Reading Comprehension As Intertextual Practice: An Ethnographic Perspective

• In Event: Ethnography as Epistemology: An International Dialogue on Challenges Facing Ethnographers Studying Knowledge Construction Across Disciplines, Time Scales, Actors, Institutions, and Countries

Abstract

The objective of this ethnographic study was to explore how teachers and students interactionally construct definitions of “reading comprehension” in two secondary classrooms. Both teachers had an explicit agenda to foreground intertextual relations among the literary and academic texts they were reading. From an ethnographic perspective, we ask – what is reading (and reading comprehension) as a set of cultural practices in these classrooms? How do these interactionally constructed definitions of reading reflect and refract a classroom culture including definitions of knowledge? Of intertextuality? Of being a “competent student”? Of learning?

The theoretical perspective we employ is microethnographic discourse analysis. This perspective builds on the ethnography of communication, linguistic anthropology , critical discourse analysis, the New Literacy studies, and those literary discussions of language that evolved from the work of Bakhtin (1935, 1953) and Volosinov (1929). At the core of this perspective is a basic premise that people act and react to each other, primarily through language, and that they may do so over time. As such, meaning is made material and visible in language, and is continuously evolving and refracted over time. Further, from this perspective there is no separation or distinction between what people do in interaction with each other and meaning; but rather they are intimate dimensions of the same social and cultural phenomena (as such, this perspective denies a mind-body dichotomy).

Each classroom was video recorded daily for the first 9 weeks of the year, student written assignments were collected, and interviews were conducted with teachers and students. In addition, field notes were taken daily and where appropriate, the researcher participated in the classroom activities (e.g., in the role of a teacher’s aide). Data analysis involved the moment-by-moment analysis of how people (teachers and students) acted and reacted to each other, and how their interactions evolved and built over time.

Findings showed that the reading practices in each classroom involved social constructions that were similar at one level but different at other levels. In both classrooms, the reading practices involved the structuring of different relations among literary texts in constructing reading comprehension. In one classroom, the students compared the characters, plots, and themes in two books being read simultaneously; in the other classroom there was a focal text and a variety of other texts were read to deepen the interpretation of events in the target text. In each classroom instructional conversations engaged students in a similar rationality of claims, text-based evidence, and warrants. Further in both classrooms the reading of literary texts was framed as a way to reflect on one’s own life and agency. However, doing so was framed differently in each classroom. In the one classroom, the reading of literary texts was framed as part of a social process for acting on the world (making it a better place for themselves or others). In the other classroom, the reading of literary texts was framed as part of a process of self-understanding and self-creation.

Author

• David M. Bloome, The Ohio State University