“Anybody Can Be Medicine:” Examining Intertextuality in Vocabulary Talk

• In Event: Examining Literacy Learning Opportunities for Elementary Multilingual Students

Abstract

The current study explores the role of intertextuality in the students’ “vocabulary talk'' around a core text. This study seeks to understand the following questions: 1. How do fourth-grade emergent bilingual students and their teacher negotiate new understandings of novel and familiar words in a small group literacy lesson? 2. How do power relations govern who contributes to the communal understanding of a word? We broadly defined “vocabulary talk” as any moment in which students actively negotiate the nuances and meanings of specific words and phrases. Intertextuality is the juxtaposition of multiple texts in an interaction with texts referring to anything that is entextualized within an interaction including but not limited to books, objects, T.V. shows, specific gestures, and previous experiences (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). Bloome and Egan-Robertson additionally conceptualize intertextuality as a social construction that is discursively created. Previous studies examining intertextuality in classroom contexts (Varelas et. al., 2006; Paugh, 2015) have noted how student’s intertextual connections allow them to draw on their funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) to deepen their learning.
In order to identify the intertextual connections that students make with specific words, we used Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) criteria of proposal, recognition, and social significance. An intertextual link must be proposed by a speaker, recognized by the listeners, acknowledged as having meaning and finally given social significance through the acceptance of its meaning. We then conducted a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1996) of the lesson’s transcript in order to understand how these intertextual connections were taken up and embedded into communal understandings of novel and familiar words. Data for this study come from fidelity video recordings of the 30-minute lessons that comprised a researcher-created literacy curriculum for multilingual learners that combined language instruction, including explicit vocabulary instruction, with guided reading, discussion and writing (Proctor et al., 2020). We identified and analyzed a small group literacy lesson with one teacher in a bilingual classroom in which many instances of “vocabulary talk” naturally arose as the students worked together to make sense of a curricular text.
Emergent findings indicated that the students collaboratively constructed new understandings of both familiar and novel words that went beyond traditional dictionary definitions. Additionally, students were able to bring in their linguistic and cultural resources in ways that decreased the distance between the vocabulary words and themselves. They were able to connect their own personal experiences and understandings to their burgeoning understandings of each word often in embodied ways. However, the teacher was the ultimate arbiter in deciding who could propose a new intertextual link, and which intertextual links were ratified into the group’s communal understandings of a word. This study contributes to research on how emergent bilingual students acquire and develop vocabulary understandings. It demonstrates how when bilingual, Latine students are able to use their linguistic and cultural resources, they are creatively able to construct complex word understandings. Therefore, this study highlights the potential for opening up spaces for students to explore vocabulary words through making intertextual connections to their own experiences and expertise.

Authors

• Brenda Luo, Boston College

• Patrick Proctor, Boston College