RR 91-3 Two cases of students' internalization of dialogue from writing time.
Abstract
Using a social constructivist theoretical framework, this paper presents cases of two students who participated in a writing process classroom in New York City. The teacher used literature to connect reading and writing in her lessons and conducted individual writing conferences with students. Students kept notebooks of their personal experiences and reflections and then selected from those to turn their writing into a project for a larger audience. Anthony, a middle-class Hispanic boy, had a successful conference with the teacher where they talked about organization and description. He appropriated the classroom dialogue which focused on imagery and figurative language and transformed it to use in his own text about his grandmother and in the writing conference he conducted with a first grader. In contrast, Anita, a working class, African-American girl, wrote an "oral" narrative that did not match the teacher's conception of good writing. Neither her text nor her conference with a younger student reflected the classroom dialogue. Instead, Anita chose to focus on mechanics and grammar, safe topics with which she felt comfortable. The study raises questions about the teacher's responses to cultural differences and the match between the teacher's images of good writing and those of the students.