Problematizing Accountable Talk: The Social Construction of Intertextuality and Argumentation in a First-Grade Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Tales, Talk, and Intertextuality With Young Children

Abstract

Recent scholarship has focused on the role of accountable talk in students’ acquisition of academic discourse. Students are held accountable to the argumentative practices of a discipline. From the perspective of sociolinguistic ethnography, disciplines are conceptualized as speech (discourse) communities; students are socialized (held accountable) to the ways of using language within that discourse community. Recently, the construct of ‘discourse community’ has been problematized recognizing that people move across, hybridize, and interpellate multiple discourse communities. Focusing on the social construction of intertextuality, findings from a year long ethnographic and discourse analytic study of academic learning in a first grade classroom are used to theorize the tensions inherent in acquiring the argumentative practices of a discipline.

Authors

• Huili Hong, East Tennessee State University

• David M. Bloome, The Ohio State University