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“And Then He Blew the House Down”: Peer Talk and Collaborative Reading in Early Literacy

Fri, April 25, 9:50 to 11:20am MDT (9:50 to 11:20am MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Terrace Level, Bluebird Ballroom Room 3B

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the role of peer talk and interaction in how K-1st grade children in an English-Spanish dual immersion classroom engage in the act of reading. Peer talk has been conceptualized as a “double opportunity space” (Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2010), which functions simultaneously as a locus for the co-construction of children’s social worlds and as a context for learning and development. Building on these approaches to peer interaction (Cekaite, Blum-Kulka, Grover, & Teubal, 2014) that have established the value of peer talk for language learning and literacy development, both in formal (e.g. Kyratzis 2014; Vardi-Rath 2014) and informal (e.g. Author, 2010, 2017) learning contexts, this paper examines how through collaborative, interactional reading (Sterponi, 2007), these children provide one another a powerful context for accessing and apprehending written texts.

Theoretical Frameworks
Theoretically, this paper is further anchored in sociocultural theory of learning (e.g. Nasir et al., 2014), which has a long history of understanding literacy not as an individual skill, but as a sociocultural practice that must be studied in relation to historical, political, and institutional frameworks of relevance (Heath 1983; Street 1995). This includes the act of reading as a socioculturally and ideologically situated activity (Luke & Baker, 1991).

Methods
This paper is part of a larger project about how peer talk and children’s communicative practices mediates young children’s linguistic, cognitive, and social development. The data for this study comes from videotaped, naturally-occurring interactions among children’s groups in both the classroom and the playground, collected throughout a six-month period in an English-Spanish dual-immersion classroom in southern California. Bringing together standard research procedures for the examination of videotaped data (as compiled and described e.g. in Erickson 2006) and classroom discourse analysis methods (Rymes, 2016), a subcorpus of video-recorded data has been created for the purpose of this paper, focusing on peer interactions during small group reading in the classroom.

Results
The paper features microanalysis of an extended small group reading interaction. The analysis reveals that children’s peer talk during collaborative, small group reading attends to both the storybook world and to the storybook-reading world to organize an effective context for meaning-making. More specifically, through multimodality, performative renderings of the story, and peer error-correction, children with different reading abilities help one another achieve greater comprehension of the text than working alone.

Significance
In an educational and policy environment where individual involvement with texts is still largely seen as the canonical way of engaging in reading and where legislation is increasingly being considered (see, for example, California’s Assembly Bill 2222) to limit reading pedagogy to a set of instructional practices deemed acceptable by proponents of the science of reading approach, this paper highlights the importance of a pedagogical environment that offers children diverse pathways to enter the world of reading, including those that the children themselves choose and organize. The paper also underscores the importance of oral language, more specifically peer talk and interaction, to build a solid foundation for critical comprehension.

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