“Did You Already Know the Answer?” First Graders Writing Nonfiction

• In Event: Reflection and Refraction in the Teaching and Learning of Academic Literacy Practices Across Grades

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to address a gap in educational research concerning how young children construct their understandings of nonfiction texts. To date there is little empirical research that describes how young children in classrooms come to understand the practices for reading nonfiction and associated composing processes. Of special focus are the classroom contexts that provide affordances and constraints on how young children acquire, take up and recontextualize the academic literacy practices.
I employ theoretical frames related to social constructionism and interactional sociolinguistics to understand the shared experiences and understandings the classroom participants. The study was guided by the understanding that meaning is constructed through actions between people that occur over time and there is a history to the joint actions and the relationships as understanding is constructed (Gergen, 1999).
I used ethnographic principles to examine how a cultural model (i.e., socially constructed ways of thinking, perceiving, believing, acting, feeling, evaluating and using language; Goodenough, 1981) was created in a classroom and how the participants enacted classroom and literacy practices to “talk into being” (Green and Dixon, 1993) their understandings of how to write nonfiction and what it meant to be a writer of nonfiction. I used discourse analysis methodology to examine the role of language and other systems of representation paying particular attention to the ways in which language was used to guide acquisition, or reflected uptake and recontextualization of the literacy practices as participants constructed a particular vision of nonfiction writing.
As a participant observer in a first-grade classroom, I collected audio and video data over the course of an academic school year. In this paper, I examine a series of classroom instructional events in which the teacher revisited the academic literacy practice of asking what she called “interesting questions.” The teacher engaged the students in this activity after students had time to “play around” with doing so and after she had presented the students with the academic literacy practice itself (report writing in science). Based on the ways in which the students reflected and refracted the given academic literacy practice, she added to their understanding of the academic literacy practice and the affordances it had for meaning making and construction of new knowledge..
An analysis of these data provides a way of conceptualizing nonfiction writing for early elementary students by describing a model of pedagogy where the teacher, in didactic sessions guided the students to acquire certain academic literacy practices. Then students had opportunities to “play with” (refract) these practices supported by the teacher before further teaching occurred. Further, instruction was guided by the teacher’s observation of the students’ acquisition and adaptation of the academic literacy practices. As the students adapted and adopted the academic literacy practices what they produced was not merely a clone of what they were shown in the first place, but something new. The findings are viewed as grounded theoretical constructs about the potentials of classroom education for the learning of academic literacy practices as inherently evolving and creative practices.

Author

• Melissa I. Wilson, The Ohio State University