Flexible Co-Construction of Meaning: Facilitating Emergent Bilingual Children's Exploratory Talk in Spanish Literature Discussions

• In Event: Linguistic Mediation, Language Attitudes, and Learning in Bilingual Classrooms

Abstract

This qualitative study examines teacher discourse and facilitation that foreground children’s exploratory talk and validate their bi/multilingual practices across nine literature discussions in Spanish in a second-grade maintenance bilingual classroom. Emergent bi/multilingual children have historically been afforded few opportunities to engage dialogically with peers and teachers in co-constructing interpretations of texts as their reading instruction has traditionally been skills driven (Au & Raphael, 2000; Lesaux, 2012). Recent scholarship also identifies benefits related to reading comprehension development when bi/multilingual children can use their full linguistic repertoires in discussions (Worthy et al., 2013; Sayer, 2013). Findings demonstrate how the teacher promotes exploratory talk associated with reading comprehension success, (Soter et al., 2008) within a dialogically organized and linguistically flexible discussion space.

Author

• Amy Clark, DePaul University