bed. 24 L draws line across the page. 25 ... 26 Lori: That's scratch. 27 Researcher: Wow. That's really a mess. Wow... 28 Lori: He's my dog. 29 My pretend dog. 30 Researcher: A pretend dog did all the mess to you bed. 31 Lori: And he is laughing. 32 Researcher: He is laughing... 33 When he makes troubles, he is laughing. 34 Lori: He is laugh, when I told him no. 35 L laughs. 36 Researcher: So, so he is laughing every time you told him no. Wow. 37 Lori: Look at his nails. That’s why, that's why (L points to her picture.) 38 That's why he scratches because of his nails. 39 Researcher: yes, mmmMM 40 Lori: I need you to cut his nail. I can’t, you know why? 41 Researcher: Why? 42 Lori: He always ran, when he need to cut his nails. 43 Researcher: Oh.

Continued 116 Table 4.3. No Cloe! Lori’s Story About Her Pretend Dog (continued)

Line Speaker Message Unit 44 Apple: xxx 45 Lori: No Cloe! Don't scratch my bed. 46 L goes back to reread the whole sentence and checks the match of word and her picture. 47 Lori: NEXT, hi, Cloe. I like you. 48 Researcher: Right. 49 Lori: He is good in this part. 50 Researcher: Yes, he is good in this part. 51 So, what’s the good thing about Cloe. 52 Lori: He, he say hi to me. 53 He would not do anything like that definitely more. 54 Researcher: Oh, good, good dog. 55 L continues to draw the good part about the dog. 56 Lori: Now I cut his nails. 57 Look at it. Lori points her pencil to the picture on page 6.

It is known from the beginning of the above transcript that the story about Cloe is a pretend story. I learned from my informal conversation with Lori after this video recording that Lori likes watching an American children’s cartoon in which there is a dog named “Cloe” (although the spelling may be different in the cartoon). Her experience with “Cloe,” the dog in the cartoon, is intertextualized and recontextualized in her current writing about her dog, Cloe. The intertextuality is constructed both at Lori’s personal level and a group level and can be categorized as a thematic intertextuality. The various

“messy” situations described by Lori can be texts transposed from the cartoon about a

117

dog Lori watched and/or from her relevant life experiences, like the peer group discussion about the dog of Apple’s brother in Mexico.

Table 4.3 shows that lines 1, 23, and 45 all start with the patterned structure “No,

Cloe, don’t do something.” Then, on line 47 in table 4.3, Lori reads “Hi, Cloe, I like you” as the end of her story. What Lori says in line 49 that “He is good in this part” suggests the evolvements of her story and her knowledge about the structure of the story. This line also looks like an ending line of a poem. During her story retelling and illustration process, Lori shows her growing awareness about the contexts and polished skills of demonstrating the thorough details in her written products. For instance, she draws the wet spots in the bed after Cloe pees. On lines 37 and 38, she, pointing to her picture, explains to the researcher that the dog scratches because of his nails. The “No Cloe!” writing process and product become evidence of Lori’s growth in her intertextual writing practice because the teacher mentioned in the interview conducted in early February 2010 that many of the students did not have clear time or a clear concept of context and could write “birds in the trees” in their winter poems. Lori showed her understanding of the contexts and successfully recontextualized different texts transposed from other writing units and her life experiences. The change of contexts in her story also corresponds with her changing emotions and tones, which is demonstrated by her uses of exclamation mark, parallel structure, repeated lines, and capital letters in her story (see table 4.4). In addition, she demonstrates her skills of involving her reader, the researcher (I) into a dialogue about what, how, and why she writes and illustrates the story. Her invitation of the researcher into the dialogue also suggests her growing audience awareness.

118 Table 4.4. Lori’s Story: “No Cloe!”

Cover page No Cloe! (title, a dog, clouds, and grasses) page 1 No Cloe! Don’t destroy my snowman! page 2 No Cloe! Don’t eat my food! page 3 No Cloe! page 4 No Cloe! Don’t Scratch my bed. page 5 No Cloe! Don’t pee in my BED! page 6 Good Cloe! I like you! Bottom page a house with smoking chimney, a dog

Besides the thematic intertextuality, Lori also transposes the poetic texts, structures, patterns, and rhythms into her current story writing. The poetic patterns and rhythm repeated through Lori’s whole story (see also Appendix H). The poetic nature of the children’s writing is mainly discussed in the following section of this chapter.

Section 2. Social Construction of a Poetics: Exploring Aesthetics in Five-Year-Olds’

Writing Practices

One dimension of the writing practice of the five-year-old students is the ways they play, experiment, and experience language uses and the ways they dramatize various discourse styles with “context-sensitive meanings, and even conflicting ideologies into a reflexive arena” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 60). The ELL children’s use of “playful” language not only reflects and refracts the social relationships and ideologies involved in

119

their writing but also formulates a particular or alternative mode that transforms their literacy learning to a joyful and fruitful literacy experience. This manifest joy and playfulness with language in the ELL children’s writing practice warrants a focus on the stylistics, aesthetics, and evocative quality of the children’s interactive discourses and warrants attention to the processes and ways of constructing a shared poetics over time in the classroom.

A poetics is defined here as the children’s playing, learning, experiencing, and experimenting with the poetic language uses and devices. It arouses their own and other participants’ aesthetic responses to their writing processes and products and contributes to the formulation and evolvement of their aesthetic perspectives and values over time. The relevant participants include their current, future, and potential readers. My interest lies in how a poetics is socially constructed by the youngest children in their early literacy practices and becomes a path of enculturation and of their writing, learning, doing literacies, and thinking and being literate. When the students’ collective active participation in their writing practices is characterized by the use of poetic language, artistic values, and the provoking of their imaginations, as well as characterized by aesthetic feelings and emotional responses, such a situation can be labeled as a “socially shared aesthetics and poetics.” A poetic orientation may emerge without any intentionality on the part of the children though obviously language can be shaped in a way oriented to the achievement of a poetic effect.

Compared with poems from an emic perspective, poetics is employed as a theoretical framework and an etic analytic construct in this study to explore the aesthetic

120 dimension of children’s language and literacy learning. Therefore, poetics goes together with aesthetics. It is socially constructed through the children’s play with poetic language and devices. And aesthetics is derived from the young writers and their readers’ participation in and experience with the social construction process and their responses to their artifacts. By the students’ poetics construction process, I mean that the children select out ideas, sensations, feelings, and images drawn from their past linguistic, literacy, and life experience, and synthesizes them into a new poetic experience accompanied with aesthetic feelings and perspectives (Rowe, 2000).

This section presents documentation and analysis of classroom interactions involving the children’s poem writing processes and their written products over time focusing on the poetic nature and aesthetic dimension. In particular, I examined the ELL students’ various writing units (both poem writing and non-poem writing) and their other literacy activities. Microanalysis was conducted of both their verbal play (e.g., instances of verbal or vocal repetition and non-verbal artistry, like clapping hands) and on interactions involving “defamiliarization.” Defamiliarization is a process by which objects “are removed and made unfamiliar.” Defamiliarization increases the difficulty and length of perception of an object because “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged to let the young writers and their readers experience the artfulness of the objects” (cf. defamiliarization in Viktor Shklovsky, 1917, “Art as

Technique”).

121

Revisiting the Context of Data Collection

The children’s writing practices in their writing workshop were observed and video recorded over seven months. There was one writing teacher and up to sixteen children in this public kindergarten in a midwestern city in the United States. On the first day of my visit on October 1, 2009, I was first introduced to their teacher, Mrs. Young, by my colleague, the teacher’s friend. Then I introduced myself to the students in this kindergarten as a student from my affiliated educational institution and said that I would like to see how they learn how to read and write and offer my help with their class. I started my observation of this class as a participant for over a month before I started to collect audio and video data and other classroom documents. After that, I visited their writing classes approximately three times a week for the whole academic year. In the following part of data analysis, I analyzed video data, photocopies of the students’ written work, and my field notes based on my participation observation.

The camera was either put on their table or held by my hand to record their peer interactions, whole-class interactions, or their interactions with me. The camera was often adjusted according to the children’s body movements, their spatial arrangement, or the change of their play areas. Usually, the video recording on each day consisted of two or three fifteen- to twenty-minute long video recordings. Meanwhile, a more established friendship has been developed between the teacher, the students, and me. I took down my field notes in the class and after class and kept a memo for my reflections on the theoretical grounding of my research and data analysis. I made photos of their classroom posters and photocopies of students’ work. The video recording helped me capture the

122 complexity and interconnectedness of the students’ talk and action (Mehan, 1979). The nuanced nonverbal behavior subtly constituting contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1986), and the transcribing of the data, are pivotal to a reliable interpretation. Multiple versions of students’ writing and other artifacts in the classroom were collected throughout the academic year. The field notes were either taken in the classroom while observing or talking with the students or recalled after my visit to the school.

The episodes chosen for analysis were transcribed by following DuBois’ new conventions (2008). The classroom interactions represented in their transcript was also described in fine-grained details to show their talk pauses, overlaps, intonations, facial expression, postural configuration, eye gaze orientation and shift, and so on. Doing so made possible an in-depth microanalysis of children poetic language uses and an illustration of the aesthetic feelings/experiences, their emotional responses, and the overall atmosphere of their poetics construction practice here. Then I summarized and discussed the difficulty that a researcher could encounter if she or he conducted studies on the aesthetic dimensions of children’s interactions and playful language uses.

Findings

I present my findings of the aesthetic dimension embedded in young children’s writing from a micro level to emphasize the centrality of their poetic language uses during their ongoing face-to-face interactions, the immediate situations, and local literacy events (Bloome et al., 2008). At the same time, this section also focuses on the sociality of poetic language uses in the participants’ discursive construction of defamiliarized images and other poetic and imaginative works, meaning potentials, and an aesthetic

123

dimension/poetics of their writing. The adopted analytic approaches here, poetry analysis and plot analysis, are drawn on the theories of poetics (Eagleton, 2007; Shklovsky, 1917), social constructionism (Gergan, 1999, 2001), and interactional sociolinguistics (Bloome et al., 2005, 2008; Cook-Gumperz, 1986, 2006; Green & Wallet, 1981; Gumperz, 1986;

Hymes, 1974). What’s playful or constitutes a poetic orientation or poetic effect is a matter of participant perspectives. What counts or does not count as poetics is related to the participants’ social interactions and the interactionally achieved patterns of proposal, recognition, acknowledgement or negotiation, and uptake. Therefore, the social construction of poetics is a form of enculturation and a negotiated process taking place in the context of a local classroom culture (cf. Arosson & Duranti, 2011).

The findings in the current section are divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the poetics construction process in a particular collective poem writing event.

The second part illustrates how a poetics is constructed and taken up by the students and how it evolves within and across literacy events in another poem writing unit, non-poem writing unit, and other literacy-related activities over time. The third part is devoted to

“defamiliarization,” which emerged as a remarkable phenomenon in the ELL children’s poem writing practices.

PART I. Poetics Construction in a Collective Poem Writing Event

The first selected video segment is from a poem writing unit. Interviews with the teacher and my informal conversations with the children in their writing workshop suggested that poem writing units were the students’ favorite writing units. Poem writing was a recurring writing unit of the class across the academic year. Importantly, it opened

124 a space for the students’ creative uses of language with potential aesthetic, creative, and evocative qualities.

The transcripts of the video segment “Let’s Help Don Fix His Poem,” represent the sharing phase of the students’ first poem writing unit in their 2009 Autumn semester.

A series of video clips were made on December 11, 2009. Their sharing phase took place on the morning of December 11 around 9:30 am. The students with their writing folder in hands sat in a circle on their reading carpet. Their teacher, Mrs. Young, joined the circle.

Several students were either invited or volunteered themselves to share their poems. Tina was one of the students who was invited to the front to read her poem aloud before the whole class. She shared her completed poem: “Bathroom,” to which she included a noise

“V V V.” Her poem received the teacher’s compliments. After the students’ sharing of their poems, the teacher asked the students to sit on the carpet and face the white board.

She sat on the chair beside the board. The students obviously enjoyed repeating the poem line “V... V... V... V...” after Tina’s sharing of her poem, creating a hilarious environment in their following collective work on “fixing” Don’s Christmas poem. In the following transcript both the verbal and nonverbal contextualized cues are described to show the poetic and dramatic features of the teacher and the students’ performance.

125

Excerpt 4.5. Set-Up of the Stage

Line Speaker Message Units 1 T: All right, are you ready? ↑ 2 I am going to write up Don’s poem. Teacher stands up and writes Don's poem on the white board. 3 Don, can I write up your poem? ↑ 4 Ss: Vu v v v v... (Students still repeat the sound in Tina’s poem, which was read shortly before they start to work on Don’s poem) 5 T: I am going to write up Don’s poem. Class management 6 T: We are gonna see how we can help him―fix his poem 7 and come pup with some words. T copies Don’s poem on the board. 8 Sx: v v v v.... 9 Sx: a/a/a/aa/a/a/a

The above excerpt (4.5) shows that the teacher’s opening question on line 1 in a rising tone does not get the students’ attention about what they are going to do next. She reframes the question into a statement on line 2. Her postural change from sitting on the chair to standing up close to the students re-signals they are moving on to a new task, helping Don fix his poem. After seeking permission from Don to write his poem on the white board, the teacher restates the first step of their current task, writing up Don’s poem from line 5 to line 7, as a couple of the students still prosodically repeat the /v/ sound that

Tina gave to the bathroom in her poem. The teacher further arranges the students’ sitting spots to separate the talking students and concretely points out their task of helping Don with words, actually more ideas. Until then, what is happening in the first seven lines sets up the stage for the social actors (the students and the teacher) to perform their art of 126 polishing a poem with the special Christmas theme, which may not necessarily be shared in all the English language learner’s native cultural or religious backgrounds. It should be mentioned here that this particular classroom practice and culture embraced cultural and linguistic diversities as opportunities for the students to use their native languages, introduce festivals in their own cultures, and share their experiences of home or other non-school literacies. Therefore, the transcript snippets here should not become a concern of a practice of English centrocism in this classroom or be used to judge the instructor’s teaching effects. In the school, this teacher is highly respected and valued by her colleagues. On line 8 and line 9, the two students’ amusing chiming with the elongated consonant /V/ and the rhythmic repetition of the vowel sound /a/ with a musical fluctuation (a/a/a/aa/a/a/a/, the unstressed three /a/ or beat followed by a faster double /a/ sound and then three slow increasingly stressed /a/ beat) functions as a prelude to the following narrative poem. The teacher began to write Don’s poem on the white board and simultaneously orally repeated the poem lines. What follows is the analysis of the sequence of lines from 10 to 17, exploring the aesthetic qualities of the teacher and the students’ language uses in their interactive writing.

Except 4.6 is presented as a table with five columns and eight rows. The first column is the number of sequential lines; the second column is the speaker (T for teacher,

Ss for students; or S for a certain student). The third column is for message units in the original transcript. To maximally represent the poetic quality of the teacher-student language uses in this poem writing unit, I draw on my knowledge of English literary criticism and parse each complete poem line or phrases into poetic feet with two syllables

127

(disyllables) or three syllables (trisyllables). Based on the original video data and the various poetic meters presented in the lines or phrases, I document and mark each stressed syllable with a slash or ictus (/) and the unstressed syllable with a breve (˘). The fourth column shows the poetic meter contained in each line. The fifth column describes other kinds of prosodic features like repetition, rising or falling tone, intonational contour, volume shift, echoing, etc. Doing so helps me examine the aesthetic and evocative quality of the students and the teacher’s stylized discourses/language uses in their interactive writing.

Excerpt 4.6. Prelude of Their Narrative Poem

Line Spr Metrical Feet Poetic Meter Other Prosodic Features / ˘ / ˘ / Trochaic trimeter 10 T : [Santa ―gave my― gift.] (variant) Rhythmic repetition 11 Ss: /v / /v /―/v //v / Interval of the rhythm / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ 12 T: He gave me―[Christmas tree] Dactylic dimeter Repetition, 13 S: [tree:] elongated vowel, echoing ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ 14 T: Gave me―chocolate↑ Variation of dactyl Rising tone / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ Rising tone, 15 Ali: Chocolate↑―chocolate↑ Dactylic dimeter, increasing exciting volume ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / Violation of ictus/ 16 T: Santa ―came to― my house. Iambic trimeter stress rules ˘ / ˘ / Elongated 17 Alright= by: Don. Iambic dimeter diphthong; increased volume

128 Line 10 has two and one half metrical feet, composing a variation form of trochaic

(one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable) trimeter. This line is also chimed with a student’s rhythmically repeating the consonant /v/ on line 11 and the indescribable sound made by Don. Their “background noises” also function as an interval of the flow of their rhyme. Line 12 is the second line of Don’s original poem. While reading this line, the teacher stresses the word “He” and the first syllable of the word

“Christmas.” In her doing so, the line contains a dactylic (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) dimeter. A student echoes the rhyme and repeats the last word of the poem on line 13, “tree,” with an elongated vowel /i:/. It is an analytically meaningful point here as from this moment, at least one of the students begin to or attempt to take up the rhyme of the poem. On the next line, the teacher continues to read the third line of Don’s original poem in a slightly varied dactyl (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) with a missing stressed syllable or the repeated word “He” (Santa) at the beginning of this line. The word “chocolate” obviously interests

Ali, who copies the teacher’s rising tone and chimes into the rhyme with an increasingly loud and funny rising tone on line 15. This partially repeating line yields two interpretations: First, Ali, who is identified as a language learner of beginning literacy competence in the placement test and by his doodling writing work, begins to practice chiming part of the poem. According to my participant observation and the video recording over time, Ali often participated or was assigned sufficient turns by the teacher to participate in their whole-group writing activities. He had salient difficulty with individual writing. His writing basically consisted of simple drawing hardly with letters

129

or words and not collected for this study. Although his ability of appreciating poetic art cannot be warranted at this moment, Ali’s smile, increasing volume, and hilarious tone indicate that he enjoyed the funniness of the rhyme and repeating and contributing to the

“funny rhyme.” And his repeated words constitute a perfect dactyl. Ali’s participation is facilitated by the poetic rhyme and the poem content likely related to his life experience of enjoying sweets.

Line 16 is another analytically important point. Instead of starting with a stressed sound in all the first three poem lines3, line 16 violates the usual stress/ictus routine here, according to which the stress is often put on the first syllable of Santa and the verb

“came.” Instead, the teacher put stresses on syllables: /ta/, /tu/, and /haus/. Then the teacher’s scansion of line 16 turns it into an iambic (one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable) trimeter.

Overall, Don’s original poem is structured with a similar beginning: “Santa/He gave me….” That is, each line has similar a beginning but varies with items given by

Santa/He. In the analysis of teacher-student’ chanting of this poem, three different poetic meters are identified: trochee (line 10), dactyl (lines 12 and 15) or dactyl variation (14), and iamb (lines 16 and 17). Although the poetic meters may emerge in their chiming without their awareness, the students at least are exposed to a variety of rhythmic patterns, composing a poetic orientation. After writing and reading Don’s original poem, the teacher stresses the possessive proposition “by,” elongating the vowel /ai/ to end the prelude of acknowledging Don’s authorship of this poem. Then they move on to the next

3 The first stressed syllable is missing on line 14, which can be “(He) gave me chocolate.” 130 act of “fixing” Don’s poem. Besides the various poetic meters, the repetition of certain sounds, elongation of vowels, the dramatic tone, the intonation fluctuation, the students’ chit-chat, their laughter, and their continuously changing postural configuration, etc. all foreground the aesthetic and evocative qualities of the teacher-student stylized language uses in their writing. As mentioned above that line 16 in iambic trimeter is a violation of the routinized ictus in a poem line or sentence, I should emphasize that my analysis of the poetic meter is not based on Don’s poem language per se but on how the teacher and

Don’s peers actually read the poem in a particular way and at a particular time when they acted and reacted to each other. In this particular literacy situation/event, the teacher- student played with the poetic features and their language play (which may have even been under their consciousness) extended the students’ participation (Cekaite &

Aronsson, 2005; Cook, 1999, 2000; Fasulo, Liberati, & Pontecorvo, 2002). Neither the language used in Don’s original poem nor the language used in the teacher-student overlapped chanting is an individual matter; rather it is “a multiparty social performance and a participant-shaped collaborative aesthetics” (Cekaite &

Aronsson, 2005, p. 181).

The analysis of the above excerpts suggests that when such collaborative aesthetics are constructed and promoted in the class, the students’ writing activities build and strengthen their membership in the classroom community. A close examination of excerpt

4.7 below illuminates how the teacher’s instruction gave rise to the construction of a poetic orientation in the subsequent teacher-student interaction.

131

Based on the view of children’s writing as being comprised of a series of particular literacy events, a second analytic approach, plot analysis, is adopted in the following analyses of excerpts to offer another layer of interpretation and understanding of the teacher-student dramatized writing practice here. The chosen excerpt (4.7) is further parsed into smaller excerpts reflecting aspects of plot structure (exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement or resolution)4 with the purpose of illuminating the poetic construction process at the plot structure level in this particular literacy event.

Excerpt 4.7. Exposition

Line Speaker Message Units 20 T: Now ▲knowing↑ what we've already know about poems. 21 How can we help Don ↑▼make his poem really rea::lly fine―for the reader to read? Tina, whose poem was shared at the beginning of their sharing time, raises her hand. 22 T: How ▲can we think about this poem to make a sound like music to our ears? ▼ The teacher covers her faces with her hands first and then puts her hands beside her cheeks. Tina imitates the teacher's gesture. 23 Sam: Yeah.

4 A plot usually includes (Gustav Freytag, 1863, Die Technik des Dramas) 1. Exposition – the introductory material that creates the tone, gives the setting, introduces the characters, and supplies other facts necessary to understanding; 2. Complication or Conflict – the struggle that grows out of the interplay of opposing forces and provides interest, suspense, and tension; 3. Rising Action – that part of the plot in which the entanglement caused by the conflict of opposing forces is developed; Climax – the highest point of dramatic action where the reader makes the greatest emotional response and the turning point in the action, the crisis at which the rising action reverses and becomes the falling action; 4. Denouement or Resolution – literally, “unknotting,” the final unraveling of a plot—the solution or outcome. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_(narrative). 132 The teacher-student interaction around fixing Don’s poem opens with the stressed word “Now” on line 20. In the following two lines (21 and 22), the teacher changes the present progressive tense “(they are) knowing” into present perfect tense. The change has two functions. First, the teacher states that they have been talking and learning about poems and how to write poems. Second, the teacher helps the students recall what they have learned about poems and apply the relevant knowledge into their current writing practice. Line 21 is an initiative point of the teacher-student construction of a poetic orientation during their action upon the poem revision task. On this line, Mrs. Young uses an appealing voice to invite the students to revise the poem. Different from her typical instructional tone, the appealing voice, the repeated stressed word “really,” and elongated vowel /i:/ dramatize the teacher’s style of talking here, which not only successfully catches the students’ attention but also enforces their awareness about the reader. These introductory opening lines set up a dramatic tone of their following interactions and function as the exposition of the plot, the literacy event of helping Don fix his poem. The lines introduce the interactants, the teacher, the students, and the readers in their mind, and also supply the fact that they have learned and have been talking about the poem. The stressed interrogative adverb “how” at the beginning of the next line proposes a more concrete task for them, making the poem sound like music to their ears. Then the

“conflict” between Don’s original poem and a poem added with musical quality is exposed. Staying in tune with the dramatized speech in the first lines of this excerpt, the teacher’s intonation contour on line 22 starts with a stressed word followed by gradually less stressed word and ends with a soft unstressed word, “ears,” which is almost inaudible

133

in the video. The teacher also deploys her body language, covering her face with her hands and then putting her hands on her cheeks near her ears to suggest that they, now the writers of this poem, think about and make the poem musical to arouse sensory and aesthetic feelings while reading it. The teacher’s performance is immediately picked up by Tina. Although Tina’s imitation of the teacher’s body languages does not necessarily warrant that she begins to seriously think about how to make the poem musical, her action at least indicates she takes up her participatory role in this poem revision activity.

“Yeah” by another student, Sam, indicates his learning through participation. The students’ recognition of and positive responses to the teacher’s proposal of adding music to the poem on the prior lines moves the event of revising the poem into a rising action stage.

Excerpt 4.8. Rising Action

Line Speaker Message Units 24 T: When you read it, you will feel. 25 I want you to close you eyes and just listen and see what xxx. Most of the students, especially the girl students, close their eyes. Eva “looks” around with her eyes closed. 26 T: Let' see. 27 Santa gives my gift. The teacher pats her lap, looking at Don. She asks him to come over to sit on her lap. Don hesitates first. Then he walks to Mrs. Young and sits on her lap, smiling happily and proudly. 28 He gives me Christmas tree. 29 Give me chocolate 30 Ali: =candy

Continued

134 Excerpt 4.8. Rising Action (continued)

Line Speaker Message Units 31 T: Santa came to my house. 32 Sx: xxxx 33 T: is there any, Class management 34 T: Is there any kind of line, you think, boys and girls? ↑ 35 You can think that comes into your head 36 or do we put, add some loud words, ▲ 37 Ali: xxx loud words. 38 T: or, Mmmm 39 Let's see who raise their hands. 40 Eva. ↑ T smiles to Eva. 41 Eva: Santa gave presents under Christmas tree. 42 T: oh, So we can add presents, T looks at the poem on the board. Lori is raising her hand. 43 T: He gives me, gives my gift, 44 Gift is like presents. ↑ 45 So he gave me Christmas tree. 46 Do you want to write present in your poem? ↑ The teacher lowers her head and asks Don. 47 There were presents he gave? D nods his head. Lori raises her hand. 48 T: Ok. He is going to thank about that. ↑ 49 Oh, see. Good. ↑ 50 Thanks for your good suggestion=

The teacher’s stylized speech and chiming continue to characterize the teacher’s leading of their conversation. The synaesthesia employed on Line 24 (“When you read it, you will feel”) puts emphasis on the aesthetic feeling generated from their to-be-revised poem. On the next line, Mrs. Young uses her teacher’s voice, asking the students to close 135

their eyes and just listen and see. This request provides the five year olds a “push” to experience the aesthetic feelings created from their poem revision process. The excerpt shows that more students respond to the teacher’s request and close their eyes. Eva, a female student, playfully looks around with her closed eyes. The students’ reactions to the teacher’s request made on line 24 indicate that they begin to take up their role in their

“play.” The poetic orientation highlighting the combined senses and aesthetic feelings provides the students with an opportunity to practice their poet eyes/observation and thinking in the process of revising Don’s original poem.

The students close their eyes and listen to the teacher reread the poem and “see” with their “poet eyes.” Don sits on the teacher’s lap, a privileged spot for the author, smiling happily. The spot is suggestive of the social realization and significance of a poem’s author. And the social values of poem writing and poet identity are fully realized by the students. This is warranted by the continuous evolvement of their postural configuration until the end of the video clip (12-11-09, part ii), the students move closer and closer to the teacher and Don and finally all swarm to the front. The students do not go back to sit on the reading carpet until the teacher says that everyone has his or her turn to do his or her own poem and enjoy the “author’s spot.”

On line 30, latching on the prior line made by the teacher, Ali seems to actively get involved in the revision work and proposes a new thing, candy, to be added in this poem.

His proposal does not receive the teacher’s or his peers’ immediate responses and is not adopted at this moment. It is known from line 34 and line 36, the teacher expects the students to come up with a couple of new lines or add some loud words. Ali repeats the

136 teacher’s words on line 37, which cannot warrant that he realizes that his new idea of candy does not meet the teacher’s expectations of adding loud words or a new line. But the teacher opens the floor for the students to add other things on line 38. Later, adding sound effects is sanctioned by the class as their focus in revising the poem.

Eva carefully speaks out her line, “Santa gave presents under Christmas Tree” (line

41), with a brief pause in the middle of the sentence and decreases her volume near the end. It is not very clear here whether she picks up or keeps the rhythm of the poem. But her new line follows the pattern, “Santa or He gave something.” And she makes a revision upon the original lines, adding new words, “presents” and “seeing” them under the Christmas tree. Making visible the connection between the presents/gifts and the tree is also her improvisation. However, only the new word, “present,” is recognized by the teacher on line 42 who turns Eva’s proposal for a new line into a chance of learning synonyms, “presents” and “gifts.” In addition, it seems that Don realizes his poem now has become a jointly constructed poem. So, he likely welcomes any ideas proposed by his peers or forwarded by the teacher. After the teacher provides evaluation to Eva’s suggestion on lines 49 and 50, the rising action stage of this poem revision literacy event develops into its climax in the following excerpt (4.9) that begins with teacher and Tina’s overlapped speech.

137

Transcript 4.9. Climax

Line Spr Message Units The teacher sees Lori raise her hand. 51 Tina: Or do you want [it reads loudly] or not loudly? ↑ (Tina uses her hand gestures.) 52 T: [Yes, Lori] 53 Lori: Christmas tree, 54 they must be pretty. 55 T: Oh, yeah. 56 When the Santa came to my house, you could write. 57 When the kids ARE asleep, you have to decide you wanna say that loud? ↑ Don nods his head. Joe is clapping his hands and singing. 58 When you kids are sleep. The teacher puts her left hand upon her cheek to imitate the baby's sleeping. 59 T: This is what he is doing in your house?↑ Don nods his head again. 60 Yeah ↑ 61 Do you like to say that LOU:D▲ ↑or quiet▼(0.2). T uses a hand gesture to suggest the low volume. 62 Don: Quiet. ▼ 63 T: Quiet. ▼ 64 Do you wanna me to write quiet▼ because when people are sleeping? The teacher puts her left hand on her hand to imitate sleeping and then moves it away quickly. 65 T: You are quite, aren't you? ↑ 66 If Don was sleeping like this. The teacher puts Don’s head on her right hand to let him pretend to sleep. She faces the other students. 67 And I said, SANTA CAME WHEN YOU ARE ASLEEP. OH. ▲▲▲ Don and other kids burst into laughter. 68 T: It will wake you up. 69 So when you sleep, 70 we would say it quiet xxx▼▼. The teacher puts Don back to a “sleep” position again and then let him set straight. 71 Santa comes, when you are asleep. 72 Do you wanna put it at the end of your poem? ↑ Don nods his head. 73 T: Alright.

138 At the beginning of the above excerpt (4.9), Tina does not wait for an assigned turn but “borrows” her teacher’s voice, combining her teacher-like hand gestures to ask Don, author of the original poem, whether he wants the poem to be read loudly or not loudly.

As Tina did a good job in adding sound to her poem, “The Bathroom,” which is shared and valued in the class, Tina shifts the center of their discussion to the sounds effect on line 51. And this shifted focus is sanctioned by both the teacher and her peers later to help

Don fix the poem. Therefore, this line becomes the initial point of the climax of the playful revisions of the poem (See Appendix I).

At the same time, although the teacher assigns Lori a turn to speak out her ideas about the pretty Christmas tree on line 52, the idea does not get repeated or recognized.

Instead, on lines 55 and 57, the teacher builds on Tina’s question of reading it loudly or not loudly and provides further contextual information that when Santa comes, the children are sleeping. Don’s nodding of his head seems to suggest or likely signal to the teacher that he understands that loud words or different sound effects should be used in different appropriate contexts. Many of his peers also nod their heads. Then the teacher combines both spoken language on line 58 and her body language of sleeping like a baby to illustrate the setting of their poem. The multimodal message conveyed in a dramatic way embodies the scene that what a child is doing (sleeping) when Santa comes and successfully helps Don realize the intertextual relation between the scene and his home experience. (The teacher asks Don about his personal home experience on Christmas Eve.

This question also helps Don and the other children realize the intertextual relation here.)

Further, in line 61, the teacher deliberately stresses the word “loud” and says the word

139

“quiet” in a very low voice to produce a drastic contrast of the sound effects and uses her hand gestures to illustrate the different “quantities” of high and low volume. Building upon his awareness about the setting and the teacher’s demonstration of different sound effects, Don comes to realize that he should use quiet words in the setting of Christmas

Eve. Later, they use small letters rather than capital letters or an exclamation mark in this poem line to describe the quietness during the Christmas night when Santa comes to his

(Don’s) house.

At the same time, the teacher strategically involves both Don and other peers in this performance. Their action and reaction in their dramatic performance construct a carnivalesque scene at this moment, constituting the climax of this poem revision event.

At first, the teacher employs a general interrogative question to confirm with Don about his decision of writing “quiet” words, combining uses of multi-semiotic sources to reemphasize the relationship of language uses and particular settings. She deploys her body gestures to pretend to sleep like a baby and a disjunctive question that is addressed to Don and the whole class. Then, she and Don co-act the scene of baby’s quiet sleeping on Christmas Eve and put the rest of the class in the role of audience. Moving the carnival mood to a peak, the teacher says, “Santa came when you are sleep, OH!” (line

67, also see Appendix I) in an exaggeratedly loud and entertaining rhythmic way.

Looking beyond the carnival mood in the class, being in the audience even without oral participation is still a way for the students to participate in the poem revision. The students all burst into laughter. Maintaining the positive mood for their learning, the teacher, on line 70, delivers a clear explanation about the social consequences of a loud

140 voice in this setting. Then the teacher changes the subject into “we,” which indicates the shifting of their role of the drama actors and audience into writers, and continues to use her quiet voice to describe the time when Santa comes. In line 72, the teacher briefly introduces the structure of the poem when she asks whether Don wants to put the line that they have collectively acted out as the end of his poem. Although it is unlikely that the young student disagrees with the teacher’s suggestion, Don and the other students/ listeners are at least exposed to the knowledge about poem structure.

From the above analysis of the prelude, exposition, rising action, and climax excerpts, a poetic orientation and aesthetic perspectives and values have been initiated and begun to evolve during the teacher-student interactive poem revision process. In the subsequent excerpt (4.10), I continue to examine how Don’s poem evolves from a plain narrative poem into a more poetic one saturated with more poetic languages and aesthetic elements. Doing so illuminates how the poetic orientation and aesthetics have been taken up and deployed by the students in their continuous “reconstruction” (revision) of Don’s

Christmas poem.

Transcript 4.10. Falling Action and Denouement

Line Spr Message Units The teacher lets Don stand so that she can write on the white board. 74 Ali: xxxx. 75 T: That’s right. 76 Let’s write that right here. 77 And you could draw back then. Continued 141

Transcript 4.10. Falling Action and Denouement (Continued)

Line Spr Message Units The teacher writes the revised poem on the board. 78 T: Santa, 79 watch we put the really little words, 80 so when we notice it, 81 we say it quiet. 82 Santa came to your house. As the teacher is writing the poem on the board, the students chime to each other, moving their bodies in a funny way. 83 Tina: Santa came to your house (Tina repeats this line in low voice.) 84 Lori: Santa came to your home. (Lori repeats the line in a more rhythmic tone, nodding her head to the rhythm. Then she moves her body and turns to Tina. Tina turns her body to face Brandon. 85 Tina: Santa came to YOUR home. Tina copies and exaggerates teacher’s tone to repeat the line in a rhythmic pattern, hand holding her plaits and nodding her head to the rhythm with a funny facial expression. 86 Brandau, au, au on: 87 Lori: hou hou hou hou The teacher finishes writing the current poem on the board and speaks to the students. 88 T: Alright, ▼=what↑ could he say▲ in this poem?↑ 89 Let’s read it again | The teacher holds Don on her lap again. 90 to see if your guys can think what line we can use it as a repeating ▲ li:ne, Alright↑ 91 Joe, I want your ears and sit right here to help me. 92 Are you ready?↑ The teacher holds Don's hand and they hold the "hand" wand together and point to the poem to lead their reading, word by word.

142 The above except (4.10) starts with the “exit” of the main actors (the teacher and

Don). The teacher lets Don stand up and grabs a marker, starting to write on the white board; the rest of the students all shift and focus their eye gaze to the white board. This series of actions indicate the context transfer from a drama to a didactic classroom teaching and learning one. The first line of this excerpt, a student’s speaking, is not captured in the video; however, his or her line/idea is acknowledged by the teacher and accepted as part of the poem content. However, from the teacher’s confirmation message from line 75 to line 81, it appears that he picks up something from their previous poetic stylized interaction. The teacher also mentions about drawing later in line 77, which suggests that the student and other students as well need to draw on multimodal semiotics other than formal or standard written language to represent their ideas. The teacher writes their revised poem line on the board and simultaneously reads the words and keeps calling the students’ attention to the relationship between the small letters and low sounds and the associated social meaning and aesthetic effects.

While the teacher is writing the revised poem on the board, the students pick up the rhythm and seem to enjoy chiming the poem with each other from line 85 to line 87.

Of interest is that the line “Santa came to my house” is chimed by the teacher in iambic trimeter in line 16 and then improvised by the students, who change the first possessive pronoun into a second pronoun and chime it in a typical trochaic (one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable) trimeter, accompanying active body movement and shared laughter. In line 83, Tina first repeats this line in a very low voice. Then Lori joins her and repeats the same line in a more obvious trochee on line 84, bouncing her upper

143

body, playfully touching her pony tail, hands up, nodding her head in the poetic rhythm.

Other children become more excited. In an exaggerated way, Tina modulates her voice to chant the same line. She puts more obvious stress on the possessive pronoun, nodding her head rhythmically with a funny facial expression. Another important cue is that on line 85 Tina holds her hands, grinning, and performs how Santa eats a cookie, which is adopted as part of their following discussion about what Santa does when he comes to the child’s house. The tri-party dramatic performance reveals their uptake of the typical poetic rhyme and their contribution to the “new” poem. The poetic orientation and aesthetic feeling is further developed by Brandon and Lori’s uses of onomatopoeia on lines 84 and 85. Brandon and Lori hilariously chant the new sounds on lines 86 and 87, strengthening the musical quality to the original sound and also maintaining the carnival atmosphere at this moment. Don’s original poem becomes a site for the whole class to participate in the construction of a poetics, using repeating lines with various rhythmic patterns, creating a carnival/supportive learning community, and arousing aesthetic feelings. At this point, this dramatized literacy event (poem revision) begins to develop into the falling action and moves towards denouement.

It can be seen from the entire transcript (4.10) that repetitive chiming is one of the remarkable features of this poem revision event. Repetitive chiming is a strategy modeled by the teacher and adopted by the students in this poem writing event. Such repetition is called re-reading by them and widely practiced in other writing units (personal narrative, punctuation, and wow nonfiction units). On the ending lines of the above excerpts, the teacher requests the students reread their current poem and contribute a repeating line. On

144 line 90, the teacher particularly stresses the word “repeating” and elongates the compound vowel /ai:/ in the word “line.” While initiating her students’ further contribution to the new poem, she delivers knowledge in two aspects. First, she lets the students know that a poem can or usually has a repeating line as they just read/chimed; second, their joint efforts of generating a repeating line for the new poem helps the students understand what can be counted as a line and can be repeated to make the poem like music to the reader’s ears. Toward the end of this event, the students and the teacher further discuss what Santa says when he comes into the child’s home, what Santa rides, and what and how Santa eats in the child’s home. Many of the details are intertextualized with Tina’s funny performance of eating something and Brandon and Lori’s onomatopoeia. Lori’s chiming and performance of “Ho, ho, ho” is acknowledged and adopted later by the whole class as the repeating line, which meets the teacher’s expectation of a rhythmic repeating line in the “new” poem.

Subsequent to the poem revision literacy event, Eva shares her poem about a cat, in which she uses her five senses to describe her cat. Her use of synaesthesia, “the cat feels as soft as a cloud” becomes the evidence of her taking up the poetic orientation and aesthetics. Meanwhile, the teacher advocates the students draw on their culture, tradition, and different life experiences in their writing. During the poetics construction process, the students are exposed to learning, performing, and practicing the rhythmic sounds, words, sentence patterns, poem structure, beginning and end, prosodic repetition, repeating line, onomatopoeia, synaesthesia, and other remarkable poetic features of their writing practices. At the same time, the students experience, participate, and begin to learn to

145

appreciate their discursively and socially constructed poetics. Their exposure to the poetics construction and emerging aesthetic taste has already been reflected in the children’s written products near the end of the first poem writing unit. The works of three students (see Appendix K), who were respectively at low, intermediate, and high English language proficiency level, are chosen to represent their debut as “poets” and uses of repetition, exclamatory rhyming words, and vertical lines, together with big pictures.

PART II. Poetics Construction Over Time

Analyses of the above transcripts in the current section show that the teacher and the students jointly construct a poetic orientation and aesthetics during their interactive poem revision process. As briefly discussed in my analyses of transcripts 4.2 and 4.3 selected from their punctuation writing units in February 2010, this socially constructed poetics is taken up by Lori and her peers in their individual writing processes in other writing units. Tina’s story, “When you see Eva, You...” (see Appendix J), can be used for another illustration of the students‘ gradual uptake and growth in and through their joint construction of poetics in their writing practices. Based on the assessment results, Tina’s

English language proficiency was intermediate level. However, she has been an active learner and participant in the class.

In this part, I analyze three more excerpts (4.11, 4.12, 4.13) to illustrate whether and how poetics and aesthetics have been constructed and taken up by the students in another poem writing unit, in a non-poem (a wow-nonfiction) writing unit, and in other kinds of routinized daily literacy practices (one of their daily five choices, word family) at different times through the academic year.

146 Poetics Construction in Another Poem Writing Unit

The first excerpt in this part (4.11) represents a whole-class discussion on season poems in their mini lesson of another poem writing unit. As the teacher introduced in the first interview, she often started a new semester with a poem writing unit and ended the semester with another poem writing unit. Because the class this year was exclusively

English language learners, she decided to start with a nonfiction unit foregrounding some facts that they could easily find in books or in their life experiences. After the nonfiction writing unit in the fall semester, they finished a poem, “Goodbye Fall, Hello Winter.” As their winter season was almost gone, they began to write a new season poem “Goodbye

Winter, Hello Spring.” The following analysis focuses on the characteristics and aesthetics of their meta talk--that is, their discussion on what and how to write the spring poem; the discussion illustrates how the students participated in this particular verbal performance event and constructed a shared poetic orientation.

Excerpt 4.11. Poem Writing “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring”

Line Speaker Message Units 1 T: What the trees look like? 2 Tell me what the trees outside look like, umm (0.3)... The teacher puts her hand under her chin. Some students raise their hands. 3 T: Dean↑ The teacher uses her hand to point to Dean. 4 D: uh. ↑(0.4)... uh↓. (0.4) What the trees look like∣NOW?↑ 5 T: Yeah. What the trees look like now? 6 D: Li:ke.... continued

147

Excerpt 4.11. Poem Writing “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring” (continued)

Line Speaker Message Units Dean sits up and gesticulates to describe a kind of shape of the tree. 7 D: They have a lot of xx. 8 T: They have a lot of xx and branches. 9 What could we say? 10 D: = (inaudible) 11 T: Yeah, and WHAT?↑ 12 In the SPRING, yes. 13 What else is gonna happen (0.2) to the tree? The teacher smiles to Dean and bends down to look around the students. 14 T: What do you see happen to the tree? Lori raises her right hand high. 15 T: xxx gona come back on so we could say: 16 Sx: = to a girl? 17 T: = goodbye Lori waives her hands to get a chance to talk. 18 trees and goodbye. 19 T: Trees and HELLO GR[EE::NS] 20 Ss: [Gree:ns] 21 T: Yeah! = Lori raises her hand and bends her body forward to try to get the teacher's attention. 22 L: I wanna go xxx 23 T: What?↑ 24 L: xxx The teacher turns back to write something on board. The students are chatting. 25 T: Oh... eyes on Lori. 26 L: I know, I know XX. 27 The threes were ...had, they were having ice. 28 T: Oh, yeah, so goodbye ice, 29 That's what Bridget said too. Right↑ 30 Ss: Bye bye pigs. Bye bye pigs. 31 T: uhmm.... The teacher turns back to look at papers hung in the wall and seems to try to find something.

Continued 148 Excerpt 4.11. Poem Writing “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring” (continued)

Line Speaker Message Units 32 T: There are still pigs around. 33 Montour: [ Pigs↑] 34 T: [Pigs], they are still around. 35 >Pigs are endothermic animals.< 36 They are still around no matter what? 37 Any body else has anything else you can think before we get started? More students raise their hands. Tai waves her hands. 38 T: Yeah↑ Tai. 39 Montour sit up tall, straight. 40 Tai please. ↓ The teacher suggests other students not speak and listen to Tai. 41 Tai: Hello park↑ 42 T: HELLO park. That would be fun time in spring, wouldn't be? 43 T: Now, you are thinking. 44 Montour: at Christmas. Eva and Bridget raise their hands. 45 T: uhm... who else I haven't heard from? The teacher looks around the students. (0.2) 46 T: Let's see, Joe ↓ 47 What are you thinking about? The teacher assigns the turn to Joe and turns back to write something on board. 48 Joe: It is the... goodbye snow. 49 T: Goodbye SNOW. 50 We were talking about that, right?↑ Don walks to the front to asks Mrs. Young. 51 Don: Mrs. Young, can I go, good bye santa xxx. The teacher smiles to him. 52 T: Goodbye Santa. The teacher turns to another new page. 53 T: Did you say that? 54 Don: Yeah. 55 T: So we’re going to start↑ our poem. 56 Sx: Good bye mommy ( funny voice). 57 T: And you guys can help me decorate it.

149

The excerpt (4.11) above shows that repetition emerges as the most poetic feature in the teacher-student discussion about their “Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring” poem. The repetition in the teacher and the students’ language uses, including sounds, words, patterns, and sentences, is examined as a poetic device deployed by the teacher and the students in their verbal play (cf. Duff, 2000). I adapt Heath’s (1982, 1986) model of examining word play at a repetition stage and a repetition-with-variation stage. Below, I first describe what has been repeated or improvised and how the repeated or improvised language uses have been performed and enhanced with various intonational contours.

Then, I proceed to examine what new ideas or learning take place in their repeated or improvised language uses.

In the above transcript (4.11), the teacher opens their discussion with an interrogative question: “What the trees look like.” She swiftly converts this general question into an imperative sentence addressed to the whole class on line 2 by adding a request phrase: “Tell me.” An adverbial of place is also added behind the key word “tree” in the repeated sentence. The teacher’s improvisation indexes her authority and facilitator role in this discussion and provides helpful cues to help the students get the sense of forthcoming spring. Then the floor is open for all the class. The teacher pauses for three seconds and then assigns a turn to Dean on line 3. Dean copies the teacher’s slightly rising tone first and uses back-channeling (“Uh”) to hold the floor for four seconds. He shifts his tone from rising into falling and successfully continues holding the floor for another four seconds. Then, on line 4, Dean repeats the original interrogative question, adding a stressed adverbial of time, “Now,” at the end of the sentence and switching back 150 to a rising tone. At the semantic level, the teacher repeats and acknowledges the sentence improvised by Dean on line 5. Meanwhile, she helps Dean hold the floor. At this point, the beginning sentence is rhythmically repeated four times (lines 1, 2, 4, 5) and improvised two times by the teacher and the students. This repetition process provides opportunities for the students to repeat, think, and change what they hear the teacher and their peers say. Dean takes the extended turn, elongating /ai/ sound in the word “like” on line 6 to get himself ready and the audience’s attention. He comes up with his own idea on line 7, which is expressed through both his oral narrative and his gesticulation, moving his right arms right to left to describe the shape of the tree. His idea is acknowledged through the teacher’s repetition of his idea. The teacher also further adds new information, the branches of the tree.

On line 009, the teacher rephrases the above repeated question, putting stress on the word “Spring” to further articulate the context of the season. She maneuvers her postural configuration, leaning closer to the students, and encourages other students to generate new ideas about “what else” happens to the tree. On the subsequent line, she repeats the question again, replacing the general adverb on the prior line with a particular sensory verb that initiates the students’ sensory involvement into poem writing. Lori takes this initiative signal and raises her hand. Another student also comes up with an answer “to a girl?” quickly on line 16 when the teacher asks about what they could say when something comes back to the tree.

The students are not able to come up with a poem line until line 16 where the teacher repeats a key word “goodbye” in their poem title. The elongated /ai/ in this word

151

successfully stimulates the students’ responses. Lori begins to waive her hands to get the teacher’s attention and bid for a turn to share her idea. Other students repeat what they have discussed so far, “trees and goodbye.” The teacher repeats the first half of the students’ collective response but stresses two new words “hello” and “greens” with the elongated vowel /i:/. The teacher’s repetition and improvisation on line 019 builds on what they have been discussing and introduces the new season and the key feature of the new season. On the next line, the students excitedly echo the new feature “greens” in the same rhythm pattern, which is more like a duet on these two lines as the students take up the poem line, the poetics, right after the teacher makes the /gr/ consonance. Meanwhile,

Lori keeps adjusting her body gesture, bending further toward the teacher and finally gets her turn; the other children are chatting and seem to have other ideas to share. On line 27,

Lori says that the trees used to have ice on them. Lori’s idea about the features of winter season is sanctioned by the teacher and converted into a new poem line, “goodbye ice.”

The teacher also acknowledges on line 29 that another student (Bridget) has shared the same idea as an attempt to engage more students into the idea generation process.

On line 30, some students chime a new line with glee: “Goodbye pigs, goodbye pigs.” The teacher leaves the floor open on line 32 for the others to participate in the discussion. Montour mimics the word “pigs” in a rising tone on line 33, overlapping with the teacher’s repetition of the same word. The teacher takes this turn from line 34 to line

36 to introduce new knowledge that warm-blooded animals like pigs are still around in the new season and to invite their contribution of more ideas for this poem. Then she assigns a turn to Thai on line 38. Thai’s utterance on line 41 follows the syntactic pattern

152 of the teacher’s leading line, “Hello green” (on line 019), and varies the content by intertextualizing her life experience of playing in the park into her classroom poem writing task. Thai’s idea is repeated loudly by the teacher on line 42. She further engages the students’ imagination about how much fun they can have in a spring park.

The teacher confirms that the students are thinking on line 43. Thinking is discussed and viewed as an important characteristic of being a good writer. Of interest is that Montour’s immediate response to the teacher’s statement on line 44 reveals his attempt of letting his active participation or good writer identity be acknowledged by the teacher. Eva, Bridget, and many other students also raise their hands, signaling that they are also doing the same thing. The students’ similar reactions to the teacher comments suggest that the importance of engaging poetic thinking in their writing has been widely validated among the students in this class. The ELL students want to be recognized as good writers in their writing community.

It can be seen from line 45 that the teacher takes great effort to engage every student in the collective poem and poetics construction processes. She looks for someone whom she has not heard from to share their thoughts. The teacher distributes the turn to

Joe on line 46, who was a student in Mrs. Young’s previous year’s class and stayed for another year in kindergarten. Joe follows the structural pattern of their poem on line 48:

“Goodbye xx, hello xxx” or “Hello xx, Goodbye xx.” As Thai contributes a new line,

“Hello Park,” Joe says goodbye to snow in a soft voice. The teacher repeats Joe’s line with the stressed word “snow” on line 49. In the rest of her response to Joe’s answer, the teacher also tries to remind the students that they were talking about the snow in another

153

poem, connecting their current writing texts with prior texts. The kind of intertextual links between different poems are also employed by Don, who was helped by the whole class in fixing his Christmas poem, to contribute another new line, “Goodbye Santa,” to this season poem. Another anonymous student also murmurs “Goodbye mommy” on line

56, which is interpreted here as his attempt of intertextualizing his life experience into this poem. His utterance is not repeated because “Goodbye mommy” is not sanctioned by his peers and the teacher as relevant to the season poem. But his attempt adds some carnivalesque flavor in this poem and poetics construction process.

My analysis of the above excerpt (4.11) echoes both Duranti and Black’s (2011) call for “a practical, aesthetic and ethical evaluation of improvisation” (p. 444) and Duff’s

(2000) call for “research examining repetition as an element of discourse that potentially unifies students in their common pursuit of leaning within particular communities of language users that socialize them into both academic and non academic language uses for various purposes” (p. 135). The analysis shows that repetition is a widely used poetic device in their poem writing and an important constituent of their shared poetics. The observed uses of repetition provide all the young English language learners in this class with access to the writing topics, linguistic and rhythmic patterns, and social recognition of using their knowledge of being a good writer. Through the repetition practice, students of various literacy competencies can participate in the writing activity (Moore, 2011) and get familiarized with the activities and peers and build up their membership in the writing community (Duff, 2000). Moreover, the repeated language uses index the intertextual and intercontextual links of their prior and current poem writing and their prior various social

154 experiences and current writing practice. What is repeated and/or improvised and sanctioned also reflects the social and power relationship in this class. In sum, my findings illuminate that repetition is one of the means allying the students in their construction of poetic orientation, a collective scaffolding tool for all the learners of various literacy competencies, a particular mode for their literacy learning and pursuit of aesthetic effects. Additionally, it is a means to create a relaxing environment full of laughter, humor, and affiliation.

Poetics Construction in a Wow-Nonfiction Writing Unit

Excerpt (4.12) is transcribed from a video clip made in the middle of the 2010 spring semester. The video clip documents the mini-lesson of the students’ first wow- nonfiction5 writing unit. In this mini lesson, the teacher plays a VHS of one of the students’ favorite authors and illustrators, Eric Carle, who shows how he illustrates his work with artistic pictures and reads some of the books that have been used as mentor books in this class. This mini lesson bridges what the students have learned about nonfiction and illustration for nonfiction and what the teacher briefly introduces as wow- nonfiction, a new literature genre, in the subsequent lessons. After finishing watching a fair part of the VHS, the students sit on their reading carpet, facing the standing white board. The teacher sits on a chair beside the white board, facing the class, and turns to a new blank page of the writing board.

5 Wow-nonfiction is a popular children’s literature genre, in which the facts in nonfiction books are narrated in a personal voice. 155

Excerpt 4.12. Poetics Construction in a Wow-Nonfiction Writing Unit

Line Speaker Message Units 1 T: All right, what do we need to do tomorrow? ↑ Sam raises his hand. 2 T: Let’s first make a list of things.↑ The teacher begins to write on the white board 3 Montour: = Things↓(musical quality) 4 Ss: We:: 5 T: We: need 6 Sx need (resonance, repetition) Sam raises his hand even higher. 7 Sx: > I know what we need< (faster speed) Bridget raises her hand too. 8 B: WE NEED PAINT. 9 T: PAINT! The teacher writes the word “paint” down on the white board. 10 Sx: I know. 11 B: We need PAPERS. The teacher continues to write the word “papers” on the board. 12 T: “Do you guys remember what kind of paper that was?” 13 Ss: Yeah! 14 Sx: TISSUE PAPER. More students raise their hands. 15 T: Tissue papers. It is gonna be wide tissue papers. The teacher uses her hand gesture to describe the width of the tissue paper they are going to need and continues to write on the board. 16 T: That’s rea:lly rea:lly kind of thin paper.↑ 18 Sx: Very cool paper.

On the beginning two lines (lines 1 and 2), the teacher addresses their discussion topic about what they are going to do tomorrow and initiates their day’s agenda of making a list of things. Sam immediately raises his hand to signal his participation in the discussion. But making the list seems not to deliver a clear message, as Montour repeats 156 the ambiguous word “things” with his Iraqi accent on line 3, adding a special musical quality to his speech. Some other students significantly elongate the vowel /i:/ in the collective pronoun “we.” This suggests they are actively participating but not necessarily having an answer ready for the teacher’s imperative question statement on line 2. The teacher follows the students’ rhythmic tempo, slightly elongating the vowel /i:/ in her repeated language uses and adds another word “need” (/i:/) to rhyme with the word “we” to further encourage the students’ participation. The repeated utterances of /w/ and /i:/ sounds from line 4 to line 6 constitutes both 6alliteration (lines 4 and 5) and assonance7

(lines 5 and 6). On the subsequent line, a student repeats the word and the tempo. Sam raises his hand even higher, a stronger sign of his willingness to share his ideas. On line

7, another student states his knowledge at a faster speech speed, repeating the rhyming words but varying the tempo. Bridget also raises her hand and bids for her turn by speaking out her answer on line 8. Her bid is immediately sanctioned by the teacher’s loud repetition of her answer “paint” on line 9 and writing her speech and idea down on the white board where the social consequence of Bridget’s contribution to their discussion is achieved. It is found that social recognition of Bridget’s idea is valued among her peers as another student also claims on line 10 that he knows it too.

On line 11, Bridget contributes another substantial idea that they need papers with a stress on the key word “papers.” The teacher turns Bridget’s answer into a question on line 12 that helps the students connect what they see in the VHS and what they will use in

6 Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words.

7 Assonance: The repetition of a vowel sound within a line. 157

their own writing (illustration) practice. Many students orally confirm their uptake of what they have learned from the mentor author (Eric Carle). One of them articulates on line 14 the specific kind of paper they need. Many others raise their hands, also indicating their knowledge about the paper for illustrating their written work. The students’ claim is acknowledged by the teacher, who repeats the students’ answer and also writes it on the white board. Mrs. Young continues to deploy hand gestures to help the students engage their imagination and “see” what particular type of paper they will use. Near the end of this excerpt, she further articulates in a rising tone the specificity of the tissue paper through repeating the adverb “really” and stressing and elongating the long vowel /i:/. A student expresses her favor of this type of paper. As a participant of this class discussion, her personal comments on the last line also reveal that their poetically stylized discussion constitutes not only a way for students’ to learn to write/illustrate but also a source of their enjoyment—thus constituting both the poetics and aesthetics shared in their daily literacy practice.

Poetics Construction in Other Classroom Literacy Activities

Besides the three basic instructional components (mini lesson, independent writing, sharing/publication) in each of their writing units, there are daily five choices, including reading to self, reading to someone, working on writing, word work (phonics skills), and listening to reading, in children’s daily classroom literacy practice. The third excerpt is transcribed from a video clip made in early 2010 spring semester, recording the teacher-student collaborative work on word family. It is selected because word family

158 practice is a common and important daily literacy practice in this and other kindergarten classrooms.

The video shows that the students are sitting on the carpet near the door of their classroom, facing a “word wall” with some rhyming words and alphabet letters. The teacher sits beside the chart board at the right side of the students. Prior to what happens in the selected video clip, the teacher handed out some word cards with pictures to the students and then asked them to put the words (cards) with the same beginning sound into the same column of the plastic holder on the wall. Then the teacher asks the students to spell out more rhyming words and write them down on the white board in the front.

Analysis of the following excerpt (4.13) aims to show how the students’ rhyming words and spelling practice can also constitute and reflect their shared poetics identified in the above analyzed literacy events across various writing units.

Excerpt 4.13. Poetics Construction in Word Family Activity

LineSpeaker Message Units Many students spell out “sit.” The teacher asks Kate to write the word "sit" on the white board. 1 T: Good. Thank you very↑MUCH↓, Kate. Kate goes back to sit on the carpet. 2 T: sit. The teacher uses her teaching wand to point to the word family the students have written on the board. 3 T: If (low volume) you know IT, you know FIT. You know MEET, you know

[SIT]. 4 Sx: [SIT]

continued

159

Excerpt 4.13. Poetics Construction in Word Family Activity (continued)

Line Speaker Message Units 5 Ss: you know MEET. 6 Sx: you know XX. 7 Sx: you know SIT 8 Sx: At. 9 Apple: you know /lid/. 10 T: A:nd You could figure out the beginning o:f= 11 Sx: kit 11 Sx: kit 12 T: kit. 13 Sx: kitten. 14 T: A:nd clap the word kitten. (volume change) Some few students repeat the word, clapping their hand twice. 15 Ss: Ki/tn/ 16 T: How many syllables? 17 CandacKi/TN/ e: 18 T: Joe? 19 Sx: two (low) ↓ 20 Joe: two↑ 21 T: TWO↓. 22 So, the first part is Kit, Kitten. 23 How would you spell kit? 24 Sx: /ki/ 25 Sx: /ki/ 26 Sx: /ki/ 27 T: T: If you know it, you know kit. Tina, how would you spell it? (1:54:45) Tina goes to the front to write the word on the board.

The excerpt (4.10) represents part of the teacher-student collective practice of rhyming words on that data collection day. Many students follow up the rhyming pattern in the teacher’s example words and come up with a series of rhyming words. The teacher calls

160 some of them to write down their words on the white board. Kate is a quiet newcomer in this class, a recent migrant from Iraq to the United States. Near the end of the 2009 fall semester, she joins this class with little English language knowledge. As Appendix A shows, Kate made impressive progress by the end of academic year. Here, when the teacher notices Kate spell out the word “sit” together with the other children she immediately calls her to come to the front to write down the word. Kate’s spelling of the word “sit” is valued by the teacher. She expresses her thanks to Kate in a dramatic rising and falling tone.

The teacher continues to model the rhyming pattern through putting stress on the rhyming words “it,” “fit,” “meet,” and “sit,” which also constitutes a poetic line of anapestic (two unstressed syllabi followed by a stressed syllabus) tetrameter.

˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ /

If (low volume) you know it, | you know fit. | You know me, | you know [sit]

The poetic rhythm is picked up by many students. The student on line 4 actually follows up the pattern and speaks out the rhyming word “sit” at the same time as the teacher does. Many other students also repeat one or the other line of the teacher’s utterances in the same rhythmic pattern. And the same ending sound /t/ from line 003 to line 008 constructs a special unanimous rhyming scheme (A-A-A-A-A-A), which makes their discussion somewhat playful and likely engages more students to get familiarized with the rhyming words and/or to learn more new words.

161

The teacher continues to adopt the strategy of playful verbal game in her meta-talk about the structure of the rhyming words. On line 010, she adjusts her tempo, elongating the vowel of her first word (and) and that of her last word (of), and leaves the floor to the students. A student comes up with a new word, “kit,” rhyming with the above words. The new rhyming word is sanctioned through the teacher’s repetition of it. The next student who introduces another new word “kitten” brings forth a variant rhyming pattern. The teacher uses this new word to create another phonics learning opportunity for the student.

The students, including Joe who is a second-year kindergartener in Mrs. Young’s class, take up the opportunity, clapping their hands and providing the right answer to the teacher’s question about the number of syllables. Then the teacher switches their task back to word spelling and divides the word “kitten” into two parts to make it more phonologically maneuverable for the students. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that the teacher and the students’ repetition of the word “two” (syllables) (lines 19-21) possesses a remarkable musical quality in their discussion, which unfortunately cannot be fully represented in this study though the current transcription convention captures many kinds of contextualization cues. The nuances in onomatopoeic lexicalization, intonation patterns, and tone and volume changes may be missing—as are the social and contextual meaning behind the changes, which are also as important as the enhancement of the students’ phonic or other kinds of linguistic skills to the students’ growth in literacy learning.

162 PART III. Defamiliarization in Poetics Construction

The term defamiliarization was first used by Vicktor Shklovsky (1917) in his essay

“Art as Technique” (in Rivikin & Ryan, 1998) to distinguish poetic/artistic language from daily language. The children’s uses of poetic languages and devices are viewed as different from those in other subject areas or other domains of their social life. The purpose of this distinction is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known (cf. Shklovsky, 1917, “Art as Technique”). The technique of art is to “make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged (p. 16)”. Therefore, which object the children and the teacher choose to write poems about is not important in this study. Instead, more important are: (a) the defamiliarized images of the objects created or arranged through their poetic language and poetic device uses and their artistic perceptions, values, thinking, and imagination engagement and (b) the accompanying aesthetic responses, moods, and experiences.

The segment of video data from which the transcript below is constructed was made during student-teacher interactive writing in their mini lesson of their first poem writing unit in the 2009 autumn semester. After the teacher read several mentor poem books and poems written by her previous year’s students, the teacher and the students began to discuss what they could write about the stapler, the most “automatically perceived” and familiar stationery item in their classroom. This video segment documents the naturally occurring teacher-student interactive conversation while they write down their previously generated ideas about the stapler.

163

Transcript 4.14 combines two excerpts transcribed from two segments of the beginning and middle of the selected video clip. The teacher-student conversations about writing conventions are filtered out for the sake of focusing on the defamiliarization phenomenon and accompanying aesthetics without intention of ignoring their learning of writing conventions or skills.

Transcript 4.14. Defamiliarization in Poem Writing

Line Spr Message Units Defamiliarized Aesthetic effects and Images feelings Excerpt (1) 04:58- 05:22 101 T: SO, black and silver. Color 102 = Do you want to start with ….uhm… uhm… 103 Sx: Snapping Snapping Quick action, adding sound 104 T: Snapping like a⋯∣ 105 Sx: =[Crocodile] Crocodile Live, quick, violent 106 T: [Crocodile↑] Repetition, varying tone 107 Sx: = Yeah. 108 Sam: [Or Like a shark. Shark Live, quick, violent 109 = >Or Like a hippo< hippo Excited mood with fast speech speed 110 T: Do you like? 111 Or, Joe, 112 [do you want to put like a crocodile Crocodile Crocodile in action and snap? ↑] with sound 113 Sam: [Or, like a shark.] shark 114 T: Is that what you mean by Action and sound snap? 115 Like↑ a:… 116 Joe: xxx

Continued 164 Transcript 4.14. Defamiliarization in Poem Writing (continued)

Line Spr Message Units Defamiliarized Aesthetic effects and Images feelings 115 Like↑ a:… 116 Joe: xxx 117 T: How about = 118 Do you guys like that? 119 like a crocodile.↑ Crocodile Appealing 120 Snap, snap ↑ Snapping Quickness crocodile 121 Ss: YEAH. Excited mood … Excerpt (2) 06:00-8:02 201 T: Do you wanna to say anything else?↑ 202 Ss: Yeah. Eva raises her hand to describe a high volume. 203 Eva: It is LOUD. Getting excited, loudness 204 T: It is loud. Echoing 205 Sam: It's xxxx. 206 T: So, snap snap. ↑ snapping Quickness, repetition 207 So we could say. 208 what do you wanna say? 209 Ss: [LOU:D] Excited mood loudness 210 Sx: [teeth like a shark.] Shark, sharp teeth Sharpness, predator, sense of fear 211 T: LOU: D. Excited mood 212 >And then we do wanna say is Shark, sharp teeth Shared sense of fear, teeth like a shark< predator, sharpness 213 Brand coz it snaps. Shark eating Quickness, violent on: 214 T: [Shar:p] teeth are Sharp teeth Sharpness 215 Sam: [and big] gonna be Size Bigness

Continued

165

Transcript 4.14. Defamiliarization in Poem Writing (continued)

Line Spr Message Units Defamiliarized Images Aesthetic effects and feelings 216 T: Sh:a:rp like a shar:k↑ Shark, sharp teeth Elongated vowels, Alliteration, sharpness 217 T: What they do? 218 What these teeth do? 219 Sx: snatch Snatching Quickness, violent 220 T: They bite the paper. Biting 221 Sx: =because they Latching voices 222 Sx: = or bite people. Biting Getting engaged 223 T: Their teeth felt out and stick Falling teeth in the paper, don't they? 224 Sx: Yeah. 225 Mugur or bite me in the..[ in the Predator Biting Fear : neck] 226 T: [so we can say] 227 Do you wanna say like sharp Shark, sharp teeth Simile teeth, like a shark?↑ 228 Ss: yeah Sam pretends to bite his biting Happy mood thumb. 229 T Snaps the paper like a turtle? Snapping turtle Metaphor, ↑ animation 230 You wanna say that too. ↑ 231 And we say snap snap again. Snapping Rhythmic repetition 232 Sx: snap snap snap snapping Rhythmic Repetition, funny, happy mood 233 T: Ok, so we wanna to say, teeth Teeth The teacher begins to write on the board

Continued

166 Transcript 4.14. Defamiliarization in Poem Writing (continued)

Line Spr Message Units Defamiliarized Images Aesthetic effects and feelings 224 Sam: tigers' teeth are [xxx] Tiger’s teeth Sharpness, predator, The teacher continues to write on the board. 225 T: like Simile 226 Sx: Tiger. tiger Predator, violent 227 T: a shark. (The teacher finishes shark Predator, violent writing the line.) 228 Ss: Shark shark Repetition, echoing 229 Sam: Teeth are teeth 230 T: =and we went to say 231 like a… uhm Sam raises his hand. 232 Sam: tiger tiger Predator, violent 233 T: Like a turtle Turtle Simile 234 like a turtle, snap↑ Snapping turtle Repetition, quickness 235 Ali: like a turtle? ↑ Repetition, echoing 236 T: snap snap Rhythmic repetition 237 And then we are gonna say Falling teeth something about the teeth fell off on the paper. 238 Have our funny line in the Funny end. 239 Ss: Yeah. (laugh) Funny, shared happy mood

Prior to what happens in the transcribed video segment above, the teacher and the students started their poem, “The Stapler,” with describing the black and silver color of

167

its body. Then the above transcript (4.11) shows that they begin to incorporate various animal images, sounds, actions, shape, and other features of the animals to defamiliarize the ordinary item, a stapler in their daily classroom life. On line 103, the first student proposes the action of snapping. This onomatopoeic word represents both the quickness of the action and the accompanying sound. The teacher invites the student to further engage their imagination about what kind of animal(s) snap(s) like that. One of the students comes up with the image of a crocodile. This idea is accepted and echoed in a varying tone by the teacher and another student. Sam begins to throw out his thoughts about the stapler’s images: “like a shark, like a hippo.” The proposed ideas, shark and hippo, add different live images of the stapler and foreground the violent nature of the snapping action. Sam’s fast speech speed to make the bid and maintain the floor also suggests the brewing excited mood in him and among other peers. On subsequent lines, the teacher lets the other students value the ideas proposed by Sam so as to involve more of them in the discussion. On line 113, Sam’s reproposal of his idea about a shark is overlapped with the teacher’s question to Joe whether he likes the snapping crocodile idea, which reveals the active ongoing negotiation in their poem writing process. Near the end of the first excerpt, the teacher chooses not to respond to Sam and summarizes the students’ initial ideas about the snapping crocodile and confirms with the whole class.

The students express their agreement aloud in an excited mood. The following analysis of the second excerpt shows how Sam’s “episode” moved into the class’s “chorus.”

In the second excerpt of transcript 4.11, the teacher puts forth a generic question to open another round of discussion about what they would like to say, and write, about the

168 stapler to further engage the students’ imagination and artistic perspectives. The teacher’s call is validated by the students. Eva raises her hand, lifting her body a little bit, to describe a high volume and orally suggests the loudness of the stapler. Eva’s proposal is soon validated by the teacher, who connects the loud sound with the action of snapping.

Eva’s idea and the sound-action connection proposed by the teacher are also accepted by the hilarious peers, who revoice her idea loudly. There is another new voice about how the teeth are like a shark among the students’ exciting chant of the effect of loudness. The teacher stresses the word “loudness” to keep in tune with the students’ excitement and also forwards the new idea to the whole class. Then Brandon joins in their discussion in a low voice, supporting the idea with his rationale that the shark snaps. Brandon’s voice is followed by an overlapped speech that the teacher and Sam provide the details about the shark’s teeth, sharpness and bigness. On line 216, the teacher clarifies that the stapler’s teeth are sharp like shark. Her utterance constitutes an alliteration utterance here and orientates the students’ imagination towards the uses of a shark’s sharp teeth. A student comes up with the word “snatch,” which includes a loud vowel like that in the word

“snap” and foregrounds the quickness and power of the animal’s snatching action. But

“snatch” is not a word widely used in this class. So the teacher changes the word into

“bite” and articulates the object that is acted on, the paper. The teacher’s speech on line

223 is latched with the student’s attempt to justify the reason for the biting action, which is interrupted by another peer who shares his concern about its biting people. The three latching lines present the polyvocal nature of the teacher-student discussion and suggest more students’ engagement into the poem creation. The fear of being bitten by the animal

169

is shared by Mugur who says the shark bites his neck. Sam also plays out the scene through sticking his thumb into his mouth to bite it. This fear feeling is not further spread among other students as the teacher keeps calling their attention to what happens to the sharp teeth. But the playful atmosphere and defamiliarization tendency remains in the classroom.

On line 229, Mrs. Young reproposes Sam’s idea about the snapping turtle, which was raised by him in their discussion prior to their current interactive writing. She further models how the snapping sound can be rhythmically repeated in a line followed smoothly by the students’ chorus of the rhythmic pattern “snap, snap, snap.” The teacher continues to write their ideas about the teeth on the board. Sam keeps sharing more new ideas about the image of a tiger, another kind of predator similar to carnivorous sharks with sharp teeth. One of his peers repeats Sam’s idea about a tiger, a new image and information about their stapler. Although Sam re-proposes this new idea, on lines 233 and 234, the teacher uses her authority to keep the idea of snapping turtle previously sanctioned by the class in their written poem. Then the teacher further proposes to use the idea that the teeth fell off in the paper as their funny line in the end. And the feeling of funniness is shared by all the students who accept the teacher’s proposal and burst into happy laughter.

To sum up, analysis of the teacher-student interactive conversations about their poem “The Stapler” shows that the students and the teacher engaged their imagination in their brainstorming and built their ideas upon each other’s. All the images (hippo, tiger, crocodile, shark, and turtle), shapes, actions, and sounds proposed and performed by the teacher and the students largely defamiliarize the students’ daily ordinary perceptions

170 about the most ordinary object in the classroom, foregrounding its animal-like image, violence and quickness of its action, loudness of its sound, and sharpness of the teeth.

These fantastic ideas are acted out in a playful way and blended with the musical/ rhythmic quality of the teacher-student talking. The analysis of this defamiliarization phenomenon enriches and refreshes our appreciation of the ELL students’ writing practices and also the associated aesthetic mood and experience derived from writing about this office object or reading the poem about the stapler. The artfulness of their language uses and the students’ represented or underrepresented creativity in their writing practice are made visible through the above analysis. As aforementioned, the aesthetic feeling is extended beyond the writers and to various readers. Such poetic experience of using poetic language and devices is also reflected in their published written work, like their poem “Water Fountain” (see Appendix E). Similarly, in this poem, metaphor, repetition, and personalization are deployed by the students and the teacher to construct an animated and personalized image (its motion of “slurp and shooting”; sound/rhyme from the repeated “slurp” in every other line; the shape “like a spoon”; and color like “a rainbow”; effect of light refraction; “watching you, share but not waste”) of a common daily used tool that people get habituated to but otherwise do not notice. In doing so, an aesthetic dimension was added to the children’s writing process through the defamiliarization process and writing became a poetic experience.

An Interpretation of the Findings

The data analyses in the above two sections show the children’s and their teacher’s complex and continuous social construction of intertextuality and poetics in

171

their interactive writing practices. First, analyses of transcripts 4.1 and 4.2 in the first section illuminate the inherently intertextual nature of the children’s practices and their potential use as heuristics for the students’ various kinds of learning. The results showed that intertextuality construction processes are not clearly bounded but highly complex and fluid. The components (proposal, recognition, acknowledgment, and social realization of social significance and/or consequences) can be omitted, repeated, or suspended for different learning purposes or adjusted to the students’ language proficiency or learning needs. Further, the proposed intertextualities have successfully stimulated the students’ play with poetic devices like onomatopoeia, simile, or metaphor in their description of the stapler. From an overarching view, all the proposed intertextualities at both collective and individual level are intended to serve, to different extents, the proposal of intertextuality between the children’s young language learners identity and their emerging young writers/artists identity.

Second, analyses of the transcripts of the students’ various literacy activities in different writing units illustrate that the running rhyme, rhythmic talk, and dramatized performance during the teacher-student’s writing practice process constitute a shared poetics, which is found to be a comfortable and transformative mode of the ELL students’ literacy learning. This poetic oriented learning mode successfully engaged the students’ imagination and artful deployment of various language skills and multimodal semiotics and texts. The five-year-old students’ literacy practice is complemented by their narratives, the teacher’s instructions, dramatic play, spectator events (e.g., watching video), and using gestures to demonstrate their ideas and abstract concepts (e.g.,

172 onomatopoeia, poem like music to ears). That is, the mode broadens the ways of using language and literacy learning through using their imagination, creativity, aesthetic perspective, and values. Complementing oral and written language instruction, especially of primary students, are dramatic role playing, visual-spatial activities, and spectator events (e.g., videos) (Roth, 2000). The findings are similar to Cook’s (1997) findings from her study on English language play and language learning—namely, that the playful languages integrating social and poetic elements can increase students’ interests and mediate the teacher-student expert-novice interaction. Another shared finding is that the students’ growing sensitivity to the metrics and the poetics helps the students and the teacher establish their affective bounds and develop a more adaptive communicative mode besides their gains in their literacy learning. That is, to some extent, the playful nature embedded in the poetic orientation provides the students with more equal access to a safe and mutually responsive learning community.

Third, the children’s written products together with the above analyzed intertextual and poetic-oriented writing processes showed their growth in their writing as well as their language. Compared with their first totally typed-up nonfiction writing exhibition in the hall, the students’ first poem writing shows the children’s debut as writers and poets.

They used rhyming words, which suggests their phonological awareness of the words, and intertextualized their life experiences into their individual poems. They begin to acquire and play with poetic devices, language, and structures, like the vertical lines, and illustrate their work with corresponding pictures. Lori and Tina’s artifacts (see appendices

H and J) produced in their punctuation writing units in the spring semester showed their

173

growth in transposing their poem writing experiences and skills into their stories. That is, they combined poetic languages and devices with skillful uses of punctuation to convey their emotions to their readers. Tina’s work with a good mix of words and pictures (see

Appendix J) demonstrated her progress in spelling as well. Many artifacts of other student work collected in the last months of the academic year also showed their continuous but different growth in their writing practices. Lori, Bridget, Dean, and Nina begin to write in complete sentences and with few supplementary graphic illustrations

(see Appendix L). For instance, Lori’s artifact in extended personal narrative (see

Appendix L) is written in poetic form and in personal narrative genre with fair good spellings. The intertextuality and poetics construction experience the children gained in and through their writing could have fostered the students’ growth in English language proficiency and writing because the change may also be influenced by other factors (i.e., parental involvement) that have not been addressed in this microethnographic study.

In line with Hudelson’s (1986) study, my findings also reveal that different ELLs take different paths and paces in their journey of acquiring and learning the target language and literacy. Students, like Don and Ali, who had low-level English language proficiency based on the classroom assessments conducted by the teacher, still had much difficulty in writing their speech down. However, based on the above analyses, I cautiously conclude with reference to the school district’s kindergarten simple story rubric (see Appendix M) that most of the students in the class were meeting the standards and made fair progress. During their writing practice, they could stay on topic, use letters, words, and pictures, grow a stronger sense of audience, produce more complex content

174 and sentence structures, and learn to collectively reflect on the overall writing processes and purposes (see Appendix N). The growth is also supported by the teacher’s response to the survey distributed in May 2010 (see Appendix O).

Taken together, the findings of the socially and discursively constructed intertextuality, poetics, and aesthetics within and across particular events and literacy practices illuminate the complexity and fluidity of young children’s intertextual writing practices and rich heuristic potentials of intertextualities and poetics in children’s learning to write and writing to learn beyond the linguistic, textual, and structural aspects of language or literacy practices. Meanwhile, the robust intertextuality and poetics construction processes characterize the local culture of this writing class. It is further argued that the experience may further influence their future perceptions and thinking about different things in other domains of their lives.

175

CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Introduction

The National Literacy Panel reported a comprehensive review of research

(published between 1980 and 2002) on language minority youth’s literacy development in a second (English) language (August & Shanahan, 2006). Studies on ELL students in primary grades (PreK-3) are underrepresented as most of the studies focus on ELL students in higher grades (4-12) or at college or graduate levels. Many of the studies on

ELLs were experimental studies on one or several components of language or literacy learning. The majority of scholarship on ELL students’ writing is located at postsecondary level with predominantly Hispanic or Asian student populations. The study reported in this dissertation was an yearlong microethnographic study on five-year-old

ELL students from six different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This dissertation probes into the intertextual and poetic nature of young ELL students’ writing practice over time and how their literacy practice has constituted and been shaped by social, cultural, and ideological contexts.

As discussed in the introduction chapter, one of the purposes of this microethnographic study is to generate questions about what should be asked about young ELL children’s writing and reading. Embarking on Street’s (1984, 1995)

176 ideological model of literacy, the anchor research question of this study explores how young ELL students’ writing practices are socially and discursively constructed in the classroom and how this particular set of social practices change and evolve within and across time and space. To provide a fuller picture of the children’s daily literacy practice in school, I specifically examined the following two sets of research questions:

1. How is intertextuality socially constructed as a learning heuristic in the ELL students’

writing workshop?

2. How is a poetics constructed in the ELL students’ writing practice, and what is the

nature of this poetics?

What follows is a presentation of the findings in correspondence with each set of the above research questions. Then I proceed to discuss the contributions this study makes to what we have known about young ELL children’s language learning and literacy practices. The dissertation concludes with implications for future research areas and possible follow-up research questions.

1. How is intertextuality socially constructed as a learning heuristic in the ELL

students’ writing workshop?

This research question is explored in the first section of chapter four. Intertextuality was employed here as both a theoretic lens and an analytic tool (Shuart-Faris & Bloome,

2004). That is, in tune with the social constructionist theoretical framing, intertextuality is not predetermined in the ELL students’ mind but socially constructed here through the children and the teacher’s action and reaction to each other. Therefore, I examined in depth the process of proposal, recognition, acknowledgement, and realization of the

177

social consequences and/or significance of intertextuality. The purpose of doing so is not simply repeating Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) study of social construction of intertextuality in classroom reading and writing but to further probe into the fluidity and complexities of intertextuality construction during the ethnolinguistically diverse ELL children’s writing processes. Moreover, what matters here is not only the inherently intertextual nature of children’s writing practice but also how the young children learn to orchestrate texts together and jointly construct complexities as learning heuristics in their writing practices. What follows is an illustration of ELL students’ writing as a complex intertextual practice and then their various types of learning gained in and through the intertextual writing practice.

My findings in the first section of chapter four show that social construction of intertextuality in young ELL students’ writing practice is not a clear cut four-component

(proposal, recognition, acknowledgement, and realization of social consequences/ significance, cf. Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) construction process but a far more complex and fluid construction processes.

a. An intertextuality construction process can be overlapped and intertwined with another one within or across different analytic units (message units, interactional units, or literacy events). An example is the intertextuality between the nonfiction writing unit and poem writing unit proposed by the teacher at the beginning of transcript 4.1. She attempted to test the students’ knowledge about the genre difference between nonfiction and poem and the difference between scientists’ and poets’ language uses and thinking.

This proposed intertextuality was overlapped with the intertextuality between the ELL

178 students’ language learner identity and their poet/writer identity, the latter which was also intertwined with other intertextualities identified in transcript 4.1. in section one of chapter four. When other intertextualities were proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and/ or socially realized and interwoven with it, the intertextuality construction process was extended and further complicated.

b. The microanalysis of the teacher-student and student-student writing process showed that an intertextuality could include or lack one or more than one of the basic four construction components. An example is Montour’s proposal of intertextuality between his finger counting, a text in their math class, and the possible candidate text for their poem writing in the ELL students’ poem (“The Stapler,” see Appendix C) writing event. His proposal was unanimously ignored by his peers and the teacher without being recognized or acknowledged but produced some social consequences. There was a shared consensus about what texts or intertextual substances were appropriate in this poem writing context. The data analysis also showed that the recognition and acknowledgement of a student’s intertextuality proposal could not necessarily be recognized, acknowledged, or made public in their interaction. An intertextuality can be directly validated through the teacher’s compliments of the proposal.

c.One or more of the four construction components could be repeated, challenged, or suspended. It depended on what texts were made available in the writing workshop

(intertextual substance)and who had and was given the rights to propose, recognize, acknowledge and get the proposed intertextuality socially realized (the intertextual rights). In this ELL writing workshop, a proposed intertextuality closely related to

179

students’ academic learning or deep learning could be iteratively utilized to maximally involve more students in the construction process. A good example was the intertextuality between their language learner identity and their poet/writer identity that was reproposed a few times to maximize the students’ literacy learning and experiences.

Overall, in the ELL students’ writing practice, an intertextuality could be multilayered with core and supplementary intertextualities. The co-existing core intertextualities consisted of the intertextuality between the intertextuality between the children’s language learner identity and their writer identity proposed in the beginning and the poem writing and nonfiction writing genres. The other four supplementary intertextualities (see table 4.2) revolved around the core intertextualities and were knitted into a net full of potential meanings, learning, and knowledge construction mediated by their playful language uses. These intertextuality construction processes constituted and were governed by their local classroom and broader social cultures and ideologies regarding what counted as appropriate candidate texts and intertextuality and how intertextuality counted in their writing practices.

During the teacher-student intertextual writing practice process, the ELL students’ various types of learning were identified and systematically presented under three categories adapted from Lemke’s “patterns of intertextuality” (2004):

a. Basic learning, students’ learning related to structure and organization of their

writing (organizational intertextuality)

b. Content learning, students’ learning related to the content or topic (thematic

intertextuality)

180 c. Deep learning, students’ learning associated with abstract concepts and the

underlying social, cultural, and ideological conventions that constitute and

guide their learning and interactions (orientational intertextuality)

The three lines of learning were not isolated but intertwined with each other during the intertextual process. The aforementioned core intertextuality between their poem writing about the stapler and their prior nonfiction writing about turtles generated the

ELL students’ basic learning about close observation of the stapler, the object of their writing content and their writing task, and more importantly launched their journey of thinking and writing as a poet, experiencing and experimenting with poetic language uses.

More specifically, regarding basic learning, the students learned about genre differences between their nonfiction writing and poem writing, the organizational structure of a poem, uses of loud words to convey emotions, and so on. The ELL children’s basic learning was more obvious at the phase of writing their ideas down (into written language or graphic symbols) as the chosen data (literacy event) in section one of chapter four was primarily the teacher-student prewriting discussion of how they can write a poem about the stapler. Their content learning, brought up by their discussion of the various features of the stapler and different animals, created many learning opportunities for the students to explore what counted as relevant and appropriate texts in this poem writing event and give them the opportunity to experiment with different rhetorical devices. The orientational intertextuality trained the ELL students’ deep thinking and learning about more abstract concepts and underlying social relations,

181

cultural facts, and ideologies embedded in their writing. Their deep learning associated with deep thinking developed through their continuous efforts in the intertextualization of their language learner and poet/writer identity and through their observation with poet eyes and continuous practice of poet thinking. Deep learning is reflected from and refracted their classroom local culture, like when to raise their hands, what questions they should ask, what texts could be brought into their discussion and enter into their intertextuality construction process, etc.

In this writing workshop, when learning opportunities were created for the ELL students to employ a broad range of intertextual links, their writing practices and their learning showed increased sophistication and evolved over time. And they successfully constructed intertextualities that integrated classroom academic texts with texts

(narratives) from their own lives. On a whole, the findings in the first section of chapter four suggest that intertextual practices (also described as intertextuality construction processes) create abundant learning opportunities and should be viewed and used as a heuristic by educators and researchers to help students construct their learning potentials and knowledge. Through iterative intertextual writing practices, students can learn to consciously juxtapose texts with different levels of scaffolding from the teacher and peers. The teachers may choose to build on, clarify, affirm, or challenge the student- proposal intertextual links (Boyd & Maloof, 2000) to enhance the students’ engagement into their interactive writing process. Hopefully, through continuous intertextual practice, the children can habitually use intertextuality to construct more and new meaning

182 potentials and new knowledge in a broader range of social practices, including their literacy practices.

2. How is a poetics constructed in the ELL students’ writing practice, and what is the

nature of this poetics?

The second set of research questions of this study aimed to explore the poetics and aesthetic experiences of young ELL kindergarteners’ writing practices. Discourse analysis was conducted on the teacher-student and student-student interactive conversations at different writing workshop phases in two different poem writing units, a non-poem writing unit and other literacy-oriented classroom activities. It was found that a poetics was constructed through the children’s experience, learning, and experiments with poetic language uses and devices. The students were found to use poetic language and devices across different writing genres and tasks. For instance, the children adapted the rhythm from their poems into their daily talk with their peers in a funny way. That is, the constructed poetics was not a unique phenomenon in their poem writing practice but also shared and represented in other genres of writing practice and writing-oriented activities

(e.g., word family activity in their daily five choices) along the whole academic year.

The findings show that the poetics construction processes successfully engaged the ELL students’ imagination and represented their capabilities of juxtaposing and manipulating various texts to defamiliarize the images of ordinary objects to arouse aesthetic effects and feelings. Further, the aesthetics can be extended to and reconstructed by their current

183

and future readers and writers (like the students in Mrs. Young’s next year’s classroom) when the ELL students’ written artifacts are consumed by them.

This part of the findings is also in line with Cekaite and Aronsson’s (2004) findings that language learning can also be applied to creative uses of teaching and learning for different purposes. If ELL students could be given similar opportunities of playing with language and making their literacy experiences even more pleasant, this poetics, these defamiliarization strategies, and the aesthetic perspectives and experience obtained from and gradually owned by the ELL students in their writing practice would further nurture their future literacy learning and their engagement with people and the world.

This poetics construction process also prolongs the readers’ appreciation of their poems. It not only adds a poetic and aesthetic dimension in children’s learning to write beyond their learning of the linguistic, textual, and structural aspects of poem but also represents an important component and characteristics of the local culture of this writing class. Moreover, the poetic experience the children had with their writing may further influence their future perceptions and thinking about things in other domains of their lives.

Contributions to the Field

This microethnographic study on ELL students’ writing practice is profoundly influenced by Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) study on social construction of intertextuality in classroom reading and writing and many scholars’ work in the field of young childhood literacy research, such as Yaden’s (2010, 2004a, 2004b, 2002a, 2002b,

184 2000), Rowe’s (2010, 2008a, 2008b, 2000, 1994), and Reyes’ (2008, 2006, 2001) series of studies on children’s emergent writing, authoring, and literacy development. The study contributes to the above research field and second language studies in the following aspects:

Theoretically, this microethnographic study reconceptualizes young ELL students’ writing as a set of particular and local social practices discursively and jointly constructed by the children, their teacher, their parents and siblings, and other community members. These relevant participants of children’s writing practices may or may not be physically present but to different extents influence or shape their classroom literacy practices. Although there were usually the teacher and the students physically present in the classroom, the writing content was always about family members, like the teacher’s daughter, the students’ siblings or their parents, or friends in the neighborhood. What is more important, what and how this local community member can write is to different extents guided by different community members. For instance, the children made cards in different languages with a desire to express their love and to please their mothers on

Mother’s Day. On the other side, school curriculum and state standards may constrain the design of their writing content, and the teacher’s professional background and training may influence how their writing workshop is organized and implemented.

This study shifts the primary focus in second language studies from the outcomes of children’s language component learning to what languages the ELL children use and how they use the language to read and write with whom and for what purposes in their daily school practices. During their literacy-in-practice process (Street, 1984), many ELL

185

students becomes active social actors in their action and reaction to each other to make meaning of and for their writing; attain, construct, and test new knowledge; and build local cultures and different communities of literacy practice. Of course, due to their complex individual, ethnolinguistic, and economical differences, the ELL students in the study varied in their pace and path to English literacy learning. The individual differences and how they influence the children’s literacy learning and practice can be a promising area for future research. But the overall findings indicate that the young ELL students, just like native English-speaking students, not only have the potential to be successful language learners but also can become active literacy consumers, users, players, and producers,

Second, this study extends our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of intertextuality construction in young ELL children’s writing practice. The findings on writing as an intertextual practice present the intertextual links between different genres, between different voices or speaking personalities, and among texts from a wide range of sources/experiences. The findings shed further insights on the patterns and nature of the intertextual practices. Intertextuality was found to be a useful heuristic for the ELL students to enrich the process of their writing to read, reading to write, and writing and reading to learn.

Third, following the new “ludic turn” in language theories and research (Cekaite &

Aronsson, 2005), my study shifts from the examination of the teacher’s central role in language play (Sullivan, 2000a, 2000b; Van dam, 2002) to a focus on the ELL children’s play and experimentation with poetic language and devices and their daily classroom

186 literacy practice and experiences. Through poetry analysis, I particularly examined in depth the patterns of rhyme, rhythm, assonance, consonance, repetition, alliteration, and parallelism in their interactive writing process. The findings add to knowledge about the poetics in children or youth’s conversations illustrated by Peck (1977), Fasulo, Liberati, and Pontecorvo (2002), Hanauer (2010), and other scholars’ work in the aspect of young

ELL children’s classroom writing workshop. Like the stance taken in the line of research following the ludic turn in language studies (Cekaite &Aronsson, 2004, 2005; Cook,

1997, 2000; Dandy, 1999; Sullivan, 2000; Wohlwend, 2011), my study also takes the

ELL students’ daily non-serious language more seriously. The findings show that the young children could also play with the target language even though their language system in a second/third/foreign language has not been fully developed.

In doing the above analysis and discussion, I agree with Heath (2012) that for the young language learners, through engaging in the observation or watching of the dramatic performance of the writing events, there are rich opportunities of “taking part” in discovery, creation, and experiments. My participant children took up the opportunity to discover, create, and experiment with the target language, different semiotic resources, and multimodal texts drawn from their various social life experiences. My finding also echoes Lemke’s (1990) argument that children’s writing can be practiced as a kind of sociodramatic play and accompanied with funny and rhythmic narratives. The play and the narrative development help young learners to bridge from colloquial, narrative, and informal language to the formal language demands of the sciences (Lemke, 1990, cited in

Heath, 2012, p. 435). Additionally, the orchestration of their narratives and all other

187

semiotic sources and texts in their participation in a playful writing activity can also be understood as a kind of achievement or a vehicle of achievement (Duranti & Black,

2011).

Based on the above findings, I intend to underscore the importance of constructing such a poetics in the classroom (especially an ELL classroom or a classroom with many

ELL students), which is a type of learning per se, to provide a wealth of access to attention and information that children need to become a member of this writing community and achieve their writing goals. On a theoretical note, the poetics constructed in this English language learners’ writing workshop can be seen as a way that motivates and facilitates children’s writing and language learning. As a pedagogical tool, as Cekaite and Aronsson (2004) have pointed out, “language learning is not only applicable to learning practices in formal teaching in the classroom, but also to the spontaneous creative use of teaching for some totally different purposes” (p. 387). It can also be deployed in either L1 or L2 classroom to improve the students’ learning and make their learning experience more enjoyable and voluntary in and out of their classroom.

This study calls for more opportunities for all (including ELL) children to enjoy playing the target language no matter through writing or other venues. In this way, another possible contribution made by this study is to invite more and further research on the construction and enactment of a poetics in children’s literacy practice and how it can empower the children’s language and literacy learning. Doing so foregrounds the importance of children’s creativity, imagination, aesthetics, and pleasures involved in their literacy learning and experience process. It extends our thinking about how the

188 aesthetic and poetic literacy experience in school may influence the students’ social practice outside of school and how they perceive and engage with people and the world surrounding them. The seemingly funny singing, chiming, drawing, writing, and talking during the ELL children’s writing practice requires an in-depth examination of what and how the cultural and ideological constraints operate in the process because their playful writing substantially is a serious business of literacy practice (Wohlwend, 2011).

Therefore, examination of the aesthetic language uses in children’s writing not only adds an aesthetic dimension to the theories of young children’s writing and language learning but also is significant to our understanding of the construction of classroom culture. The construction of a poetics as part of the classroom culture provides opportunities to gain a more complete view of the set of potentials of spoken and written languages that children do (or do not) have access to for writing in their classroom. In line with previous studies (Cekaite & Arson, 2004, 2005; Cook, 1997, 2000; Dandy,

1997; Fasulo, Liberati, & Pontecorvo, 2002; Sullivan, 1999; Wohlwend, 2011), my study underscores the need of integrating children’s language learning and literacy practices with pleasure, aesthetics, and imagination (Murphy, 2012). It is also argued that the aesthetic dimension and poetics explored in this study need to be viewed as “heuristics for learning or creativity aimed for learning” (Duranti & Black, 2011, p. 159).

Implications for Future Research

As discussed in chapter one, this dissertation research on the beginning literacy practice of young (ELL) children has several limitations regarding its particular research

189

site, data collection, and size of the data corpus and scripting about the participants’ home linguistic and cultural backgrounds and their nonschool literacy experiences. To enhance our understanding about the literacy learning, practice, and experiences of this particular but complex group of ELLs and bilingual/biliterate or multilingual/multiliterate students, the following issues and areas need to be further addressed, investigated, or improved in further research INCLUDING SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE METALINGUISTIC

AND METACOGNITIVE PROCESSES INVOLVED IN YOUNG CHILDREN’S PLAY

WITH POETIC LANGUAGES (TOPICS NOT ADDRESSED IN THIS

DISSERTATION).

Time commitment is the first issue in the area of second language studies.

Compared with the numerous studies on L1 children’s language/literacy development and socialization (Bissex, 1980; Compton-Lilly, 2009; Heath, 1983, 2012; Lilly, Teale, &

Sulzby, 1987; Reyes, 2001, 2006, 2008; Rowe, 1997; Yaden, 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2010;

Wohlwend, 2011), there is an urgent need of more qualitative, longitudinal, or ethnographic studies on how second language literacy and/or heritage language literacies have been developed since birth or early childhood. For my study, it would be worth tracking how the ELL children have been doing in their school literacy practices and non- school literacy practices and how their English literacy and home/heritage language literacy or literacies have changed, evolved, or even been eradicated over time. This time issue is related to space issue and needs to be addressed as well in future research on

ELL children’s second language or multilingual and multiliterate development.

190 More studies need be conducted both in and out of the ELL students’ classroom.

Regarding their school experience, the children’s literacy practices in classes other than language arts or other school settings may help construct a fuller picture of their overall school literacy practices/experiences. Like Yaden (2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2010) and Reyes

(2001, 2006, 2008) and their colleagues, entering and getting socialized into the ELL children’s nonschool communities creates another way to explore the authentic languages used by the children at various occasions, religious rituals, peer play, and festivals in their home or other communities. In doing so, we can deepen our understanding of the children’s performance in other language(s) and local cultures that may be reflected in and refracted through their school literacy practices. Broadening the field and widening the focus on their languages/literacies-in-use will also widen our understanding of the interference or mutual promotion of their native and target language literacy practices so that the connections between the children’s home and school literacy practices can be further promoted and the possible disconnections can be bridged.

The expanded research areas will enable second, foreign, and multilingual and multicultural literacy researchers to know their research participants better as more whole human beings--as children, students, siblings, friends, and other community members in different languages and local cultures. To borrow Heath’s words from her seminars held at The Ohio State University in May 2012, language is all from communication and socialization and interdependent with time, space, models, and materials. That is, in the field of early childhood L2 and multiliteracy practices, ELL students’ “organic” language uses (Ashton-Warner, 1963, cited in Hoffman & Roser, 2012, p. 301) matter not only by

191

themselves but also in their interrelations with all these aspects. This means, besides the time and space issues addressed above, researchers also need to attend to diversification of data types and data collection methods and enlargement of their corpus of data.

Regarding the current study on the beginning literacy practices of ELL children, it would have been helpful to provide scripts about how the children used English and/or other languages with their family members or other community members at different social occasions based on wider observation of their experiences with various literacy sources and practices, such as those pertaining to religious rituals and so on.

As aforementioned, the possible follow-up research questions are:

a. How do children interact with others (peers, teachers, parents, siblings, and

friends) with, through, and around written language and other literacy

artifacts?

b. How does the connection or disconnection between school and nonschool

contexts influence the development of children’s literacy practices?

c. How do English language learning children adopt and/or adapt extant literacy

practices in and across different social contexts?

d. How do children’s biliteracy (or multiliteracy) practices change and evolve

over time?

e. In what ways can ELL children’s biliteracy and multiliteracy development be

facilitated in classrooms and other contexts?

In brief, the overarching goal of future research is to explore how a supportive environment/space can be constructed to facilitate English language learning children’s

192 development and achievement of literacy, biliteracy, or mutliliteracy competence and deep academic learning while supporting positive social identities associated with their families and communities.

I’d like to conclude this dissertation with another quote from Heath’s seminar

(2012): “Often our teaching avoids heuristic pleasure.” I hope this study on the beginning literacy practices of young children (especially ELL students) can invite more theoretically and methodologically diverse research on ethnolinguistically diverse young children who are learning, playing, or experiencing one or more than one language and literacies. The study makes a call for a partnership between their literacy education and practices and pleasure, aesthetics, and imagination (Murphy, 2012) and a rediscovery of these underrepresented elements in current curriculum and teaching practice to empower our today and future children’s learning, their thinking, doing, and their being in the world.

193

References Abasi, A. R. (2008). Are we encouraging patchwriting? Reconsidering the role of pedagogical context in ESL student writers’ transgressive intertextuality. English for Specific Purposes, 27(3), 267-284.

Allen, G. (2000). Intertextuality. NY: Routledge.

Ammon, P. (1985). Helping children learn to write in ESL: Some observations and some hypotheses. In S. W. Freedman (Ed.), The acquisition of written language: Response and revision (pp. 65-84). Norwood, JN: Ablex Publishing.

Atkinson, D. (2002). Toward a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 86, 525-545.

August, D. (2006). Literacy instruction for language-minority children in special education settings. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 523-554). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Baghban, M. (1984). Our daughter learns to read and write: A case study from birth to three. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Baghban, M. (2007). Scribbles, labels, and stories: The role of drawing in the development of writing. Young Children, 62(1), 20-26.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1935/1981). Discourse in the novel (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination (pp. 259-422).. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1953/1986). The problem of speech genres (V.W. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60-102). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M., Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7-15). London: Routledge.

Baskwill, J., & Harkins, M. J. (2009). Children, parents, and writing. Young Children, 28-33. 194 Bauman, R., & Briggs, C.L. (1990). Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology,19, 59-88.

Beach, R., Appleman, D., & Dorsey, S. (1990). Adolescents’ use of intertextual links to understand literature. In R. Beach & S. Hynds (Eds.), Developing discourse practice in adolescence and adulthood. Norwood, NJ: Albex Publishing Corporation, 224-245.

Bearse, C. (1992). The fairy tale connection in children’s stories: Cinderella meets Sleeping Beauty. The Reading Teacher, 45 (9), 688-695.

Birdwhistell, R. (1977). Some discussion of ethnography, theory, and method. In J. Brockman (Ed.), About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson (pp. 103-144). New York: Dutton.

Bissex, G. (1980). Gyns at wrk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Bizzell, P. (1982). Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing. Pre/text, 3, 213-224.

Blanton, L. (2002). Seeing the invisible: Situating L2 literacy acquisition in child-teacher interaction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11, 295-310.

Bloome, D. (1985). Reading as a social process. Language Arts, 62(2), 134-142.

Bloome, D. (2005). Introductions to studying language and literacy, in particular. In R. Beach et al. (Eds). Multidisciplinary perspective on literacy research (pp. 275-92). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Bloome, D., Beierle, M., Grigorenko, M., & Goldman, S. (2009). Learning over time: uses of intercontextuality, collective memories, and classroom chronotopes in the construction of learning opportunities in a ninth-grade language arts classroom. Language and Education, 23(4), 313-334.

Bloome, D., Carter, S. P., Christian, B. M., & Madrid, S. (2008). Discourse analysis in classrooms: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Bloome, D., Carter, S. P., Christian, B. M., Otto, S., & Shuart-Faris, N. (2005). Discourse analysis and the study of classroom language and literacy events: A microethnographic perspective. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bloome, D., Champion, T., Katz, L., Morton, M. B., & Muldrow, R. (2001). Spoken and written narrative development: African American preschoolers as storytellers and storymakers. In L. Harris, G. Kamhi, & K. Pollock (Eds.), Literacy in African American communities (pp.45-76). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 195

Bloome, D., & Clark, C. (2006). Discourse-in-use. In J. Green, G. Camill, & P. Elmore (Eds). Complementary methods in research in education (pp. 227-242). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bloome, D., & Egan-Robertson, A. (1993). The social construction of intertextuality and classroom reading and writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 28(4), 303-333.

Bloome, D., & Hong, H. (2012). Reading and intertextuality. In C. A. Chapelle. (Ed.). The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Bloome, D., Katz, L, & Champion, T. (2003). Young children's narratives and ideologies of language in classrooms. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 19, 205-223.

Bloome, D., Katz, L., Hong, H., May-Woods, P., Wilson, M. (in press). Methodologies in research on young children and literacy. In N. Hall, J. Larson, & J. Marsh (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood literacy (2nd ed.,pp. 381-400). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bloome, D., Puro, E., & Theodorou, E. (1989). Procedural display and classrooms. Curriculum Inquiry, 19, 265-291.

Brown, A. L. (1978). Knowing when, where, and how to remember: A problem of metacognition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 77–165). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Buckwalter, J., & Lo, Y. (2002). Emergent literacy in Chinese and English. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11, 269-293.

Buckwalter, J. (2006). Emergent biscriptal biliteracy: Bilingual preschoolers hypothesize about writing in Chinese and English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.

Cairney, T. (1990). Intertextuality: Infectious echoes from the past. The Reading Teacher, 43(7), 478-484.

Cairney, T. (1992). Fostering and building students’ intertextual histories. Language Arts, 69 (7), 502-507.

Calkins, L. (1983). Lessons from a child. Exeter, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.

Calkins, L. (1986). The art of teaching writing. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

Cathcart-Strong, R. (1986). Input generation by young second language learners. TESOL Quarterly, 20(5), 515-530.

196 Cekaite, A., & Aronsson, K. (2004). Repetition and joking in children’s second language conversation: Playful recyclings in an immersion classroom. Discourse Studies, 6, 373-92.

Cekaite, A., & Aronsson, K. (2005). Language play: A collaborative resource in children’s L2 learning. Applied Linguistics, 26(2), 169-91.

Champion, T., Katz, L., Muldrow, R., & Dail, R. (1999). Storytelling and storymaking in an urban preschool classroom: Building bridges from home to school culture. Topics in Language Disorder, 19(3), 52-67.

Chandrasoma, R., Thompson, C., Pennycook, A. (2004). Beyond plagiarism: Transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 3(3), 171-193.

Chang, L. L., & Osguthorper, T. (1990). The effects of computerized picture-word processing on kindergartners' language development. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 5, 73-84.

Chapman, M. (1994). The emergence of genres: Some findings from an examination of first grade writing. Written Communication, 11, 348-380.

Chapman, M. L. (1995). The sociocognitive construction of written genres in first grade author(s). Research in the Teaching of English, 29(2), 164-192.

Chapman, M. L. (1996). More than spelling: Widening the lens on emergent writing. Reading Horizons, 36, 317-339.

Chapman, M. L. (1999). Situated, social, active: Rewriting genre in the elementary classroom. Written Communication, 16, 469-490.

Chapman, M. (2002). A longitudinal case study of curriculum genres, K-3. Canadian Journal of Education, 27, 41-64.

Cheong, C. (2010). Unsung voices: The transformation of writing and identity of Korean ESL students in U.S. secondary schools. Unpublished dissertation. ProQuest document ID: 76477915.

Chung, Y., & Walsh, D. J. (2006). Constructing a joint story-writing space: The dynamics of young children's collaboration at computers. Early Education & Development, 17(3), 373-420.

Clay, M. (1975). What did I write? Auckland: Heinemann.

197

Collins, E., & Green, J. L. (1992). Learning in classroom settings: Making or breaking a culture. In H. H. Marshall (Ed.), Redefining student learning: Roots of educational change (pp. 59-86). NJ, Norwood: Ablex.

Compton-Lilly, C. (2009). Listening to families over time: Seven lessons learned about literacy in families. Language Arts, 86(8), pp. 449-457.

Connery, M. (2006). The sociocultural-semiotic texts of five and six year old emergent biliterates in non-academic settings. Unpublished dissertation, The University of New Mexico.

Cook, G. (1997). Language play, language learning. ELT Journal, 51(3), 224-231.

Cook, G. (2000). Language play, language learning. New York: Oxford.

Cook-Gumperz, J. (1986). The social construction of literacy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cook-Gumperz, J. (2006). The social construction of literacy (2nd Ed..). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cook-Gumperz, J., & Kyratzis, A. (2001). Child discourse. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton, (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 590-611). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Cox, B. (1994). Young children's regulatory talk: Evidence of emerging metacognitive control over literacy products and processes. In R. Ruddell & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (4th ed., pp. 733-756). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Cox, M., Jordan, J., Ortmeier-Hooper, C., & Schwartz, G. (Eds.). (2010). Reinventing identities in second language writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Crawford, J. (1987). Bilingual education: Language, learning and politics. Education Week, 1, 19-50.

Cummins, J. (1979). Linguistic interdependence and educational development of bilingual children. Review of Educational Research, 49(2), 222-251.

Cummins, J. (2006). Multiliteracies and equity: How do Canadian schools measure up? Education Canada, 2, 4-7.

Daiute, C., & Dalton, B. (1993). Collaboration between children learning to write: Can novices be masters? Cognition & Instruction, 10(4), 281-334.

Danby, S. (1999). The serious business of play. In J. Mason and M. Wilinson (Eds.). Taking children seriously. Proceedings of a national workshop (pp. 208-36).

198 Sydney, Australia: Childhood and Youth Policy Research Unit, University of Western Sydney.

Dickinson, D., Wolf, M., & Stotsky, S. (1993). Words move: The interwoven development of oral and written language. In J. B. Gleason (Ed.), The development of language (pp. 369-420). NY: Macmillan.

Dix, S., & Amoore, L. (2010). Becoming curious about cats: A collaborative writing project. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 33(2), 134-150.

Duff, P. (2000). Repetition in foreign language classroom interaction. In J. K. Hall and L. S. Verplaetse (Eds.), Second and foreign language learning through classroom interaction (pp. 139–59). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Duff, P. A. (2001). Language, literacy, content, and (pop) culture: Challenges for ESL students in mainstream courses. Canadian Modern Language Review, 58(1), 103-132.

Duff, P. A. (2010). Language socialization. In N. H. Hornberger & S. L. McKay (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language education (pp. 427-454). New York: Multilingual Matters.

Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (Eds.). (2011). The handbook of language socialization. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Durgunoglu, A. (1998). Acquiring literacy in English and Spanish in the United States. In A. Durgunoglu & L. Verhoeven (Eds), Literacy development in a multilingual context (pp.135-145). Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.

Durgunoglu, A., Mir, M., & Aritio-Marti, S. (2002). The relationship between bilingual children’s reading and writing in their two languages. In G. Rijlaarsdm (Series Ed.) & S. Ransdell & M. Barbier (Volume Eds.). Studies in writing: Volume 11: New directions for research in L2 writing (pp. 82-100). Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Dyson, A. H. (1981a). Oral language: The rooting system for learning to write. Language Arts, 58, 776-784.

Dyson, A. Haas. (1981b). A case study examination of the role of oral language in the writing processes of kindergarteners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin.

Dyson, A. H. (1982a). The emergence of visible language: Interrelationships between drawing and early writing. Visible Language, 16, 360-81.

199

Dyson, A. H. (1982b). Reading, writing, and language: Young children solving the written language puzzle. Language Arts, 59, 829-39.

Dyson, A. H. (1983). The role of oral language in early writing processes. Research in the Teaching of English, 17, 1-30.

Dyson, A. H. (1984a). Emerging alphabetic literacy in school contexts: Toward defining the gap between school curriculum and child mind. Written Communication, 1, 5-55.

Dyson, A. H. (1984b). N spell my grandmama: Fostering early thinking about print. The Reading Teacher, 38(3), 262-271.

Dyson, A. H. (1986a). The imaginary worlds of childhood: A multimedia presentation. Language Arts, 63, 799-808.

Dyson, A. H. (1986b). Transitions and tensions: Interrelationships between the drawing, talking, and dictating of young children. Research in the Teaching of English, 20 (4), 379-409.

Dyson, A. H. (1987a). Individual differences in beginning composing: An orchestral vision of learning to compose. Written Communication, 4, 411-442.

Dyson, A. H. (1987b). The value of “time-off task”: Young children’s spontaneous talk and deliberate text. Harvard Educational Review, 57, 396-420.

Dyson, A. H. (1988). Talking up a writing community: The role of talk in learning to write. In S. Hynds, & D. L. Rubin (Eds.), Perspectives on talk and learning (pp. 99-114). IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Dyson, A. H. (1989). Multiple worlds of child writers: Friends learning to write. NY: Teachers College Press.

Dyson, A. H. (1991). Viewpoints: The word and the world: Reconceptualizing written language development, or Do rainbows mean a lot to little girls? Research in the Teaching of English, 25(1), 97-123.

Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary school. NY: Teachers College Press.

Dyson, A. H. (1995). Writing children: Reinventing the development of childhood literacy. Written Communication, 12(1), 4-46.

Dyson, A. H. (1997b). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.

200 Dyson, A. H. (1999). Coach Bombay’s kids learn to write: Children’s appropriation of media material for school literacy. Research in the Teaching of English, 33(4), 367-402.

Dyson, A. H. (2002). The drinking God factor: A writing development remix for “all” children. Written Communication, 19(4), 545-579.

Dyson, A. H. (2003a). The brothers and sisters learn to write: Popular literacies in childhood and school cultures. New York: Teachers College Press.

Dyson, A. H. (2003b). “Welcome to the Jam”: Pop culture, school literacy, and the making of childhoods. Harvard Educational Review, 73(3), 328-361.

Dyson, A. H. (2006). On saying it right (write): “Fix-Its” in the foundations of learning to write. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(1), 8-42.

Dyson, A. H. (2010). Writing childhoods under construction: Re-visioning “copying” in early childhood. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 10, 7-13.

Eagleton, T. (2007). How to read a poem. Malden, MA: Jon Wiley & Sons.

Edelsky, C. (1982). Writing in a bilingual program: The relation of L1 and L2 texts. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 211-228.

Edelsky, C. (1986). Bilingual children’s writing: Fact and fiction. In D. John & D. Roen, (Eds.), Richness in writing Empowering ESL students (pp.165-176). NY: Longman.

Erickson, F., & Shultz, J. (1977). When is a context? Newsletter of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, 1, 5-12.

Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (1981). Social process in first and second language learning. In H. Winitz(Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (Annals) (Vol. 379, pp. 33-47). New York: New York Academy of Science.

Fasulo, A., Liberati, V., & Pontecorvo, C. (2002). Language games in the strict sense of the term: Children’s poetics and conversation. In S. Blume-Kulka and C. E. Snow (Eds.), Talking to adults, the contribution of multiparty discourse to language acquisition (pp. 209-37). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Fernsten, L. A. (2008). Writer identity and ESL Learners. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 44-52.

201

Ferreiro, E. (1990). Literacy development: Psychogenesis. In Y. Goodman (Ed.), How children construct literacy: Piagetian perspectives (pp. 12-25). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Fillmore, L. W. (1979). Individual differences in second language acquisition. In C. F. Fillmore, D. K. Kempler, & W. S. Y. Wang (Eds.), Individual differences in language behavior and language ability (pp. 203 -228). New York: Academic Press.

Flavell, J. (1979).Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive- developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-011.

Flower, L., & Hayers, J. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32, 365-387.

Fountas, I., & Pinnell, G. (2010). Fountas and Pinnell benchmark assessment system (end Ed.). Heinemann.

Francis, D., Lesaux, N., & August, D. (2006). Language of instruction. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 351-364). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Frank, C. (2009). “I’m making a fixing machine”: Conversation and the development of writing in young children. California Reader, 42 (3), 39-47.

Garcia, G. E., McKoon, G., & August, D. (2006a). Synthesis: Language and literacy assessment. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second- language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 583-96). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Garcia, G. E., McKoon, G., & August, D. (2006b). Language and literacy assessment of language-minority students. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language- minority children and youth (pp. 597-624). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gass, S., & Selinker, L. (2008). Second language acquisition: An introductory course (3rd ed). New York: Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.

Gee, J. P. (2011). Reading, language development, video games, and learning in the twenty-first century. In G. Lopez-Bonilla & K. Englander (Eds.), Discourses and identities in contexts of educational change (pp. 101-128). NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 202 Genesee, F., Lidholm-Leary, K., Saunders, W. M., & Christian, D. (2006). Educating English language learners. NY: Cambridge UP.

Genesee, F., & Riches, C. (2006). Literacy: Instructional issues. In F. Genesee, K. Lidholm-Leary, W. M. Saunders, & D. Christian(Eds.), Educating English language learners (pp. 109-175). NY: Cambridge UP.

Genishi, C., & Dyson, H. A. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. Washington, DC: Teachers College Press.

Gergen, K. J. (1999). An invitation to social construction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gergen, K. J. (2001). Social construction in context. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gergen, K. & Gergen, M. (2010). Social construction: Entering the dialogue. Chagrin Fall, OH, Taos Institute Publications.

Geva, E. (2006). Second-language oral proficiency and second-language literacy. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 123-140). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gibbons, P. (2003). Mediating language learning: Teacher interactions with ESL students in a content-based classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 37, 247– 273.

Goldman, S., & Bloome, D. (2005). Learning to construct and integrate. In A. F. Healy (Ed.), Experimental cognitive psychology and its application (pp. 169-182). Washington D. C.: American Psychology Association.

Gooch, E. (2002). Home/school digital linking. Retrieved from www.ltscotland.org.uk/ sharingpractice/p/aboynenursery.asp.

Gort, M. (2006). Strategic codeswitching, interliteracy, and other phenomena of emergent bilingual writing: Lessons from first grade dual language classrooms. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 6(3), 323-354.

Graves, D. E. (1981). A case study observing the development of primary children's composing, spelling, and motor behaviors during the writing process (Final report, NIE Grant No. G-780174. ED 218-653). Durham: University of New Hampshire.

Graves, D. E. (1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

Graves, D. E., & Hansen, J. (1983). The author’s chair. Language Arts, 60, 176-183.

Green, J., & Bloome, D. (2005). Ethnography and ethnographers of and in education: A situated perspective. In J. Flood, S. B. Heath, & D. Lapp. (Eds.), Handbook of 203

research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 181-202). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.

Green, J. L., & Wallat, C. (1981). Mapping instructional conversations: A sociolinguistic ethnography. In J. L. Green & C. Wallat (Eds.), Ethnography and language in educational settings (pp. 161-207). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Gregory, E. (2001). Sisters and brothers as language and literacy teachers: Synergy between siblings playing and working together. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(3), 301-322.

Gumperz, J. J. (1986). Discourse strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gumerpz, J. J. (2001). International sociolinguistics: A personal perspective. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 215-228). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Gumperz, J. J., & Hymes, D. (1972). Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. New York & London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Halliday, M. K. (1979/1980). Three aspects of children's language development: Learning language, learning through language, learning about language. In. Y. M. Goodman, M. M. Hausser, & D. S. Strickland (Eds.), Oral and written language development: Impact on schools (pp. 7-19). International Reading Association & National Council of Teachers of English.

Haneda, M. (2000). Modes of student participation in an elementary school science classroom: From talking to writing. Linguistics and Education, 10(4), 1-27.

Haneda, M. (2005a). Some functions of triadic dialogue in the classroom: Examples from L2 research. Canadian Modern Language Review, 62(2), 313-333.

Haneda, M. (2005b). Investing in foreign-language writing: A study of two multicultural learners. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4(4), 269-290.

Haneda, M. (2006). Becoming literate in a second language: Connecting home, community, and school literacy practices. Theory into Practice, 45(4), 337-345.

Haneda, M., and Wells, G. (2000). Writing in "knowledge-building" communities. Research in the Teaching of English, 34(3), 430-457.

Haney, M. R. (2002). Name writing: A window into the emergent literacy skills of young children. Early Childhood Educational Journal, 30(2), 101-105.

204 Harris, P., Trezise, J., & Winser, W. N. (2004). Where is the story?: Intertextual reflections on literacy research and practices in the early school years. Research in the Teaching of English, 38(3), 250-261.

Harste, J. C., Woodward, V. A., & Burke, C. L. (1984). Language stories and literacy lessons. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.

Hartman, D. K. (1995). Eight readers reading: The intertextual links of proficient readers reading multiple passages. Reading Research Quarterly, 30 (3), 520-561.

Hartman, D. (1992). Intertextuality and reading: The text, the reader, the author, and the context. Linguistics and Education, 4, 295-311.

Hanauer, D. I. (2010). Poetry as research: Exploring second language poetry writing. Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Hawkins, M. (2005). Becoming a student: Identity work and academic literacies in early schooling. TESOL Quarterly, 39(1), 59–82.

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. (1980). Writing as problem solving. Visible Language, 14, 388-399.

Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11, 49-76.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Heath, S. B. (2012). Words at work and play. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hink, K. E. (1985). Let's stop worrying about revision. Language Arts, 62, 249-253.

Hippie, M. L. (1985). Journal writing in kindergarten. Language Arts, 62, 255-261.

Hirvela, A. (2005). Computer-based reading and writing across the curriculum: Two case studies of L2 writers. Computers and Composition, 22, 337-356.

Hirvela, A., & Belcher, D. (2001). Coming back to voice: The multiple voices and identities of mature multilingual writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10, 83-106.

Hirvela, A., & Sweetland, Y. L. (2005). Two case studies of L2 writers' experiences across learning-directed portfolio contexts. Assessing Writing, 10, 192-213.

Hoffman, J. V., & Roser, N. (2012). Reading and writing the world using beautiful book. Language Arts, 89(5), 293-304.

205

Hudelson, S. (1986). Children’s writing in ESL: What we’ve learned, what we’re learning. In P. Rigg & D. S. Enright (Eds.), Children and ESL: Integrating perspectives (pp. 23-54). Washington, DC: TESOL.

Hudelson, S. (1987). The role of native language literacy in the education of language minority children. Language Arts, 64, 827-841.

Hudelson, S. (1989). Write on: Children writing in ESL. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Huss, R. L. (1995). Young children becoming literature in English as a second language. TESOL Quarterly, 29(4), 767-774.

Hymes, D. (1974). The foundations of sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistic ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Keenan, E. O., & Klein, E. (1975). Coherency in children’s discourse. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 4(4), 365-78.

Kenner, C., & Kress, G. (2003). The multisemiotic resources of biliterate children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 3(2), 179-202.

Korzenik, D. (1977). Saying it with pictures. In D. Perkins & B. Leondar (Eds.), The arts and cognition (pp. 192-207). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kos, R., & Maslowski, C. (2001). Second graders' perceptions of what is important in writing. The Elementary School Journal, 101, 567-584.

Kreeft, J., R., Shuy, W., Staton, J., Reed, L., & Morruy, R. (1984). Dialogue writing: Analysis of student-teacher interactive writing in the learning of English as a second language. NIE-G-830030. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED).

Kress, G. R. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. New York: Routledge.

Labbo, L. D. (1996). A semiotic analysis of young children’s symbol making in a classroom computer center. Reading Research Quarterly, 31, 356-385.

Labbo, D., Eakle, A., & Montero, M. K. (2002). Digital language experience approach: Using digital photographs and software as a language experience approach innovation. Retrieved from: www.readingonline.org/electronic/labbo2/.

Laman, T. T., & Van Sluys, K. (2008). Being and becoming multilingual writers’ practices: Children in multilingual, multiage classrooms participate in and transform the writing workshop. Language Art, 85(4), 265-274.

206 Lancia, P. (1997). Literacy borrowing:Tthe effects of literature on children’s writing. The Reading Teacher, 50(6), 470-475.

Lantolf, J. P., & Pavlenko, A. (1995). Sociocultural theory and second language learning Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 15, 108-124.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Leki, I., Cumming, A., Silva, T. (2006). Second-language composition teaching and learning. In P. Smagorinsky (Ed.), Research on composition: Multiple perspectives on two decades of change (pp. 141-169). NY: Teachers College Press.

Lemke, J. L. (2004). ‘Intertextuality and educational research’. In N. Shuart-Faris & Bloome (Eds), Uses of Intertextuality in Classroom and Educational Research (pp.3–17). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Lesaux, N. K. (2006). Development of literacy. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 75-122). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lesaux, N. K., & Geva, E. (2006). Synthesis: Development of literacy in language- minority students. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the national panel on language-minority children and youth (pp. 53-74). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

MacGillivray, L. (1994). Tacit shared understandings of a first grade writing community. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26(3), 245-266.

Many, J., & Anderson, D. (1992). The effect of grade and stance on readers’ intertextual and autobiographical responses to literature. Reading Research and Instruction, 31(4), 60-69.

Martin, W., Culp, K., Gersick, A., & Nudell, H. (2003, April). Intel teach to the future: Lessons learned from the evaluation of a large-scale technology-integration professional development program. Paper presented at the annual meeting of American Research Association, Chicago, IL.

Matsuda, P., & De Pew, K. (2002). Early second language writing: An introduction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11, 262-268.

McDermott, R. (1977). Social relations as contexts for learning in school. Harvard Educational Review, 47(2), 198-213.

207

McKay, S. L., & Wong, S. C. (1996). Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 577-608.

Meek, M. (1988). How texts teach what readers learn. Stroud, Glos: The Thimble Press.

Millard, E., & March, J. (2001). Words with pictures: The role of visual literacy in writing and its implication for schooling. Reading Literacy and Language, July, 54-61.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31, 132–141.

Moody, J. (2007). Plagiarism or intertextuality?: Approaches to teaching EFL academic writing. The Asian EFL Journal, 9(2), 195-210.

Moore, L. (2011). Language socialization and repetition. In A. Durant, E. Ochs, & B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 209-226). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Murphy, S. (2012). Reclaiming pleasure in the teaching of reading. Language Arts, 89(5), 318-328.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2007). National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Retrieved from http://www.nces.edu.gov/nationreportcard/nde/.

Neumann, M. M., Hood, M., & Neumann, D. L. (2009). The scaffolding of emergent literacy skills in the home environment: A case study. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36, 313-319.

Neuman, S. B., & Roskos, K. (1991). Peers as literacy informants: A description of young children's literacy conversations in play. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6, 233-248.

Neuman, S. B., & Roskos, K. (1992). Literacy objects as cultural tools: Effects on children's literacy behaviors in play. Reading Research Quarterly, 27(3), 202-225.

Newkirk, T. (2007). Popular culture and writing development. Language Arts, 84(6), 539-248.

Nistler, R. (1990). A descriptive analysis of good readers' and writers' concepts of authorship at grades one, three, and five. In J. Zutell & S. McCormick (Eds.), Literacy theory and research: Analyses from multiple paradigms: Thirty-ninth yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 359- 368). Chicago: National Reading Conference. 208 Orellana, M. F., Reynolds, J., Dorner, L., & Meza, M. (2003). In other others: Translating or “para-phrasing” as a family literacy practice in immigrant households. Reading Research Quarterly, 38, 12–34.

Pantaleo, S. (2006). Readers and writers as intertexts: Exploring the intertextualities in student writing. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 29(2), 163-181.

Pappas, C. C., Varelas, M., with Gill, S., Ortiz, I., & Keblawe-Shamah, N. (2009). Multimodal books in science-literacy units: Language and visual images for meaning making. Language Arts, 86(3), 201-217.

Peck, S. (1977). Language play in child second language acquisition. Paper presented at the Los Angles Second Language Research Forum. Los Angles, California.

Phinney, M. (1998). Children "writing themselves": A glimpse at the underbelly. Language Arts, 75, 19-27.

Powell, R., & Davidson, N. (2005). The donut house: Real world literacy in an urban kindergarten classroom. Language Arts, 82, 248-56.

Power, B. P. (1991). Pop ups: The rise and fall of one convention in a first grade writing workshop. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 6, 54-66.

Qintero, E. (2010). Something to say: Children learning through story. Early Education and Development, 21(3), 372-391.

Reyes, I. (2006). Exploring connections between emergent biliteracy and bilingualism. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 6(3), 267-292.

Reyes, I., & Azuara, P. (2008). Emergent biliteracy in young Mexican immigrant children. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(4), 374-398.

Reyes, I., & Moll, L. (2008). Bilingual and biliterate practices at home and school. In B. Spolsky & F. Huit (Eds.), The handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 147-160). Maiden, MA: Blackwell.

Reyes, M. L. (2001) Unleashing possibilities: Biliteracy in the primary grades.In M. L. Reyes and J. J. Halcon (Eds), The best for our children: Critical perspectives on literacy for Latino students (pp. 96–121). New York: Teachers College Press.

Riel, M. (1990). Computer-mediated communication: A tool for reconnecting kids with society. Interactive Learning Environment, 1(4), 255-263.

Robinson, J. L. (1987). Literacy in society: Readers and writers in the worlds of discourse. In D. Bloome (Ed.), Literacy and schooling (pp. 327-353). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

209

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978/1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Roskos, K. A., & Christie, J. (Eds.). (2000). Play and literacy in early childhood: Research from multiple perspectives. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rowe, D. W. (1989). Author/audience interaction in the preschool: The role of social interaction in literacy learning. Journal of Reading Behavior, 21, 311-349.

Rowe, D. (1994). Preschoolers as authors: Literacy learning in the social world of the preschool. Cresskill, NH: Hampton Press.

Rowe, D. W. (2000). Bringing books to life: The role of book-related dramatic play in young children's literacy learning. In K. A. Roskos & J. Christie (Eds.), Play and literacy in early childhood: Research from multiple perspectives (pp. 3-26). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rowe, D. W. (2003). The nature of young children's authoring. In N. Hall, J. Larson, & J. Marsh (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood literacy (pp. 258-270). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rowe, D. W. (2008a). The social construction of intentionality: Two-year-olds' and adults' participation at a preschool writing center. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(4), 387-434.

Rowe, D. W. (2008b). Social contracts for writing: Negotiating shared understandings about text in the preschool years. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(1), 66-95.

Rowe, D. W., & Neitzel, C. (2010). Interest and agency in two- and three-year-olds' participation in emergent writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 169-195.

Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group. (1992). Constructing literacy in classrooms: Literate action as social accomplishment. In H. H. Marshall (Ed.), Redefining student learning: Roots of educational change (pp. 119-150). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Schieffelin, B., & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 163-191.

Schrader, C. (1989). Written language use within the context of young children's symbolic play. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 4, 225-244.

210 Schultz, K. (2006). Qualitative research on writing. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 357-373). NY: The Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T., & Tierney, R. J. (1990). Reading-Writing connections: The relations among three perspectives. Literacy Theory and Research, 39, 13-34.

Shen, F. (1989). The classroom and the wider culture: Identity as a key to learning English compositions. College Composition and Communication, 40, 459–466.

Shklovsky, V. (1917/1998). Art as technique. In J. Rivkin and M. Ryan (Eds). (1998). Literacy theory: An anthology (pp. 15-21). Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Short, K. (1992). Researching intertextuality within collaborative classroom learning environments. Linguistics and Education, 4, 313-333.

Short, K. G., Kauffman, G., & Kahn, L. H. (2000). "I just need to draw": Responding to literature across multiple sign systems. The Reading Teacher, 54, 160-71.

Shuart-Faris, N., & Bloome, D. (Eds.). (2004). Uses of intertextuality in classroom and educational research. Connecticut, Information Age Publishing.

Sidelnick, M. A., & Svoboda, M. L. (2000). The bridge between drawing and writing: Hannah's story. The Reading Teacher, 54, 174-84.

Sipe, L. (1993). Using transformations of traditional stories: Making the reading-writing connection. The Reading Teacher, 47(1), 18-26.

Sipe, L. (1999). Children’s response to literature: Author, text, reader, context. Theory into Practice, 38(3), 120-129.

Sipe, L. (2000a). The construction of literary understanding by first and second graders in oral response to picture storybook read-alouds. Reading Research Quarterly, 35 (2), 252-275.

Sipe, L. (2000b). “Those two gingerbread boys could be brothers”: How children use intertextual connections during storybook read-alouds. Children’s Literature in Education, 31(2), 73-90.

Siu-Runyan, Y. (1996). Connecting writing, talk, and literature. In A. McClure & J. Kristo, Books that invite talk, wonder, and play (pp. 119-139). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Skilton-Sylvester, E. (2002). Literate at home but not at school: A Cambodian girl’s journey from playwright to struggling writer. In G. Hull & K. Schultz (Eds.),

211

School’s out: Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice (pp. 61– 92). New York: Teachers College Press.

Skukauskaite, A., Liu, Y., Green, J. (2007). Editorial Introduction: Logics of inquiry for the analysis of video artefacts: Researching the construction of disciplinary knowledge in classrooms. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2(3), 131-137.

Smith, M. (2008). An interactional sociolinguistic perspective on an instructional conversation: Talking opportunities for literacy learning into being. In D. Bloomeet al. (Eds.), Discourse analysis in classrooms: Approaches to language and literacy research (pp. 79-92). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Snow, C. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships during the preschool years. Harvard Educational Review, 53(2), 165-189.

Stacey, J. (2009). Writer identity while learning discipline-specific academic literacy in an additional language. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 27(3), 345–356.

Still, J., & Worton, M. (1990). Introduction. In M. Worton & J. Still (Eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and practices (pp. 1-44). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1995). Social literacies. London: Longman.

Sullivan, P. N. (2000a). Spoken artistry: Performance in second language class. In J. K. Hall & L. S. Verpaetse (Eds.). Second and foreign language learning through classroom interaction (pp. 60-75). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sullivan, P. N. (2000b). Playfulness as mediation in communicative language teaching in a Vietnamese classroom. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 115-131). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sulzby, E. (1986). Writing and reading: Signs of oral and written language organization in the young children. In W. Teale & E. Sulzby (Eds.), Emergent literacy: Writing and reading (pp. 50-89). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Van Dam, J. (2002). Ritual, face, and play in a first English lesson. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization (pp. 237–266). London: Continuum.

Varelas, M., Pappas, C. C., Kokkino, S., & Ortiz, I. (2008). Students as authors. Science

212 and Children, 45(7), 58-62.

Vass, E., Littleton, K., Miell, D., & Jones, A. (2008). The discourse of collaborative creative writing: Peer collaboration as a context for mutual inspiration. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 3(3), 192-202.

Volk, D. (1997). Questions in lessons: Activity settings in the homes and school of two Puerto Rican kindergartners. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 28(1), 22–49.

Volk, D., & De Acosta, M. (2001). “Many differing ladders, many different ways to climb… ”: Literacy events in the bilingual classroom, homes, and community of three Puerto Rican kindergarteners. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1, 193– 224.

Voloshinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). New York: Seminar Press.

Vukelich, C. (1986). The relationship between peer questions and seven-year-olds' text revisions. In J. Niles & R. Lalik (Eds.), Solving problems in literacy: Learners, teachers, and researchers: Thirty-fifth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 300-305). Chicago: National Reading Conference.

Vukelich, C. (1993). Play: A context for exploring the functions, features, and meaning of writing with peers. Language Arts, 70, 386-392.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Walshe, R. D. (Ed.). (1981). Donald Graves in Australia: “Children want to write…”. Rosebery, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association.

Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe., Trans., 3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan.

Welch, N. (1998). One student’s many voices: Reading, writing, and responding with Bakhtin. In F. Farmer (Ed.), Landmark essays on Bakhtin, rhetoric, and writing (pp. 215-224). Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (2007). Collective memory. In J. Valsiner and A. Rosa (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (pp. 645-660). Cambridge University Press.

Willett, J. (1995). Becoming first graders in an L2: An ethnographic study of L2 socialization. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 473–503. 213

Williams, A., & Gregory, E. (2001). Siblings bridging literacies in multilingual contexts. Journal of Research in Reading, 24, 248–265.

Wiseman, A. (2003). Collaboration, initiation, and rejection: The social construction of stories in a kindergarten class. The Reading Teacher, 56, 802-810.

Wohlwend, K. (2008). Dilemmas and discourses of learning to write: Assessment as a contested Site. Language Arts, 86(5), 341-351.

Wohlwend, K. (2011). Playing their way into literacies. NY: Teachers College.

Wollman-Bonilla, J. E., & Werchadlo, B. (1995). Literature response journal in a first- grade classroom. Language Arts, 72, 562-570.

Wollman-Bonilla, J., & Werchadlo, B. (1999). Teacher and peer roles in scaffolding first graders' responses to literature. The Reading Teacher, 52, 598-611.

Yaden, D., et al. (2010). First things first: External evaluation research brief: Arizona kindergarten readiness study. Retrieved from http://www.azftf.gov/ PublicNoticeAttachmentCenter/03-12-2012%20BOARD%20Meeting-CMTE %20Attachment%2030%20FTF%20External%20Evaluation%20Annual %20Report%207-1-2011.pdf

Yaden, D. B., & Brassell, D. (2002). Enhancing emergent literacy with spanish-speaking preschoolers in the inner city. In C. M. Roller (Ed.), Overcoming the odds in comprehensive reading instruction across grade levels (pp. 20-39). Wilmington, DE: International Reading Association.

Yaden, D. B. Jr., Rowe, D. W., & MacGillivray, L. (2000). Emergent literacy: A matter (polyphony) of perspectives. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthall, P. D. Pearson, and R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Volume III (pp. 425-454). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Yaden, D. B., Rueda, R., Tsai, T., & Esquinca, A. (2004). Language proficiency assessment: Professional development and the outcome of early literacy intervention. In O. N. Saracho (Ed.), Contemporary perspectives on language policy and literacy instruction in early childhood education (pp. 215-242). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.

Yaden, D. B., Tam, A., Madrigal, P., & Brassell, D. (2000). Early literacy for inner-city children: The effects of reading and writing interventions in English and Spanish during the preschool years. The Reading Teacher, 54(2), 186-189.

Yaden, D. B., & Tardibuono, J. M. (2004). The emergent writing development of urban latino preschoolers: Developmental perspectives and instructional environments for second language learners. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 20, 29-61. 214 Yi, Y. (2009). Adolescent literacy and identity construction among 1.5 generation students: From a transnational perspective. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 19(1), 100-129.

Yi, Y. (2010). Adolescent multilingual writer’s transitions between in- and out-of-school writing practices. Journal of Second Language Writing, 19(1), 17-32.

Zhou, M., & Kim, S. (2006). Community forces, social capital, and educational achievement: The case of supplementary education in the Chinese and Korean immigrant communities. Harvard Educational Review, 76(1), 1–29.

Zuengler, J., & Miller, E. R. (2006). Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two parallel SLA worlds. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 35-58.

215

APPENDIX A

Kate’s Artifact in Spring 2010

216 APPENDIX B

Classroom Settings

217

Appendix C

POEM “THE STAPLER”

218 APPENDIX D

“End-of-year Poster”

219

APPENDIX E

Poem “Water Fountain”

220 APPENDIX F

Classroom Poster “Author”

221

APPENDIX G First Nonfiction Writing Unit Exhibition

222 APPENDIX H Lori’s Story “No Cloe!”

223

APPENDIX I Climax of “Let’s Help Don with His Christmas Poem”

224 APPENDIX J Tina’s Story “When you see Eva, You... ” in Punctuation Writing Unit

225

APPENDIX K The Students’ Published Poems in First Poem Writing Unit (from left to right: low, intermediate, high English Language Proficiency Student)

226 APPENDIX L Lori, Dean, Bridget and Nina’s Artfacts in Spring Semester

227

APPENDIX M

School District’s Kindergarten Simple Story Rubric

228 APPENDIX N

Collective Reflection on Their Writing Processes

229

APPENDIX O

Survey

230