Casi Nomás Me Dicen Qué Escribir/They Almost Just Tell Me What to Write: A Longitudinal Analysis of Teacher-Student Interactions in a Linguistically Diverse Mainstream Secondary Classroom
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online January, 2011
Casi Nomás Me Dicen Qué Escribir/They Almost Just Tell Me What to Write: A Longitudinal Analysis of Teacher-Student Interactions in a Linguistically Diverse Mainstream Secondary Classroom
To explore the challenges that can arise in teacher-student interactions in linguistically diverse mainstream classrooms, this case study analyzes the ways in which a native Spanish speaker of high-beginning English proficiency and his teacher negotiated an extended writing task in a tenth-grade mainstream humanities course. An “interactional histories” analysis, which offers a contiguous (Maxwell & Miller, 2008) and multimodal analysis of classroom discourse and texts at multiple steps throughout the writing process, is used to demonstrate the pedagogical and conversational moves through which the teacher adapts the academic task and the teacher and student co-construct this assistance. This study illustrates the ways in which opportunities for language minority students' literacy development are locally created through teacher-student interaction but are reflective of linguistic, cultural, and institutional concerns related to the academic performance and achievement of language minority students in schools.
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