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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled
The Road to Participation: The Evolution of
a Literary Community in an Intermediate Grade
Classroom of Linguistically Diverse Learners

presented by

AILING KONG

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment.
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11100 W." .

THE ROAD TO PARTICIPATION:
THE EVOLUTION OF A LITERARY COMMUNITY IN AN INTERMEDIATE
GRADE CLASSROOM OF LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE LEARNERS

By

Ailing Kong

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology,
and Special Education

2000

ABSTRACT
THE ROAD TO PARTICIPATION:
THE EVOLUTION OF A LITERACY COMMUNITY IN AN INTERMEDIATE
GRADE CLASSROOM OF LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE LEARNERS
By
Ailing Kong

The purpose of this study is to examine the process in which a class of
students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned to participate in
the discourse of a literary community. Over the past two decades, the number of
students who speak a language other than English at home or practice a non-
mainstream home culture has risen dramatically, and this number continues to
grow (August & Hakuta, 1997). The language barriers and the cultural differences
these students encounter at schools prevent them from gaining access to success
there. Studies show that English-language learners receive lower grades and score
below their classmates on standardized tests of reading and math (Moss & Puma,
1995). Studies also show that literacy learning of culturally and linguistically
diverse students is best facilitated in classrooms where learning opportunities are
created for students to participate in reading, writing, and talking about texts in
classroom learning communities.

Data for this study were collected during the 1998-1999 school year from a
4"‘/5th grade split classroom in an urban school and included ﬁeld notes of

observation, audio- and video-taping, interviews with the teacher and students,

students’ writing samples, and students’ pre and post SORT test scores and a pre

and post meta-comprehension strategy survey. This study focuses on how students
learned to participate in Book Club discourse. Data analysis reveals a gradual
release of responsibility in conducting Book Club group and whole class
discussions from the teacher to the students over the school year (Pearson &
Fielding, 1991). Teacher talk and teacher-led talk at the beginning of the year gave
way to student-centered talk, though the teacher continued to provide guidance
and support to the students. By the end of the year, students assumed more
responsibility in their group and whole class discussions by initiating topics of
their own interests, monitoring their own discussions, and constructing new
knowledge together. Data analysis also reveals that learning opportunities in Book
Club were created for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Five features
highlight the practice in this classroom. First, the teacher believed that all students
bring with them rich experiences and knowledge to contribute to the discussions
and tried to cultivate this belief among students to create a community of learners.
Second, students were given the time and space to share with each other their
responses to quality literature, and they were encouraged to construct meanings
collaboratively. Third, students were pushed to think critically and reﬂectively
about what they read by writing responses to high level questions. Fourth, the
teacher employed multiple modes of teaching, from telling, modeling, scaffolding,
facilitating student discussions, and participating as a member (Au & Raphael,
1998). Finally, the teacher persisted in challenging the students and maintained

high expectations of the students.

Copyright by
AILING KONG

2000

This work is dedicated to my parents,
Xianji Kong and Fanglian Kong

With love and appreciation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I feel deeply grateful to many people who have guided me, supported me,
and helped me in this endeavor. It is with their guidance and support that I am able
to ﬁnish my graduate study and complete this piece of work.

First, I feel so fortunate to come to know and work with the members of my
committee: David Pearson, Chris Clark, Carol Sue Englert, Jenny Denyer, and Jim
Gavelek. Each one of them has given me so much in their unique ways. To them, I
am forever grateful. David, my advisor, was always there for me at every moment
I needed his help and advice, despite his very busy schedule. He made me feel
special. He and Chris co-directed my dissertation. They spent hours listening to
me rambling about what I saw in the classroom, read and re-read again drafts of
my sense making of the data, provided me with thoughtful and timely feedback,
and guided me through the steps leading towards telling a coherent story. They are
my role models.

Carol Sue apprenticed me directly into doing classroom research. It was
through her modeling and scaffolding in many conversations I held with her either
individually or in our research group that I learned how to apply a theoretical
framework to doing research, including asking questions, collecting data and
analyzing them. Working with her on the LEAP project gave me the most valuable

research experience and prepared me in various ways to conduct this dissertation

study.

vi

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Jenny taught me to be sensitive to the language used by the teacher and its
effect on the students in their learning and how to examine patterns in the
interactions between the teacher and the students. Discourse analysis plays a big
part in helping me understand the classroom in this study.

Dr. Gavelek deserves special thanks. Being his advisee in the initial four
years of my doctorate study, I had many opportunities to talk with him about
Vygotsky, the socio-cultural theoretical perspectives, and my learning. He was
always taking the time to listen to my “non-sense” or half baked ideas. It was
through those countless talks that the ideas for the dissertation initially emerged.

I am indebted to Taffy Raphael for leading me into the field of research in
reading and writing. I tried my very first empirical study on my daughter’s reading
strategies while taking her Psychology and Pedagogy of Literacy course, and later
conducted my practicum study under her guidance as well. I also thank Jack
Smith for his support and his input to my dissertation proposal.

I thank participants of the Writers’ WorkshOp from fall 1998 to fall 1999
organized by Chris Clark. Members of the group, Kailonnie Dunsmore, Jocelyn
Glazier, Cara Lyke, Haojing Chen, Nel Duke, Vickie Percel-Gates, and Michael
Michell, all read part of my dissertation work and gave me advice as well as
emotional support in my writing endeavor.

I thank Cindy Brock who, as my mentor, always gave me valuable
suggestions and detailed feedback on each piece of writing I showed her. I missed

her a lot after she graduated. I thank Cathy Reichel, for her initial suggestion and

vii

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advice on the study site and on negotiating access to it. I always felt enriched after
each of our conversations. I thank Susan Blake who, being always supportive,
helped me read and edit parts of my dissertation draft.

I thank all my other friends who contributed to enriching my personal and
intellectual experiences at MSU that led to this piece of work. They include my
cohort group, Paul Conway, Yasuo Miyazaki, Heather Pleasant, Jim Erekson,
Steve Sheldon, Meg Ropp, Susan Blake, Lina Wu, Cheng Hui Chen, Taming Tze,
Dan, and Sejin Chung, and others I worked with and who became my friends,
particularly Gaston Dembele, Loucia Contantinou, Ruth Berry, Xiuwen Wu, Meg
Koshimura, Carolyn O'Mahony, Mani Ponnan, J ian Wang, Lishuan Yang, Vibha
Bhalla, and Faaiz Gierdien. Their friendship and constant encouragement kept me
braving through the challenges of graduate school. Friends in my T aiji practice
group helped me keep a healthy body and a balanced mentality.

I speciﬁcally wish to thank the teacher in this study, Mrs. Ellen Fitch, who
graciously opened her classroom and her teaching to me. It was risky business for
I was in her room observing every minute she was with her students at the
beginning of the school year for a very extended time and I was there frequently
later as well. Without her support and cooperation, this study would not have been
possible. I am also very thankful to her students who accepted me as a member of
their classroom community. I’m thankful to the principal, the teachers and the staff
of the school, who invited me into their “family” and helped make my stay there

pleasant and informative.

viii

q
.-

Finally, I am indebted to my families. I wish to thank my parents for
bringing me up as who I am today and for always giving me unconditional love
and support all throughout my life. (Sometimes, I feel it was the wish to make my
father feel proud of his little daughter that kept me working on my dissertation
even when he was no longer with me.) I thank my three brothers and two sisters
who took up the responsibility of taking care of my aged parents so that I could
concentrate on my studies. I thank my daughter, Mengmeng, for being with me all
the time in the past seven years, for engaging me in interesting conversations
about her school, her teachers, and her friends, and for lending an ear to my
struggles as well. I wish to express special thanks to my husband, Ming, for giving
me continuous love and encouragement, and for bearing with me moments of

stress and frustrations.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................... xv
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1
AGrowing Diverse Student Population ................................................... 2
Socio-Cultural Theoretical Perspectives ................................................... 4
Vygotskian Socio-Cultural Theory ................................................. 5
Learning as a Process of Transformation of Participation in
Cultural Practices ..................................................................... 7
Vygotsky Space ....................................................................... 8
The Importance of Classroom Learning Experiences .................................... 9
CHAPTER 2

DIVERSE LEARNERS, LITERATURE-BASED INSTRUCTION,
AND BOOK CLUB: A REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE ....12

Teaching Diverse Students in Classroom Settings ..................................... 12
Second Language Acquisition ..................................................... 12

Debate over Language ofInstruction ofESL Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .....13

Classroom as a Community of Learners ......................................... 16
Literature-Based Instruction ............................................................... 23
Affordance of Literature ............................................................ 24
Changing Practices and Changing Beliefs ....................................... 27
Research on Literature-Based Instruction ....................................... 29

Challenges Facing Teachers in the Transition .................................. 31

Book Club: Learning Community, Participation,

and the Development of Literacy Skills ................................................. 35
What is Book Club? ................................................................ 35
Community, Participation, and Skills Development ........................... 37
Learning and Development of Diverse Students in Book Club .............. 38
Implementing Book Club .......................................................... 39

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY ......................................................................... 43

Participants and the Setting ................................................................ 43

Data Collection .............................................................................. 46

Data Analysis ................................................................................ 49

CHAPTER 4

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SHARED LITERACY PRACTICE ................. 53

Book Club Implemented in Ellen’s Classroom ......................................... 55
Materials Used ....................................................................... 57
Book Club (Group Discussion) ................................................... 59
Community Share (Class Discussion) ............................................ 6O
Mini-Lesson ......................................................................... 61
Group Reading ...................................................................... 62
Individual Writing .................................................................. 63

Teaching by Telling: The First Stage of the J oumey .................................. 64
Introduction of Book Club ......................................................... 64

xi

Creating a Collaborative Learning Community ........................ 65
Learning to be Responsible Learners .................................... 68

Asking F at, Juicy Questions and Writing for a Know-nothing

Audience ..................................................................... 72
First Book Club Unit: Stone Fox ................................................. 76
Initial Student Resistance ................................................. 76
Close Observation of Group Discussion Demonstrations ........... 78
Dominance of Teacher Talk and Teacher-led Talk .................... 82
Book Club Challenges ............................................................. 85
First Fishbowl ............................................................... 86

The Kind of Questions Students Asked at the Beginning
of the Year ................................................................... 88

The Challenge for JR to Express His Different Interpretations... . ..90

Teaching by Modeling and Scaffolding: The Second Stage of the Journey ........ 93
Mediating Tools ..................................................................... 94
Fishbowl as a Structural Tool to Mediate Students’ Learning ....... 95

Prompts as an Instrumental Tool to Mediate Students’ Learning ....98

A Shift from Teacher/Teacher-Led Talk to Student-Centered Talk ........ 101
Increased Student-Talk Time ............................................. 101
Participation Pattern of Book Club Discussions ...................... 103

Teacher Talk ....................................................... 105
Student Talk ....................................................... 106
Teacher Moves: Multiple Instructional Strategies ............................ 113

xii

Building New Knowledge on What Students Already Know ...... 115

Creating an Environment in Which Students Could Teach

and Learn from Each Other .............................................. 117
Telling/Modeling .......................................................... 122
Scaffolding/Challenging ................................................. 126
Learning by Doing: The Third Stage of the Journey .................................. 132

Learning to Engage in Book Discussions at a Higher Level:
“Outlandish Ideas need to Stay out of the Discussion!” ..................... 134

Book Club Discussions Created Learning Opportunities for Students... . 136

Activity Structure ......................................................... 137

Opportunities for the Development of Literary Skills ................ 139
Making Connections ............................................. 139
Developing an Aesthetic Appreciation of Books ............ 142
Developing Multiple Perspectives ............................. 143
Developing a Personal World View ........................... 145

Opportunities for the Development of Social Skills ................. 149
Monitoring Group Discussion ................................... 149

Challenging Each Other and Sharing Different

and Tentative Ideas ............................................... 150

Opportunities for the Development of Language Skills ............. 151

What is Learned Beyond Talk in Book Club Discussions ............................ 153
Slosson Oral Reading Test ........................................................ 153
Meta-comprehension Strategy Index (MSI) .................................. 155

xiii

Book Club Written Responses ................................................. 158

Student Self-Evaluation of Their Progress Made in

Reading and Writing ............................................................... 165
CHAPTER 5
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ........................................................ 169
Findings ..................................................................................... 169
Lessons Learned from the Study ........................................................ 175
On Learning and Development .................................................. 175
On Teaching ....................................................................... 178

Employ Multiple Instructional Strategies to Create ZPD for
Students with Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds ...... 178

Create a Classroom Learning Community for Students with
Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds ........................ 184

Use Book Club to Promote the Literacy Skills of Students

with Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds .................. 186
Questions for Further Research ................................................. 188
APPENDICE
Appendix A: Time-line graph ........................................................... 190
Appendix B: Student-Self Evaluation for Book Club Discussions ................ 191
Appendix C: Thuy’s Responses to Stone Fox and Walk Two Moons ............. 192
Appendix D: End-of-Book Self Assessment .......................................... 194
Appendix E: Book Club Evaluation: Reading Log .................................. 195
Appendix F: Students’ Reaction and Goal-Setting Sheet ........................... 196
REFERENCES ............................................................................ 197

xiv

n1“

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

Table 7

Table 8

Table 9

Table 10

Table l 1

Table 12

Table 13

Table 14

LIST OF TABLES

Four Contexts of the Book Club Program and

Their Learning Opportunities ............................................. 36
Sample Book Club Schedule .............................................. 56
Books Read for Book Club ................................................ 58
Day by Day Count of the Time Spent on Book Club Activities

in the First Stage ............................................................ 83
Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Club Activities

in the First Stage ............................................................ 84
Sample Prompts ............................................................ 100

Day by Day Count of the Time Spent on Book Club Activities
in the Second Stage ....................................................... 103

Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Club Activities
in the Second Stage ....................................................... 103

Talking Turns Taken by the Teacher and the Students
during the 12-minute Community Share .............................. 105

Functions of Teacher Talk and their Frequencies
during a Community Share Conversation ............................. 105

Day by Day Count of the Time Spent on Book Club Activities

in the Third Stage ......................................................... 138
Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Club Activities

in the Third Stage ......................................................... 138
Students’ Gains from Pre- to Post-SORT Test Scores .............. 155

The Differences Between Students’ Pre- and
Post-Scores in MSI ........................................................ 157

XV

Title I

Table .

Table ‘

 

 

Table 15

Table 16

Table 17

Analysis of Paired Mean Differences for Pre and
Post Scores in MSI ...................................................... 158

Book Club Units and Number of Lessons/Written Responses .159

Summary of Students’ Comments on Changes in
Their Reading and Writing Performance over the Year ............ 166

xvi

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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this study is to explore how a class of students with diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned to participate in the discourse of a
literary community. Two assumptions are underlying the study. First, it is assumed
that the goal of literacy education is to best prepare all students, including students
with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, to be competent participants in
the literacy practices of a democratic and diverse society. Literacy practice is used
here in a broad sense and includes the cultural, political, and economic practices of
a society. According to socio-cultural perspectives of learning and development,
human actions and human higher order thinking processes are mediated by signs
and tools, primarily psychological tools such as language (Vygotsky 1978;
Wertsch, 1985). Language affords, as well as constrains, human actions and
human thinking. Thus, in order to prepare students to be competent participants in
the cultural, political, and economic practices of a democratic and diverse society,
teachers must not only help students acquire cultural heritage or "common
knowledge" (Edwards and Mercer, 1987), but also help students become
independent and critical thinkers and reﬂective life-long learners (Dewey, 1916).
Teaching and learning becomes a process of transformation.

Second, it is assumed that a multicultural society is a society in which
different ethnic groups learn from each other and contribute to the common good

of the society (N ieto, 1992; Spindler & Spindler, 1994). Thus, in teaching students

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with diverse backgrounds, teachers should not only help them gain access to the
cultural capital (Delpit, 1995), the conventions and norms of discourse privileged
in our schools and society, they should also engage students in developing
knowledge and skills that will beneﬁt a multicultural society, such as active
participation, respect for difference and diversity, pride in self identity, and a
disposition toward cooperation and collaboration (Au, 1998).

In this chapter, 1 construct an argument for studying the classroom literacy
learning experiences of students with diverse backgrounds, with a focus
speciﬁcally on how they learned to participate in literary discourse. I begin by
brieﬂy describing the changes in student population and the challenges educators
have in teaching students with diverse backgrounds. I then discuss the socio-
cultural theoretical framework to illustrate how classroom literacy learning
experiences affect students’ acquisition of the literacy knowledge and skills.

A Growing Diverse Student Population

The number of students who speak a language other than English at home
or practice a non-mainstream culture has risen dramatically over the past two
decades and this number continues to grow. According to a 1990 US. census
report quoted by August and Hakuta (1998), about 14 percent of the total number
of students in the US. population live in a home where a language other than
English is spoken. According to a more direct estimate based on a nationally
representative sample of school districts, the number of English-language learners

in grades K-12 in the fall of 1991 increased almost 1 million since a survey

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conducted in 1984 using similar methodology (Fleischman and H0pstock, 1993).
Among these students, a large proportion were native speakers of Spanish (73
percent). This was followed immediately by native speakers of various Asian
languages, such as Vietnamese (3.9 percent); Hmong (1.8 percent); Cantonese (1.7
percent); Cambodian (1.6 percent); Korean (1.6 percent); and Laotian (1.3
percent) (August & Hakuta, 1997, pp. 17-18).

Educators and researchers have provided evidence showing that the

i

differences and discontinuity between diverse students’ experiences at home and
at school create difﬁculties for them to achieve academic success at schools
(Heath, 1983; Au, 1998; Banks, 1993). The language barriers and the cultural
differences prevent these students from gaining access to educational success
(Valdes, 1998). Studies show that English-language learners receive lower grades;
they are judged by their teachers to have lower academic abilities; and they score
below their classmates on standardized tests of reading and math (Moss and Puma,
1995). There is also a high drop-out rate for students whose ﬁrst language is not
English (Fillmore & Meyer, 1992). The gap between the literacy achievement of
students of diverse backgrounds and their mainstream peers is also documented in
the results of reading and writing tests administered by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (Donohue, Voelkl, Campbell, & Mazzeo, 1999) and in the
standardized tests scores obtained by states (Au & Raphael, 2000). Statistics also
show that these students are overwhelmingly from disadvantaged socioeconomic

backgrounds (August & Hakuta, 1998), a factor that may negatively affect diverse

students’ literacy deveIOpment (Snow, Burns, & Grifﬁn, 1998). Many studies
explore how diverse students develop literacy knowledge and skills (Au & Mason,
1981; Raphael & Brock, 1993; DeStigter, 1998; Hiebert, 1991; Wells & Chang-
Wells, 1992; M011 1992; Nieto 1999). Yet, more research is needed to focus on
how to help these students beat the odds and obtain the necessary literacy skills to
succeed at school and society (Au, 1998; Delpit, 1995; Taylor, Pearson, Clark, &
Walpole, 1999).
Socio-Cultural Theoretical Perspectives

The theoretical framework guiding this study is the sociocultural
perspectives of learning and development by Vygotsky (1978, 1986), Wertsch
(1985), Lave & Wenger (1991), and Rogoff, Matusov, & White (1996). A
fundamental tenet of socio-cultural theory is that all higher psychological
processes originate in purposive social interactions among human beings and with
their living environment. Hence, learning and development becomes a process of
transformation of participation that takes place within speciﬁc social, cultural, and
historical contexts. In this section, I ﬁrst introduce brieﬂy the three interrelated
themes of the Vygotskian socio-cultural theories summarized by Wertsch (1985)
and the concept of learning as transformation of participation by Rogoff, et al.
(1996) and Lave & Wenger (1991). Finally, I discuss the Vygotsky space
(Gavelek & Raphael, 1996; Harre, 1984) which delineates the process of the

transformation.

Vygotskian Socio-Cultural Theory
Vygotskian socio-cultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) explicates individual

learning and development within social, cultural, and historical contexts. Wertsch
(1985) summarizes the three fundamental themes of Vygotskian socio-cultural
perspectives. First, to understand any phenomenon, we must understand both its
origin and the processes by which it is acquired. Who we are and what we do can
be explained by our experiences. What students experience in the classroom
shapes what they will learn and who they will be. What teaching materials to use,
what learning activities to organize, what assessments to give, what power
relations to be established between the teacher and the students, and what
languages to use will either help create learning opportunities for the students or
exclude the students ﬁ'om learning.

Second, mind is social in nature. Knowledge is constructed and learning
occurs in interactions with the more knowledgeable members of a community in
meaningful contexts. For students to develop their literacy knowledge and skills
for participation, they must have the opportunities to observe and participate in the
practices, while being assisted by the more knowledgeable others. Vygotsky
(1978) distinguishes the actual mental development and the zone of proximal
development (zpd). He deﬁnes zpd as "the distance between the actual
developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level
of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult

guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (p. 86). He urges educators

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to foresee mental development prospectively and create the zone in their
interaction with children. For students with diverse cultural and linguistic
backgrounds to construct their understanding and interpretation of the literacy
practices, the establishment of a zpd enables them to make connections between
the knowledge they bring into the classroom and the new practices they learn.

Third, human action, including high level mental processes, is mediated by
signs and tools - primarily psychological tools such as language. Language, with
its vocabulary and structure and their associated concepts, affords and constrains
how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Gee (1992) describes
language as a carrier of the "the characteristic ways of talking, acting, interacting,
thinking, believing, and valuing, and sometimes characteristic ways of writing,
reading and/or interpreting" (p. 20) of any socioculturally deﬁned groups of
people. As a tool, language mediates how the speakers perceive and make sense
of their physical and social world.

Vygotskian socio—cultural perspectives view the process of learning and
development as a process of intemalization/transfonnation of the cultural practices
of a community. Learning and development occur in interactions with more
knowledgeable members of a community in communal practices within unique
historical contexts and are mediated by language in use. Thus participation
becomes the essential element in analyzing the process of learning and

development.

g.

Learning as a Process of Transformation of Participation in Cultural Practices

The dialogic and interactive nature of learning and meaning construction
highlights the importance of participation, which is the goal as well as the means
of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, et al., 1996; Dewey, 1916). To Dewey
(1916), "knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it is
effective", and "cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator" (p. 393).

Lave and Wenger (1991) delineate the process of the participating mode as
a process of knowledge construction. They argue that the process of participation
proceeds from peripheral to full in the purposive activities carried out by members
of a community in speciﬁc situations. In this process, novitiates appropriate and
practice the knowledge and skills required to engage in full participation in the
soico—cultural practices of a community. Rogoff, et al. (1996) take the idea a step
further. To them, learning and development is a process and a transformation of
one’s participation in socio-cultural activities. Participation in the social and
cultural activities of the community transforms the participants' understanding,
roles, and responsibilities.

Children are enculturated into "school" ways of reading, writing, talking
and thinking through participating and experiencing in their daily activities,
especially in the classroom and school learning activities. The learning-as-
transformation-of-participation view has changed the view of children as learners
from being "blank slates" to "thinkers" and "belief-holders" (Bruner, 1996). Their

limited experiences help them to construct a theory of the world. This theory, or

 

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schema, gives them a lens for understanding their experiences. Bruner believes
that pedagogy is to help the children understand better, more powerfully, less one-
sidedly, or to modify and expand their theory of the world. To achieve this is
through discourse, collaboration, and negotiation rather than imitation or didactic
instruction. He believes that "knowledge is what is shared within discourse, within
a 'textual' community" (p. 57).
Vygotsﬂ Space

While Lave and Wenger (1991) point out the trajectory of learning through
participation, Vygotsky (1978) delineates speciﬁc details of how learning occurs
in interaction and participation. According to Vygotsky, "Every function in the
child's cultural development appears twice: ﬁrst, on the social level, and later, on
the individual level; ﬁrst, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the
child (intrapsychological)” (p. 57). Gavelek and Raphael (1996) adapt Harre's
(1984) "Vygotsky Space" to capture this learning process from social to individual
and to social again, and from public to private to public again. They created a
visual representation for this process. In this model, learning begins from the
social/public arena, when the leamer/novitiate observes the cultural practices of
the community. What they see and hear gets internalized or transformed through
the learner/novitiate's personal and individual space. Then the learners/novitiates
demonstrate their understanding and interpretation of their observation of the
cultural practices at the public/social space again. While the learners/novitiates

repeat the cycle of observation, appropriation, internalization/transfonnation, and

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demonstration of their interpretation, the more knowledgeable members of the
community continue to model expert behavior of participation and at the same
time scaffold the learner's participation behavior. New understanding and
interpretation of the cultural practices occurs and gets demonstrated again. As a
result of the recursive cycles, a leamer/novitiate proceeds from peripheral
participation to expert participation through appropriation, transformation,
publication, and conventionalization.

Thus, the social, cultural, historical, and physical contexts help to shape the
kind of experiences children and novitiates have, which in turn, shape what they
will learn and whom they will be. The view that learning occurs through
interaction and participation in cultural practices and mediated by language directs
us to examining what goes on in the interpersonal space between the participants
to understand learning. To explore how students learn in classrooms, we need to
examine what constitute the experiences of the students, such as what expectations
held by the teacher and students, what role they assume, what materials are used,
what learning activities are organized, what assessments are given to students, etc.
All these help us to understand how students with diverse backgrounds develop
their literacy knowledge and skills and explore what facilitates this learning
process.

The Importance of Classroom Learning Experiences
Research has shown that there are many factors affecting how well students

with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learn to read and write, such as

their home exposure to books and literacy, their motivation in learning to read and
write, and even their attitudes towards the culture of the language (Ogbu, 1993).
However, what happens in the classroom has a direct impact on students’ literacy
achievement (Au & Raphael, 2000; Cummins, 1997). What learning materials the
teachers decide to use, what learning activities they organize for the students, how
they assess students' learning, what power relations they establish between the
students and themselves, and what languages they use in interacting with the
students will either help create learning opportunities for the diverse students or
deprive them of the learning opportunities.

The Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA)
(1998) summarizes IO research-based principles to improve the reading
achievement of America's children and emphasizes the importance of programs
and instructions. Only one principle points out the importance of the children's
home language and literacy experiences and two others highlight professional
development and collaboration of the whole school staff. The other seven
principles all focus on the programs and instructions that directly constitute the
children's experiences in the classrooms. Programs that create a "variety of
classroom language and meaningful reading and writing events" and instructions
that provide guidance to support successful reading acquisition help improve
students' reading achievement. For students with diverse cultural and linguistic

backgrounds, effective instruction includes "assessment, integration, and extension

10

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of relevant background knowledge and the use of texts that recognize these diverse
backgrounds".

Cummins (1997) examines students’ learning in the classroom and focuses
on how power relations between the teacher and the students affect students’
participation in the learning activities. He points out, "These microinteractions [in
the classroom] form an interpersonal or an interactional space within which the
acquisition of knowledge and formation of identity is negotiated. As such, the
microinteractions constitute the most immediate determinant of student academic
success or failure" (p. 425).

To summarize, socio-cultural theoretical perspective points us to examining
the participation patterns of diverse students and their interactions with the more
knowledgeable/powerful others in classroom practices to understand how they
learn at school and to explore ways of helping them to improve their literacy
achievement. What students learn is inﬂuenced and shaped by their experiences,
of which classroom constitutes an important part. This study explores the process
in which students were enculturated into the classroom literacy practices, i.e.,
Book Club, and developed the knowledge and skills that are needed for
participation. It examines the changes of the learning activity structures, the
interactions between the teacher and the students, the different roles of the teacher
and the students, the participation patterns of the teacher and the students in Book

Club activities, and the factors affecting the changes over the school year.

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CHAPTER 2
DIVERSE LEARNERS, LITERATURE-BASED INSTRUCTION,

AND BOOK CLUB : A REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE

This study examines how a fourth/ﬁfth grade classroom of culturally and
linguistically diverse students learn to develop literacy knowledge and skills and
to participate in the conversations of a literary community. In this literature
review, I focus on studies in three areas that inform the current study: (a) studies
on teaching diverse students in classroom settings, (b) studies on the literature-
based instruction, and (c) studies on Book Club, the speciﬁc instantiation of
literature-based reading employed by the teacher in this study.

Teaching Diverse Students in Classroom Settings

Second Language Acquisition

The traditional view of second language acquisition regards language as a
system of structures consisting of phonology, morphology, semantics, pragrnatics,
and lexicon. To learn a language is to analyze and understand all these
components as objects of study. More recent views emphasize the cultural aspects
of language and focus on language in use. Learning a language is not only learning
the codes, but also acquiring the culture in which the language is embedded
(Widdowson, 1984).

Garcia (1994) summarizes studies on bilingualism and second-language
acquisition with regard to the acquisition of linguistic skills, cognitive

development, and social/cultural aspects of language. Garcia concludes that a

12

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the

student’s linguistic, cognitive, and social experiences play an important part in
how culturally and linguistically diverse students learn to develop “the full
repertoire of linguistic skills in English, in preparation for participation in
mainstream classes” (p. 88). This is because:

1. The linguistic, cognitive, and social character of the child are developing
simultaneously.

2. Linguistic, cognitive, and social development are interrelated. That is,
cognitive processing factors may inﬂuence linguistic and social
development, linguistic development (the ability to Operate within the
structural aspects of languages) may inﬂuence social and potential

cognitive functioning, and, in turn, the development of social competence
may inﬂuence directly the acquisition of linguistic and cognitive repertoires

(p. 69).
Debate over Language of Instruction for ESL Students

One issue of debate regarding the education of students with diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds in the United States focuses on the language of
instruction. Should teachers teach in the child’s native/home language or the
English language? The supporters of native language for instruction recommend
that teachers use students’ native language for instruction and not introduce the
English curriculum until students master that language. They believe that students’
mastery of their native language provides important cognitive and social
foundations for second-language learning as well as academic learning in general.
Supporters at the other end recommend minimal use of native language ﬁom the
beginning of the students’ school experience. Snow, Burns, and Grifﬁn (1998)
have examined the issue of instructional language in teaching early elementary

students and ﬁnd very little data-based evidence to answer speciﬁc questions of

13

 

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language acquisition and ultimate attainment of second language learners. Relying
on a review by August and Hakuta (1997), Snow and her colleagues note that
English speakers in French immersion programs in Canada acquire literacy in
French after initial instruction in French, but add that the success of immersion in
Quebec may be due to the fact that the English-speaking children come from
families that are generally middle-class and academically motivated and have the
access to many academic and literacy resources.

At the same time, Snow, et al. (1998) note that the development of a child’s
ﬁrst language plays an important role on how the child acquires a second
language. Cummins (1979) reviews a number of studies that show high
interlanguage correlations on literacy and literacy-related tasks. His study also
demonstrates this transfer between languages belonging to different language
families, such as between English and Japanese and between English and
Vietnamese (Cummins, 1984). Collier and Thomas (1989) ﬁnd that on average
children who have presumably established basic literacy skills in a native language
catch up with monolingual English-speaking peers in all areas within a couple of
years after arrival, unless those children enter U.S. schools in kindergarten or ﬁrst
grade. Their study highlights the importance of the development of ﬁrst language
in affecting the students’ school learning in general. From this array of patently
insufﬁcient evidence, Snow et al. conclude, “It is clear that initial reading
instruction in the ﬁrst language does no harm and it seems likely both from

research ﬁndings and from theories about literacy development that initial reading

14

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instruction in the second language can have negative consequences for immediate
and long-term achievement” (p. 23 8). They urge initial literacy instruction in a
child’s native language whenever possible and suggest that literacy instruction
should not be introduced in any language before some reasonable level of oral
proﬁciency in that language is attained.

To demonstrate the complexity of the issue of instructional language,
Garcia (1994) cited Ramirez et al.’s (1991) study of three programs on a native
language and English instruction continuum, with late-exit transitional bilingual
education programs at one end, early exit programs in the middle, and structured
English immersion strategy programs at the other end. All three programs share
the same instructional goal: to help the language minority student to acquire
sufﬁcient English language skills to succeed in an English-only mainstream
classroom. The programs differ in the amount and duration that English is used for
instruction as well as the length of student participation time. Though results show
“the immersion programs gave the youngest students an initial advantage when
tested in English, but this advantage disappeared by third grade” (p. 78). Overall,
the results suggest that there were no program differences at the end of four years
(K-3). Instead of focusing on ﬁnding out which language of instruction helps
students of diverse backgrounds develop a second language, Garcia (1994) asks
the ﬁeld to pay attention to the broader contexts of US. society’s treatment of
these students in and out of schools, as also suggested by Heath, (1986), Cummins

(1986), Freire (1973), Ogbu (1987), and Trueba (1987). He calls on the ﬁeld to

15

 

 

develop a new pedagogy that “redeﬁnes the classroom as a community of learners
in which speakers, readers, and writers come together to deﬁne and redeﬁne the
meaning of the academic experience” (p. 80). He further describes the new
pedagogy:
In any case, it argues for the respect and integration of students’ values,
beliefs, histories, and experiences and recognizes the active role that
students must play in the learning process. However, this responsive
pedagogy expands students’ knowledge beyond their own immediate
experiences while using those experiences as a sound foundation for
appropriating new knowledge. (p. 80)
Classroom as a Community of Learners
Consistent with Garcia’s call for a new pedagogy, educators have been
studying the social and cultural experiences of diverse students in and outside
schools. As students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds seem to fall
more easily into the at-risk categories, studies are conducted to examine the
discrepancy between these students’ home experience and their school experience.
Differences are documented in the interactional/communication styles these
students experience at home and at school (Heath, 1983; Au, 1981). Many
scholars investigate creating classroom learning environments to help diverse
students achieve the same academic success as their mainstream peers (Raphael &
Brock, 1997; Zuniga-Hill & Yopp, 1996; Garcia, 1991; Trueba, Jacobs, Kirton,
1990; DeStigter, 1998; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). The common theme among

these efforts shows that learning opportunities are created for diverse students

when teachers build communities in their classrooms.

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Community has become a new buzz word in the language of education.
Rogoff and others explore the idea of community of learners (Rogoff, 1994, 1995;
Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 1996), based on the premise that knowledge is socially
constructed and “learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with
others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural
activity” (Rogoff, 1994, p. 209). In discussing community building in schools,
Sergiovanni (1994) makes a distinction between “community of place” and
“community of mind”. Quoting the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1940),
Sergiovanni calls a group of people bound by external forces, such as the
classroom, a "community of place" in contrast to a "community of mind". The
latter distinguishes itself ﬁ'om the former in that it transforms a collection of "1's"
to a collective "we", hence providing the members with "a unique and enduring
sense of identity, belonging, and place" (Sergiovanni, 1994, p. xiii). In general, the
members of a community of mind have shared values and ideals; they are bounded
by internal factors, such as commitment, obligations and duties; and they usually
care for, listen to and value each other.

Kohn (1996) describes a classroom community as “a place in which
students feel cared about and are encouraged to care about each other. They
experience a sense of being valued and respected; the children matter to one
another and to the teacher. They have come to think in the plural: they feel
connected to each other; they are part of an ‘us’. And, as a result of all this, they

feel safe in their classes, not only physically but emotionally” (pp. 101-102). Kohn

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emphasizes that “students need to feel safe in order to take intellectual risks; they
must be comfortable before they can venture into the realm of discomfort” (p.
103)

Studies of school and classroom effectiveness show that classroom as a
community of learners creates learning opportunities for students to participate
and develop their academic and social skills (Rogoff et al., 1996; Dudley-Marling
& Stires, 1992; August & Hakuta 1998; Cummins, 1994). Classroom learning
communities usually share these underlying features: (a) students are respected
and valued for who they are, (b) students enjoy certain control over their mental
activity in the classroom, (0) students engage actively in collaborative learning
activities and have opportunities to share, and (d) instruction builds on students'
prior knowledge so that students can make connections between their personal
experience and the subject matter they are learning (Brown, 1997; McMahon,
Raphael, Goatley, & Pardo, 1997; Englert & Rozendal, 1996; Green & Yeager,
1995).

Evidence also shows that literacy learning of the culturally and
linguistically diverse students is best facilitated in a classroom where student
diversity is treated as a resource rather than a deﬁcit. There are several commonly
shared features of such classrooms: (a) the teacher and students create a classroom
learning community in which all students feel respected and all ideas are valued
(Moll, 1998; Nieto, 1992), (b) learning opportunities are created for students to

engage in reading and writing when they construct knowledge collaboratively

54L

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(Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992; DeStigter, 1998), (0) teachers believe that the
diverse students are capable of “generating wonderful ideas” and hold high
expectations of students (Meier, 1995; Zuniga-Hill & Yopp, 1996), and (d)
instruction builds on students’ prior knowledge and is delivered in ways that are
congruent with students learning and communication styles they bring into the
classroom (Au, 1981; Trueba, 1990; Garcia, 1994). These features contribute to
developing classroom as community of learners in which children are enculturated
into “school” ways of reading, writing, talking and thinking while participating in
their daily learning activities. The power relations between the teacher and
students and the verbal interactions among them exert a substantial impact on this
process of enculturation (Cummins, 1997; Green, & Yeager, 1995; Hiebert, 1991).
For example, the teachers in Au and Mason’s (1981) classrooms practiced
“a balance of rights” in speaking and tum-taking between the teacher and students
that allowed students to demonstrate and develop higher achievement-related
behavior. Heath’s (1983) teachers explored a two-way-path intervention to help
the Trackton children acquire the school-based discourse, as they showed students
the connections between their home socialization experiences and the new ways of
questioning and answering that school usually required. Dudley-Marling and
Stires (1992) explore how to include at-risk children to engage in reading and
writing and recommend that “teachers should concentrate on transforming their
classrooms to make them places which are more congenial to the linguistic,

cultural, social and intellectual backgrounds students bring to school. In short,

19

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teachers need to create a community of learners” (p. 359). Ladson-Billings (1994)
observes African American teachers and concludes that incorporating students’
home and community culture into classroom life enables the teachers, students and
researchers to work together as a community of learners. Ladson-Billings argues
for using the intellectual and cultural resources of the students’ families and
communities as an empowering process to afﬁrm students’ self-worth, to build a
positive cultural identity, and to enhance their conﬁdence as learners.

The teachers studied by Nieto (1999) built on students’ strengths and
accommodated the perspectives and experiences of the students to help them
increase their academic achievement. Like Cummins (1997), Nieto sees the nature
of the teacher-student relationships central to students learning. She points out,
“Teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and actions, within the broader context of the society
in which these take place, are fundamental to understanding student learning” (p.
167). In DeStigter’s (1998) learning community, Latino English-as-a-second-
language high school students and at-risk Anglo counterparts read Spanish and
English-language literature, wrote stories and poems, and helped revise each
other’s work, while drawing upon their own experiences and family histories. In
the process, participants also developed affective relationships among each other,
which enabled members of the community to encounter difference as
complementary rather than divisive. The teachers in Moll’s (1994) schools with
large Latino populations incorporated the “funds of knowledge” of the community

to help children establish connections between the texts and the worlds.

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The balance of this evidence on explicit community building efforts
suggests that students thrive in classrooms that are constructed as communities of
learners; students are more engaged in these classrooms because the teachers value
students’ background knowledge and who they are, and create learning
opportunities that use what they bring to the class in making sense of what they
learn.

In other research efforts, community, while residing in the background,
nonetheless emerges as an important factor explaining student learning. Two other
studies examine effective second language teachers. Zuniga-Hill & YOpp (1996),
in an analysis of the practices of eight exemplary elementary school ESL teachers’
instructional practice, ﬁnd consistent themes that help explain what makes their
lessons successﬁil for ESL students. First, these teachers believe that the students
are capable of high academic achievement, and they use different teaching
techniques to help students understand key concepts without compromising
content knowledge. Second, these teachers activate their students' prior knowledge
and help them develop general knowledge and the language with which to express
it. Third, these teachers use current instructional strategies and techniques in the
language arts, such as thematic teaching and integrated literature-based units.
Fourth, they embed instruction in a context that fosters respect and mutual
accommodation, when “both teachers and students modify their behaviors in the
direction of a common goal” (N ieto, 1992, p. 258). The teachers learn to approach

teaching with a mindset that is different from working with a class of mainstream

21

students. They stress the importance of ﬂexibility in organizing instruction, and
the importance of accepting diverse ways of learning and expressing knowledge.
Fifth, the teachers engage in reﬂective practice. They articulate a high level of
awareness about their classroom practice and they think carefully about what they
learn and how to implement it in their teaching.

Similarly, the three effective Spanish/English bilingual teachers in Garcia’s
(1993) study use language in highly communicative ways and focus instruction on
what is meaningful to the students. They provided students opportunities for
active learning as they implement a literature-based reading program and engage
students in a writer’s workshop, when they generate topics, write about them,
revise and edit the drafts, and ﬁnally publish them. The teachers encourage
collaborative interactions among students and give them time to work together on
a wide range of instructional activities. They also share some unique dispositions.

99 ‘6

They are highly dedicated and they view themselves as “creative, resourceful,”
“committed,” “energetic,” “persistent,” and “collaborative.” They are also
committed to improving themselves and their teaching and, at the same time, they
are conﬁdent about their teaching abilities. In addition, these teachers value who
their students are and they hold high expectations for all their students.

To summarize, the available evidence ﬁ'om both explicit and implicit
community building efforts suggests that when teachers conceptualize their

classroom as community of learners, opportunities are created for diverse students

to practice and develop the social and cognitive skills needed to participate in the

22

 

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literacy community. Teachers who are effective in promoting the learning of
diverse students build on the skills and knowledge they bring into the classroom
and at the same time create opportunities for them to practice the skills. Although
building on students’ prior knowledge and creating an active learning environment
beneﬁt all students, they are more critical to the success of students with diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Ovando & Collier, 1998).
Literature-Based Instruction

Beginning in the middle 19805 and continuing at least through the late
1990s, literature-based instruction has gained increasing attention in both research
and classroom pedagogy. Originally popularized as an antidote to the dominant
skill-based instruction, such as basal-based instruction or “basalized” literature
instruction, it gained momentum alongside process writing and the whole
language movements (Pearson, 2000). Au and Raphael (1998) describe the
purpose of literature-based instruction as “to engage students in active meaning-
making with literature, to give them the ability both to learn ﬁom and to enjoy
literature throughout their lives” (p. 124). Purves (1993) highlights the educational
impact of literature and suggests, “Literature, that collection of imaginatively
created and artistically crafted texts, is an important cultural expression, and its
place in the schools is to bring the young into an understanding of their culture and
the cultures that surround them” (p. 360). Galda (1998) views literature as
“mirrors and windows” through which we learn to understand better about

ourselves and others, as she believes reading literature is a process of

23

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transformation. She also quotes Hade’s (1993) four reasons for teachers to teach
literature in the classroom: (a) teaching reading, (b) developing literary
knowledge, (c) developing self-understanding, and ((1) developing social
responsibility.

Literature-based instruction uses literature as a tool to engage the
readers/learners in reading, writing, talking, and thinking about themselves, about
others, and about the world that surrounds them. In the process, children learn to
become conﬁdent and competent participants in the cultural and social practices of
their community and later the society.

Affordance of Literatu_r_e

Rosenblatt (1978) makes a distinction between two kinds of reading:
efferent reading and aesthetic reading. In efferent reading, “the reader’s attention
is focused primarily on what will remain as the residue after the reading” (p. 23).
In aesthetic reading, “the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living
through during his relationship with that particular text” (1978, p. 25). When
reading aesthetically, a reader is focusing on the experience that the text makes
possible. Benton (1983) describes this experience as a journey through the
secondary world created between the reader and the text. Galda (1998)
summarizes Benton’s arguments and says that when we read aesthetically, “we
picture characters and events, anticipate actions, think back over what we have

read, identify with characters, and make the virtual experience we are shaping part

24

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of our lives” (p. 2). Reading is a creative, transactional process that involves
readers in actively creating meaning under the guidance of the words on the page.

Purves (1993) extends this exploratory sort of reading to include social and
cultural aspects. He views reading not necessarily aesthetic but “hermeneutic”. His
deﬁnition of reading is based on the epistemological assumption that “meaning
resides in the negotiation among readers in an interpretive community, not in the
text, in authorial intention, or in the individual statement concerning the
signiﬁcance of the text" (p. 352). To him, reading literature possesses multiple
goals, from seeking exploratory interpretation to generating argument and
speculation. Reading literature hermeneutically is similar to reading philosophy
and speculative prose. Thus, teachers should gear their instruction toward creating
“a humanities seminar or an intellectual talk show” for students to participate (p.
352). Purves also emphasizes the importance of helping students develop certain
“habits of mind”. One of them is that readers “need to acknowledge themselves as
readers with prejudices, ignorances, and beliefs that impinge on their readings and
interpretations” and apply the same to interpret the authors as writers (p.359). He
reminds us that “we are not just reading the writers, but reading the writer in a
cultural context and understanding ourselves as culturally situated readers” (p.
359)

Like Benton, (1983) who values what the journey through the secondary
world can do to the readers, Purves cherishes the richness in literature: “that

collection of imaginatively created and artistically crafted texts” (p. 360), and

25

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emphasizes the importance of engaging students in interacting with literature
hermeneutically. He also suggests including multicultural literature and art in
school curriculum to help youngsters develop the understandings needed to inhabit
in a global village.

However, in classrooms, neither the epistemic mode of engagement nor the
hermeneutic engagement of texts is common (Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). Wells
and Chang-Wells (1992) study reading and writing texts in the classroom and ﬁnd
that the texts in the classroom are most likely to induce the perforrnative,
informational, and functional modes of engagement. In many classrooms, there is
little or no opportunity for students to engage with texts in a re-creational or
epistemic mode. They dismiss the concern of some scholars who view the
different modes hierarchical and argue that students must engage with texts in
lower modes before they are ready to tackle higher modes. They view it as a
version of the pedagogical fallacy:

In learning to be literate, they [students] do not need to have fully mastered

the code and the information contained in the text in order to begin to

interact with it epistemically. Indeed, just the reverse. For it is when
children understand, from shared story reading, that texts are
representations of worlds waiting to be explored, challenged, and even
improved upon, that they will be most strongly motivated to master the
performative mode of engagement so that they can read them for

themselves (p. 144).

Wells and Chang-Wells suggest that epistemic mode of engagement should

be seen as “the most effective point of entry for literacy learning and as the focus

26

for each unit of work at every level of education,” because it has the potential to

“empower the students’ thinking, feeling, and action” (p. 145).

Changing Practices and Changing Beliefs

 

During the late 19808 and early 19903, skill-based reading instruction was
replaced by literature-based instruction in many schools around the country
(Raphael & Hiebert, 1996; McMahon, et al., 1997). Accompanying this new
instruction are new understandings of how learning occurs, new views of students,
and new deﬁnitions of literacy knowledge and skills. Literature-based approaches
have adopted socio-cultural perspectives as an underlying theoretical lens,
emphasizing reading and writing as higher order mental processes and acquired
through interaction with more knowledgeable others in meaningﬁil practices
(Vygotsky, 1983; Brock & Gavelek, 1998). Students are seen as knowledgeable
beings with their own theories of the world (Smith, 1975; Anderson & Pearson,
1984) rather than “blank slates” or “empty vessels” waiting to be ﬁlled with
knowledge. Reading is not just decoding the word but also making sense of the
world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Literature-based instruction encourages students
to construct meanings actively when the text, the reader, and the community of
learners to which the reader belongs to all play a role. Instruction in this case is
not centered around transmitting a set of disconnected decoding skills but rather
around making sense of the text through discussions and sharing interpretations of

the text.

27

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Implementing a literature-based instruction requires the teachers to
understand “children’s responses to literature, the value of the experience of
reading for reading’s sake, the use of literatures in the teaching of reading, the
content of the literature-based curriculum, and appropriate forms of assessment”
(Raphael and Au, 1998, p. xiii). This understanding helps teachers make decisions
on what reading materials to choose and shapes their interactions with students

over texts (Hiebert and Colt, 1989). Purves (1993) suggests that teachers use

multicultualism as the selection principle and choose books that best represent the
best depictions of the many cultural experiences that make up the world. In
practice, many classroom teachers implement literature-based instruction in
different formats. Some teachers may only use literature as reading-aloud and
silent reading materials. Some may engage students in small group and large
group discussions. Others may develop an integrated curriculum using literature in
teaching not only reading and writing, but also other subjects such as social studies
(Highﬁeld, 1998) and science (Morrow, Pressley, & Smith, 1997).

The change to literature-based instruction requires not only a change in
selecting materials and organizing learning activities, but also a change in beliefs
of reading and literature, the learning process, the learners, and the power relations
between the teacher and the students. McGee and Tompkins’s (1995) describe
four plans for using the book Stone Fox (Gardiner, 1980), each representing a
different theoretical perspective, to demonstrate the connections between

instruction, beliefs, and theory. The four theories of reading guiding their lesson

28

plans a
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plans are (a) reading as an interactive, strategic process; (b) reading as knowledge
of literacy forms; (c) reading as personal response; and ((1) reading as critical
literacy.
Research on Literature-Based Instruction
Literature-based instruction has the potential to help students develop their

knowledge and skills to participate in a literary community when opportunities are
created in the classroom for them to engage in aesthetic and hermeneutic reading
of literary texts (Rosenblatt, 1978; Purves, 1993; Galda, 1998). The essence of
aesthetic, hermeneutic readings is captured in the “grand conversations” over the
literary texts, instead of “gentle inquisitions” (Beds and Wells, 1989, p.4), when
participants construct deeper meanings together. Their ﬁndings show that young
children of varying abilities who participate in rich discussions of works of
literature are capable of:

a) articulating their construction of simple meaning, but also changing it as

they heard alternate views; b) sharing personal stories inspired by the reading

or discussion, often in poignant and revealing ways which triggered

identiﬁcation by other group members; c) participating as active readers —

predicting and hypothesizing and conﬁrming or disconﬁrming their predictions

as they read; (1) showing that they had attained insights about how the author

had communicated her message to them and supporting their evaluations of

that communication with their interpretations of the text (p. 27).

Their analysis also shows that while engaging in the “grand conversation,”

students constructed knowledge together and children with difﬁculties in reading

were supported in their struggles to understand. They became full participating

members of an “interpretive community” — a group which negotiate agreement

29

about interpretation (Fish, 1980). In Eeds and Wells’ literature study group,
children developed their inquiry skills, learned to become collaborative, and
created a learning community that encourage risk-taking and exploration
behaviors. Eeds and Wells suggest that teachers become “not authorities on
meaning, explicators of text, or sources of answers, but simply other readers with
whom to talk” (p. 28), hence, to engage students in grand conversations about
literature.

Bartley (1993) examines literature-based instruction for students who were
classiﬁed as “language-deﬁcient.” These students, 44 sixth-graders of
predominantly Filipino heritage, were chosen because of their poor score on
grade—level comprehension tests. They either shifted from their primary language
or had been exposed to inadequate English as their primary language. In an ex post
facto descriptive study Bartley examines relationships between the teacher’s
instructional strategies and the students’ grth in comprehension scores.
Statistical analysis of the comprehension test scores indicates a signiﬁcant gain
after approximately 25 weeks of instruction using literature-based integrated
language instruction. The students, who engaged in class discussions about what
they read, read orally under the guidance of the teacher, and received direct
instruction when needed, scored signiﬁcantly higher in their comprehension tests
than the students taught using other approaches.

Bottomley, Truscott, Marinak, and Henk (1999) investigate three different

reading programs: the whole language instruction, the literature-based instruction,

30

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and the basal reader literacy instruction and gathered data from 396 children in
fourth, ﬁfth, and sixth grade from 28 classrooms. They explored how different
programs inﬂuenced students affectively and used three affective measures,
including Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (ERAS), Reader Self-Perception
Scale (RSPS), and Writer Self-Perception Scale (WSPS). Their ﬁndings “suggest
that a literature-based approach to reading and writing appears to exert superior
impact on intermediate-aged children’s affective literacy orientations” (p. 115).
Challenges Facing Teachers in the Tran_sition

However, it is no easy task for either teachers or students to shift ﬁ'om
conventional basal to literature-based instruction; both have to learn new roles,
which require them to accept either greater (for students) or less (for teachers)
responsibility for the quality of the discussions (Johnston, Allington, Guice, &
Brooks, 1998). Scharer (1992) documents not only the changes teachers need to
make in their thinking and ways of organizing instruction but also the challenges
and problems confronting the teachers during the transition to implementing a
literature-based instruction. She ﬁnds that the four teachers in her study decreased
their use of basal materials and increased the use of trade books “through read-
aloud sessions, sustained silent reading, small and large group book discussions,
and thematic planning” (p. 439). They also gave students more control over the
books they read, assigned more group projects based on literature selections, and
began to use informal assessments, such as running records, student-teacher

conferences, observations, and portfolios. The challenges and problems reported

31

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by teachers include “a limited knowledge about literature and reading, a limited
repertoire of organizational strategies, and difﬁculties documenting student
progress in ways that would inform both grading decisions and instructional
planning” (p. 439).

In an extension of this work, Scharer and Detwiler (1992) move beyond the
most “observable” changes to considering changes in the students as well as the

teacher’s attitudes and beliefs in a context in which they were sandwiched between

F.

the external pressures (the accountability of the district testing program) and the
internal pressures (the teachers’ desire to plan the most effective lessons for their
students with limited knowledge about literature and reading). They ﬁnd that when
students were allowed to choose their own books and projects, they became more
motivated and, more importantly, more engaged in both the reading and writing
assignments. They also began to share their readings in free discussion. The
changes in students’ dispositions and behaviors prompted the teacher in their case
study to reevaluate her teaching and her values of students as readers. Instead of
tests, scores, and skills, the teacher began to value students’ attitude toward
reading, their interactions with each other over books, their reading habits, and the
connections they are making among the readings.

In a recent study, Scharer and Peters (1996) compare two teachers’
perceptions of book discussions and the ways students and teachers talk about
books. They ﬁnd that “both teachers indicated in their interviews that it was

important for students to talk with each other and express thoughts and opinions.

32

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However, data analysis revealed few examples of students talking with each other.
Teachers asked for students’ opinions, but within a highly controlled, limited
framework” (p. 46). In other words, in discussions, students were either engaging
in “gentle inquisitions” or, at best, a dialogue with only the teacher instead of
participating in a “grand conversation” in an interpretative community (Eeds &
Wells, 1989).

The gap between teachers’ beliefs and their practices is also revealed in the
ﬁve-year multilevel project reported by Johnston, Allington, Guice and Brooks
(1998). Johnston, et al. examine the transition from a basal-based instruction to a
literature-based literacy curriculum in four high-poverty school districts over ﬁve
years. Their study reveals a pessimistic picture with regard to what was going on
in classrooms. They ﬁnd that the test scores of students remained largely stable on
average and very little change occurred in classroom instruction. They write,
“What we saw, by and large, were literacy lessons in which the materials had
changed but the time allocations, the teacher-child interactions, the assessment and
evaluation practices, and the tasks children were given remained largely stable
across the 5 years” (p. 88). Johnston, et al. attribute this lack of change to three
factors. First in one school, the use of the basal is mandated. Second, many
teachers still believe the basal represents ofﬁcial knowledge. Third, it is easy and
safe to use a basal manual. In general, there does not seem to exist a safe and
supportive environment for the teachers to take risks in changing their

instructional practices. Johnston, et al. conclude that “unless there is radical

33

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change in the ways that administrators and policymakers view educational change,
literacy instruction in the 21St century will remain much the same as it is now” (p.
82).

Looking across the array of scholarly efforts to understand and evaluate
literature-based instruction, it appears that literature-based instruction is well
framed within a theoretical and rhetorical framework that teachers can readily
embrace. However, changes in practice do not come automatically with the change
in rhetoric. To help teachers embrace literature-based instruction, more studies are
needed to understand how it can be implemented, especially in the face of policy
factors that work against its implementation. Such studies, in the aggregate, will
have to look both inside and outside the classroom. Outside the classroom, we
need to examine administrative practices and policies (e.g., assessments, mandated
materials and instructional practices, and teacher evaluation practices) to
determine the ways in which they support or block teacher implementation of
reform practices such as literature-based reading. Inside the classroom, we need
detailed descriptions of (a) how to establish a classroom community of learners in
which students feel safe and supported, (b) how to engage students in rich and
rigorous interrogations of texts and authors, and (c) how teachers move from the
center to the periphery in facilitating student ownership and responsibility for
learning. Longitudinal studies describing the literature-based instructional
practices are especially needed to document the changes at different times of the

school year. The current study undertakes this task.

34

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Book Club: Learning Community, Participation,
And Development of Literacy Skills
What is Book Club?

The Book Club program, as a particular approach to literature-based
instruction, was developed collaboratively by university researchers and school
teacher researchers in the early 19905 (Raphael & Hiebert, 1996). The objective is
to create an integrated literacy program in which students read, write, and talk
about books in contexts that are meaningful to them. The program is based on the
theoretical framework of social constructivism; as such, learning is viewed as
embedded in social interactions with more knowledgeable others and mediated by
language in meaningful contexts (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991; Gee, 1992).
Three assumptions guide the program: (a) language is fundamental in thinking,
problem solving, and learning, (b) reading and writing are higher psychological
processes, and (c) literacy learning occurs in social interactions with more
knowledgeable others (Raphael & Hiebert, 1996).

Raphael and McMahon (1997) delineate the Book Club program as
including four contexts for instruction and participation in language and literacy:
community share, reading, writing, and book clubs 1, the last of which is the center
of the program (see Table 1). According to the Book Club designers,
“Fundamental to all four contexts is the instruction that helps students participate

successfully with a repertoire of strategies. Thus, in the Book Club program,

35

 

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instruction is contextualized to meet the particular needs of students’ acquiring
and developing literacy abilities (i.e., reading and writing) and oral language
abilities (i.e., as speakers and listeners in meaningful discussion)” (Raphael &
McMahon, 1997, p. xii).

Table 1

Four Contexts of the Book Club Progpam and Student Learning Opportunities

 

 

Context Participants Student Learning Opportunities
Community share Whole class with the 0 To share ideas from their reading and
teacher small-group discussions;

0 To observe their teacher and peers in
interactions around textual ideas;
0 To make connections across the texts

in their lives.
Reading Individually, with 0 To apply skills and strategies for
partners, or in small a) personal response
groups b) building ﬂuency

c) comprehending
d) interpreting
e) critiquing the literature they read
0 To interact with a range of literary
works over the academic year
Writing Individually 0 To engage in writing to support both
reading and discussion
0 To write in response logs and in more
structured "think-sheets"
0 To develop their ideas in more
extended texts
Book clubs In small groups of three To discuss a common reading
to ﬁve students 0 To share their personal responses
To help one another clarify potentially
confusing aspects of their reading
0 To create interpretations and critiques
of their texts,
0 To discuss authors' intent

Note. Adapted from Raphael & McMahon, 1997, p. xii.

 

' I will follow McMahon and Raphael's use of book clubs without capitalization to refer to the small group
discussion and of Book Club with capitalization to mean the whole Book Club program.

36

Community, Participation, and Skills Development

The body of research on Book Club has made several observations that help
generate a model of reading that puts interactions and participation as the most
critical parts of learning to read (Gavelek & Raphael, 1996). The approach also
calls for a “community of learners” environment in which students feel safe and
valued to participate and explore ideas (Rogoff et al., 1996; Raphael & Goatley,
1997). Book Club provides students with the time and space, such as in group
discussions (book clubs) and whole class discussions (community share), to share
their developing thoughts, ask each other’s questions, and construct meanings of
texts and their life experiences collaboratively (McMahon, et al., 1997; Raphael &
Au, 1998). In discussions, students practice and develop their knowledge and
skills needed in participating in conversations in a literary community. Book Club
helps foster and extend. students’ interpretation of and responses to texts (Brock &
Gavelek, 1998). McMahon (1992) analyzes group discussions of 5 students over a
ten-week period and evidence shows that students’ interaction patterns changed
when they began to include all members to share in the group and value all ideas.
They also discussed “individuals’ ideas and interpretations about text” (p. 337).
Book Club opens possibilities for exploring new forms of assessment and
evaluation that share responsibility with the students (Wong-Kam, 1998; Bisesi, et
al., 1998; Bisesi, 1997). Finally, analysis of teacher’s role in Book Club reveals 5
forms of instruction on a continuum from teacher control high/student activity low

to teacher control low/student activity high. These ﬁve teacher’s roles consist of

37

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explicit instruction, modeling, scaffolding, facilitating, and participating (Au &
Raphael, 1998, p. 125).
Learning and Development of Diverse SM in Bool_< Club

As a literature-based instructional program, Book Club creates
opportunities for diverse students, including students with learning disabilities and
ESL learners, to participate as knowledgeable members of the group due to each
child’s unique experiences (Goatley, Brock, & Raphael, 1995; Goatley, 1997;
Raphael & Brock, 1993; Brock, 1996).

Raphael and her colleagues also examine how students with learning
disabilities and ESL learners participate in Book Club program (Goatley, et al.,
1995). Goatley, et al. analyze the interactions in a diverse group of 5 ﬁfth-grade
students, three of whom were qualiﬁed for special services (i.e., Chapter 1, special
education program, ESL service), as they engaged in student-led discussions on
Park ’3 Quest over three weeks in May. They ﬁnd that Mei, an ESL learner,
assumed leadership role frequently within the Book Club discussion due to her
knowledge of Book Club and her unique experience of living in Vietnam. More
importantly, her regular education peers supported her leadership role. Stark, a
child with learning disabilities, was sometimes accepted as the authority on certain
points of discussion. They also ﬁnd that book club discussions created
opportunities for diverse students to practice strategies for interpreting texts and
constructing meaning, speciﬁcally clarifying confusions and eliciting information

from sources.

38

Raphael and Brock (1993) document the literacy progress that Mei, who
came from Vietnam, made during a period of three years in which she participated
in Book Club. First, Mei increased both her participation in discussions and her
self-conﬁdence, each appearing to have a reciprocal effect on the other. She
developed her skills in initiating new topics of conversations, reintroducing topics
later when having no initial responses, and responding to others’ questions in ways
that extended the topics of discussion. She also developed strategies to gain the
ﬂoor of conversation. Over time, Mei’s comments demonstrate quantitative and
qualitative changes in thinking and participation. She spoke more frequently. Her
questions and comments initiated new t0pics, challenged other’s ideas, and
invited/commanded participation from others. Finally, interacting with others
about books, Mei had the opportunity to use and develop her second language in
meaningful contexts which in turn permitted her participation and promoted her
self-efﬁcacy.

Implementing Book Club

Wells (1997), after examining evidence on students’ participation in Book
Club discourse communities, asks the question: “How can teachers, with their
students, create a community that engages with literature in a spirit of open-ended
exploration and inquiry?” (p. 114). Rueda (1997) urges that we as the ﬁeld need to
know more about how responsive teachers, such as the ones in Book Club,

monitor the ongoing classroom interactions with respect to their instruction and

39

hel;

ll‘t

assessment, and what it might take to enable teachers to engage in this type of
instruction.

Thus, more studies are needed especially to provide multiple thick
descriptions of what happens when teachers are implementing Book Club. The
teacher-readers can evaluate the case studies themselves, decide on what to try,
anticipate the possible outcomes, and act as informed “risk takers” due to the
particular needs of their students, their own personal characteristics, and perhaps
the unique affordances and restrictions of their working environment. To this end,
McMahon (1998) describes in detail what she and the teacher, Jacqueline, did to
help Jacqueline’s students improve (a) the quality of their written response, and
(b) the quality of their conversations in discussions. To help students with their log
responses, they ﬁrst established the reading/writing strategies and behaviors as
explicit instructional goals, identiﬁed students’ existing writing patterns, planned
the instruction accordingly, and ﬁnally implemented the instruction to change
students’ writing patterns and appropriate assessment to document the changes. To
help improve students’ conversations, they asked students to analyze ﬁrst other
students’ talk and later their own talk. In doing so, they helped students understand
what it means to have a conversation about books, how it looks, what it sounds
like, and what is being talked about. In thier case, it was a success story and it
makes the teacher’s “spark a little brighter for teaching reading this [that] year”
(p. 302). Also by depicting what happens with this particular teacher in her

particular room, the rich description of their case enables the readers a vision of

40

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what could be done to help improve speciﬁc areas and what can happen in their
own classrooms.

As a speciﬁc and well-documented approach to literature based instruction,
Book Club appears to have great potential for (a) creating opportunities for
students, including diverse learners, to participate in reading, writing, and talking
about books, and (b) for helping teachers learn how to play multiple roles in
apprenticing students into the discourse of a literary community. Though many of
the studies come ﬁ'om projects that follow the teacher and the students for multiple
years, few studies document the longitudinal changes over a school year and use
the whole class as the unit of analysis. The case of Mei was followed for three
years and data from multiple sources and occasions were collected. But due to the
questions the researchers asked, three book clubs which the authors believed to be
representative of the data set were selected for the in-depth analysis to document
the changes in Mei’s participation patterns in group discussions over the years
(Raphael & Brock, 1993). Other studies focus data analysis on conversations in
small groups or focus students for a shorter period of time (McMahon, 1992;
Goatley et al., 1995; Brock, 1996; Goatley, 1997; Boyd, 1997; Highﬁeld, 1998).
Bisesi (1997) explores a perfonnance-based assessment for Book Club program
through analysis of written survey-responses, interviews and observations. As a
result, there is a need for more studies on Book Club that provide detailed
descriptions of the what teachers can do to support the development of the literary

knowledge and discourse skills students need to engage in critical, reﬂective

41

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conversations about texts. To provide maximum assistance to teachers who may

want to begin this journey, we need to know, ﬁrst of all, whether the journey is

worth the effort. If so, then we need to answer questions like, “How did the
teachers and the students begin? What struggles did they have? What assistance

did they get? How did changes occur?” The current study examines the changes

in the teaching and learning that occur in a single classroom over a whole school

year as a teacher struggles to engage a linguistically and culturally diverse group
of students in a new set of literacy practices known as Book Club. The two
research questions the study asks are:

1. What learning trajectory did a class of culturally and linguistically diverse
students take to learn to participate in Book Club, a literature-based
instructional program?

2. What learning opportunities were created for the students and how were they

created?

42

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CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
This study is a qualitative, interpretive case study grounded in ethnographic
perspective (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995; Stake, 1994; Strauss & Corbin,
1990). I follow a classroom of culturally and linguistically diverse students over
the course of a school year, observing their daily activities and their interactions
with each other in their classroom. I hope to ﬁnd out how the class develops a
shared literacy practice and how the diverse students acquire the knowledge and
skills needed to participate in the practice. I also explore this learning through
examining the dynamic, on-going interactions among the participants over the
school year, and identify patterns of interaction that help create learning
opportunities for the diverse students. In this section, I brieﬂy describe the setting,
the participants, the process of data collection, and how the data is analyzed.
Participants and Setting
Ellen and her fourth/ﬁfth grade students in an urban school at a Midwest
city participated in the study. The school was founded as a Focus School in 1994
to meet the needs of the growing number of students who moved to this city with
their newly arrived immigrant families and needed special instruction in English
as a new language. A second major focus of the school was to provide instruction
in world languages for the children of monolingual English-speaking families. At
the time the study was conducted, the school was a 100% school of choice. Any

family who wanted to enroll their child or children at the school could apply.

43

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Because of limited space, the school was not always able to enroll the children of
all interested parents.

The school offered two types of classes. One type was general education
that follows the school district curriculum. The other type was called DLP
(developing language proﬁciency) classes. DLP classroom teachers also followed
the district curriculum while focusing more intensively on language instruction to
help students develop their basic speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in
English. When these students’ English became sufﬁciently well developed,
(usually after no more than 2 years) they were recommended to the general
education classrooms for the following school year. However, there was some
movement of students from DLP to general education classes during the school
year when newly arrived students enrolled. During the year this study was
conducted, ﬁve students moved from the DLP into Ellen’s general education
classroom at different times of the year due to the arrival of new students who
needed intensive English language instruction.

The school has a very diverse student population, consisting of 25%
Hmong, 25% Vietnamese, 25% Latino, 13% Pan-African, and 12% Caucasian.
Every year the students, staff and parents celebrate the anniversary of the school’s
founding and its diversity on Unity Day, October 12‘". According to the principal,
the school celebrates diversity not on special holidays, but in their daily
curriculum and instruction (personal communication with the Principal). The

school offered two world language courses: Spanish and French, and students

44

could use their home language at any time during the school day to communicate
with others. The students’ pledge for the year 1998-1999 reﬂected the school wide
theme “RESPECT” and was prepared by a special group of parents and the school
staff. The pledge went:

I will do my best to:

R - Respond Politely

E — Expect Respect from Myself and Others

S — Strive for Success

P - Problem-Solve

E — Encourage Others

C — Cooperate

T — Take Responsibility for My Choices

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T,

Ask Me What it Means To Me.”

The goal of the school as stated in their mission statement was to “foster a climate
of unity, mutual respect, cultural and linguistic dignity, and excellence in
achievement” (School Staff handbook, 1998-1999).

Ellen, the teacher who participated in the study, was of Greek origin. She
was taking her last course to complete her master degree in literacy instruction
when the study began. She had been teaching at the current school for 4.5 years
full time and it was her fourth year teaching Book Club. She believed that Book
Club gave her students more opportunities to read and write. The summer before
the study, she did an independent study course with a professor at MSU and wrote
Book Club lesson plans for ﬁve books. She submitted the one for The View From

Saturday to the Small Planet Communications, which has a website for Book Club

community, and it was published online (Fitch, 1998). Ellen also expressed her

45

interest in creating a learning community in her room. She believed that Book
Club, a literature-based language arts program, was a much better way to teach
students to read and write than the skill-based instructional program using basal
readers (interview, December 15, 1998). The class Ellen taught was a split
fourth/ﬁfth regular education class, consisting of 10 ﬁfth graders and 15 fourth
graders, 14 boys and 11 girls. The class had a very diverse student population.
When the year began, there were 25 students in this class. Ethnically, 6 were
Vietnamese, 4 Hmong, 4 multi-racial, 3 Caucasian, 3 Latino, 3 Haitian, 1 Somali
and 1 Bosnian. Over the year, 3 students left for the ﬁfth grade classroom and 3
new students joined the class. Two of them were from Somalia and I from Bosnia.
Linguistically, more than half of the students came from homes in which a
language other than English was spoken as the mother tongue. Over 90% of the
students in this class had ﬁ'ee or reduced payment for meals. Students were bussed
to school from all over the town and some spent over an hour on the way to and
from school.
Data Collection

Data were collected throughout the 1998-1999 school year (See Appendix
A). I wanted to capture the dynamics of this class at the beginning of the year and
then follow the class to see what changes, if any, took place over the year and how
these changes occurred. In order to see how Ellen prepares for the school year, I
was in the classroom for three mornings in August getting the room ready together

with her. The school was also very supportive of my research and included me in

46

the school “family.” The principal invited me to attend the whole day staff get-
together before the year began and I was with them each time there was a school
wide event, such as the whole day district professional development event, school
potluck, fund raising event, Unity Day celebration event, and end of the year staff
get-together.

As a participant observer, I tried to make my presence as normal to the
students as possible. First, I was there a lot, especially at the beginning of the year.
Second, Ellen told the students on the ﬁrst day of school who I was, why I was
there, what help they could ask ﬁ'om me, and what questions they should not ask
me. When Ellen was teaching, I would sit at the back of the room taking notes.
When the students were working individually or in groups, I would walk around
and students would ask me questions and I would help them. Sometimes I would
just sit at their table and listen to them. Both the students and the teacher
recognized me as part of their classroom community.

Data collection time was roughly divided into three intensive periods in
order to capture the changes at different times over the year. Altogether I observed
the students for 31 whole school days, 19 half days and 6 times when I went only
for Book Club activities. I observed the class a lot at the beginning of the year. For
the beginning 6 weeks, I was there in the classroom every day when school was in
session. I usually arrived at the classroom before the students came in, and left
after the school bus left. Then from mid January to early February, and in early

May, I did my mid-year and end of the year intensive data collections. I took ﬁeld

47

I...
4

notes on my observation each time I was there, audio taped some of the class
conversations, and video taped all the Book Club discussions and mini-lessons
except of the ﬁrst book. Besides observing what went on with the whole class, I
also chose six students for convenience and focus of data collection as the class
regrouped book clubs each time they had a new Book Club unit. With the six
focus students, I could follow this small number of students more closely in their
group discussions and Ellen always tried to put two and sometimes three focus
students in one group. All of the six focus students were of Asian backgrounds.
Four of them came from Vietnamese families and two were from Hmong families;
three of them were boys and three girls; three were in the fourth grade and three in
the ﬁfth grade. I also collected their written responses for Book Club and some
other writings they did, including their “ME poems”, and stories they entered for a
writing contest. To measure students’ progress, I helped the teacher give the
Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) test, the Meta-comprehension strategy Index
(M81), and a reading and writing habits survey at the beginning and the end of the
year.

Additionally, I interviewed Ellen formally 6 times during the school year,
each interview lasting between 1 and 1.5 hours. The ﬁrst two interviews focused
more on understanding Ellen’s beliefs of diverse students, of their learning, and of
her teaching. Questions included the following: “What strengths do you see your
students have and what are some of their needs? What expectations do you have

for your students? What roles do you see yourself playing in their learning? Why

48

do you implement the literature-based instruction, Book Club, as your literacy
instruction? What kind of learning environment do you aim to create in your
classroom? What kind of power relations do you want to establish between you
and your students, and why?” Later interviews focused more on her instructional
behaviors and decisions. Based on what I observed in the room, I asked Ellen why
she was doing things the way she did and how she thought everything was going.
At the same time, I had many informal talks and exchanges with Ellen during
lunch breaks and sometimes after school about certain behaviors I noticed of the
students. I also interviewed the 6 focus students both at the beginning and at the
end of the year to get their background information and I also asked them what
they thought about themselves, their class, their teacher, and their learning

experiences, especially with Book Club.

Data Analysis

I wanted to know whether students with diverse cultural and linguistic
backgrounds in this class would learn to participate in Book Club discourse or not
and if so, how their learning was facilitated over the year. I wanted to ﬁnd out
what it was like at the beginning of the year; what the teacher did to try to create a
learning community; how the students responded to the Book Club curriculum;
how the teacher helped students develop the knowledge and skills needed to
participate in reading, writing and talking about books; and how opportunities

were created for the students to practice and learn to participate.

49

Different questions demanded different approaches to data collection and
data analysis. At ﬁrst I used a synchronous approach to analyze the data
thematically. While I was still collecting data, I grouped my ﬁeld notes and the
teacher interviews respectively and coded them according to a long list of
categories of teacher behavior, such as community building, valuing students’
opinions, disciplining students, praising students, etc. Though coding the data
helped me familiarize myself with the data, I did not seem to get anywhere with
regard to pattern identiﬁcation. I continued to interact with my dissertation
directors and tried to ﬁnd themes that would help me make sense of the data.

Then I turned to a developmental approach to examine the data across the
whole school year, trying to identify interactional patterns between the teacher and
students and among the students at different times. I focused on who was/were
doing the talk and what they were talking about. Patterns began to emerge. For the
early observations, massed at the beginning of the year, teacher telling and teacher
frustration dominated my interpretive comments. For the mid year observations,
the teacher talk switched from telling to modeling and scaffolding — she was trying
to get students to talk to each other about the text and assisting them in doing so.
Near the end of the year, the subjects and the contents of my comments focused
predominantly on the students and what they were doing instead of the teacher. As
it turned out, a straightforward, developmental lens proved the most useful
approach to examining the data; this in turn helped to discern the patterns of

change over the year even clearer.

50

Reﬂecting on this process, I also realize that as a researcher, I see different
things even in the same piece of conversation at different times because of the
mind-set and expectations I have at the moment. I remember that when I
transcribed an early community share conversation from mid-November, I was
really thrilled to see students’ active participation after watching their struggles
and the teacher’s efforts in pushing the students to talk during their ﬁshbowl
discussions in September and October. The tallies of the number of times students
talked and the number of students who participated in the discussion made me
very excited. But looking back at this early piece of data and re-examining it after
data collection ended at the end of the study and after having observed a year’s
worth of grth in students’ participation, I noticed that underneath this high level
of participation students shifted topics frequently, spoke across one another, and
focused more on factual information in the text. It was not a bad conversation at
all, but something was missing that should have been there to render it as a more
thoughtful and expert-like piece of literary discourse. I was able to notice these
things that I could not do six months earlier because seeing what students were
able to do in their discussions at the end of the year gave me new reference points
and my expectations of students’ participation differed as a result. Together both
sets of analysis helped to tell the story of change.

The process of data analysis for me was a continuous process of sense
making and pattern identiﬁcation. The data were rich and had so much to offer.

The more I engaged with them, the better picture I was able to construct of how

51

this group of students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned and
were assisted to join in the “grand conversations” about books. As Glaser and
Strauss (1967) pointed out, qualitative data analysis is a process of engaging in

constant comparative analysis, through which patterns of change emerge.

52

CHAPTER 4
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SHARED LITERACY PRACTICE

This study aims to explore the road traveled by Ellen, the teacher, and her
linguistically diverse students in developing a particular approach to literature-
based reading program, i.e., Book Club, over a school year. I examine the process
in which this group of fourth/ﬁfth graders learned to participate in reading,
writing, and talking about books of quality literature, and the role the teacher
played in facilitating their learning. This chapter focuses speciﬁcally on how
students learned to acquire a literary discourse that enabled them to participate in
Book Club discussions.

For purposes of analysis and reporting, the year divided itself conveniently
into three stages (see Appendix A). The ﬁrst stage was relatively brief and
exploratory in nature. It began on the second school day when Book Club was ﬁrst
introduced to the students and ended on the day when the class had their ﬁrst
ﬁshbowl discussion on September 22. In this stage, the class was introduced to the
various Book Club learning activities while working with the book, Stone Fox.
This exploratory stage evidenced both the teacher’s and the students’ initial efforts
to construct the meaning and practices of Book Club. During the ﬁrst stage, Book
Club activities were dominated by teacher talk and teacher-led talk. The second
stage lasted from late September to early February. This stage was marked by a
big increase in the time allotted for student-centered talk and the creation of more

public space for the teacher and the more knowledgeable peers to model and

53

scaffold literacy skills. The time and the space allowed the students the
opportunities to observe, appropriate, practice, and develop their knowledge and
skills needed for participation in the literary discourse. The third stage extended
ﬁ'om mid-February to the end of the school year. It was characterized by a shift of
power and control ﬁom the teacher to the students in leading the discussions as
they gradually acquired the Book Club discussion genre. In reality, the three stages
were not as clear-cut as my description implies. The students were engaging in
Book Club discussions and practicing the knowledge and skills needed for
participation long before they “took over” in February, while Ellen continued to
model and scaffold ways of reading, writing, talking and thinking long after that
takeover. The journey toward the development of a shared practice began with
excitement, challenges, and resistance on the part of the students, and persistence
on the part of the teacher. It ended with students’ increased expertise knowledge
and skills in participating in a literary discourse about books.

In this chapter, I ﬁrst describe brieﬂy the Book Club practices in this
classroom. Then I trace the route Ellen and her students took to develop a shared
literary discourse as students shifted from being peripheral participants to more
knowledgeable participants in discussions through the three stages: (a) teaching by
telling in the ﬁrst stage, (b) teaching by modeling and scaffolding in the second
stage, and (c) learning by doing in the third stage. Finally I discuss what students

learned beyond participation in discussions.

54

Book Club Implemented in Ellen's Classroom

Even though Book Club has a uniﬁed structure, not all teachers who
practice Book Club follow exactly the same model. Some teachers have the whole
class read and discuss the same book, while others have individual groups choose
their own books to read and talk about. Some teachers ask students to write free
responses from a list of prompt categories, and some give students the exact
questions to respond to. Even the sequence of implementing the activities may be
different. Some classes begin with reading the book, writing the response,
discussing in groups and then moving to community share (see McMahon et al.,
1997). Others, including Ellen, organize group and class discussions ﬁrst,
followed by mini-lesson, reading, and writing. In this section, I describe how Book
Club was implemented in Ellen’s classroom, including their daily schedules,
books they read, and their ﬁve Book Club learning activities: book clubs,
community share, mini-lesson, reading, and writing.

Ellen and her students engaged in Book Club every day except on half
school days or when special events occurred. In Ellen’s class, Book Club schedule
changed over the year based on students’ knowledge and skills in participating in
Book Club activities. At the beginning of the year, students engaged in more
whole class conversations about Book Club. Starting from their second Book Club
unit, their schedule became routinized, beginning with ﬁshbowl discussions
followed by mini-lesson, group reading and individual writing. As students gained

more participation skills, they began to include all students in small group

55

discussions, which they called “book clubs”. After that, the class convened for
community share when all groups could share with the whole class what they had
talked about. Table 2 outlines the Book Club schedule for the class on May 5,

1999. It more or less represents a typical day of Book Club from November to the

 

 

 

end of the year.
Table 2
mole Book Clab Schedplg
Time of Day Activity
11:50 Ellen checked to see who were not prepared for Book Club.
11:53 Students got into book clubs and began sharing and discussing the
reading in groups.
12:17 Students reassembled in whole-class community share.
12:27 Teacher conducted a mini-lesson and introduced the prompt
questions.
12:40 Lunch break.
1:30 Students gathered in their usual study groups and began taking turns

reading aloud today’s Book Club assignment. Some students listened
to the chapter on tape. When they ﬁnished reading, students wrote
their responses to the prompt questions individually.
2:15 Class stopped working on Book Club.
Nata. Based on ﬁeld notes for May 5, 1999.

A typical Book Club day began with discussions — ﬁrst the small group
discussion, followed by the whole class discussion. The mini-lesson was next,
followed by group reading and ending with individual writing. The discussions
and the mini-lesson usually lasted about 35 to 45 minutes. The reading and writing
time varied depending on the agenda of the day. If students didn't ﬁnish writing
their response to the prompt questions, they took it home to complete it.

At the beginning of the year, the class started Book Club at around 11:20

and ﬁnished by lunch break at 12:40. Later in the year, as in this sample, Ellen

56

changed to having book clubs and community share and, sometimes, conducting a
mini lesson before lunch followed by group reading and individual response
writing in the afternoon. Ellen felt that after the lunch break, students concentrated
more on their tasks.
MaterLals Usec_l

Over the school year, the class completed 9 Book Club units with 12 texts
(see Table 3). Ellen chose all the books based on what she believed to be good
books for Book Club, i.e., books that would support the various Book Club
components, and her experiences with previous students she had taught. The most
important criterion for Ellen in choosing a book was its potential to support rich
conversation. For Ellen, this meant that the books should have appealing topics,
rich context, and high interest potential. One common feature of the 12 texts was
their literary quality. All of them were generally acknowledged as modern classics
for young readers. Almost all books either won some literary award for children's
literature or were written by authors whose other works had won some literary

award.

57

Table 3

 

 

 

BoolgReapl for Book Chat;

Author Title Award Year
Gardiner, J. R. Stone Fox The Harper Trophy 1980
Naylor, P. R. Shiloh Newbery Medal 2 (1992) 1991
Curtis, C. P. The Watsons Go to Newbery Honor (1996) 1995

Birmingham: 1963
Lowry, L. Number the Stars Newbery Medal (1990) 1989
Konigsburg, E. L. The View from Saturday Newbery Medal (1997) 1996
Babbitt, N. Tuck Everlasting ALA Notable Book4 1975
Taylor, M. 5 Mississippi Bridge 1990
Song of the Tree 1975
The Friendship“ The Coretta Scott King 1987
Award (1988)
The Gold Cadillac* The Christopher Award 1987
(1988)
F enner, C. Yolonda's Genius Newbery Honor (1996) 1995
Creech, S. Walk Two Moons Newbery Medal (1995) 1994

 

* The class used a version that has both stories in one book.

Another important material artifact used in Book Club was a question sheet
for each book unit, which consisted of a list of questions designed to elicit student
daily responses. This sheet was referred to as a "prompt sheet" by the teacher and
the students. Ellen prepared these prompts and gave them to the students on the
ﬁrst day they started reading a new book. The prompts were organized into
lessons, and each lesson had a central theme with a cluster of questions on the
chapter(s) students read for a particular day. Some of the prompts focused on
helping students learn about the technical aspect of writing techniques; some

prompts focused on techniques that would promote understanding of the text, and

 

2 The Newbery award is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the
American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.
3 Natalie Babbitt is the Newbery winning author for Knee Knock Rise and the Search for Delicious.

" ALA Notables are given annually to books that are outstanding for that year by American Library Association.

5 Mildred Taylor is the Newbery winning author in 1977 for Roll of Thunder: Hearing My Cry.

58

some focused on interpreting the texts. Some other prompts required students to
connect what they read to their own personal experiences and formulate their own
views. Still other prompts aimed to help students develop critical thinking skills.
Occasionally, students would get a free choice prompt.

Book Clubs (Groap Discassion)

Book clubs (with small letters) refers to the small group discussions. These
usually occurred the day after students had read the chapter(s) and written the
response to the prompt questions. During book clubs, students gathered in small
book club groups of four to six and shared their responses to the prompts for the
day. They also asked each another questions and sometimes commented on what
each had written down. Similar to Raphael and McMahon (1997), who viewed
book clubs as "the center of the program", Ellen, the classroom teacher, valued
this sharing and interacting time most among the various Book Club activities. She
viewed it as a time when knowledge was constructed in a social setting and when
the more knowledgeable students could model ways of comprehending and
responding to texts. During the book club discussions, Ellen would sit with one
small group of students for the entire time. Occasionally she would say something,
but mostly she would just listen and jot down notes of evaluation or record
interesting ideas as they emerged in the conversations. At the same time she kept
an eye on the other book club discussions. Two minutes before the end time of the

discussion, Ellen would tell the students to use the remaining two minutes to sum

59

 

   

Ir“)

 

6
1

«\ﬂ

up what they had talked about in preparation for the community share discussions.
The group conversation was usually about 15 to 20 minutes long.

Each time the class began a new book unit, new groups (book clubs) were
formed. Students were asked to write down the names of three people, but not
their friends, whom they would like to be with in the new group, and then Ellen
assigned students to groups. Asking students to recommend people for their group
might create some trust among the members. If they ended with people they
wished for, they were happy. If they didn’t get the people they wanted, they still
felt that the others in their group might have chosen them, which could support a
positive feeling toward each other.

Community Shape (Class Discussion)

After students discussed their responses to the prompts in book clubs, they
convened into the large group referred to as Community Share. They sat at six
round tables placed in the shape of a horse-shoe opening to face the teacher in the
front. Occasionally, especially at the beginning of the year, Ellen would ask some
students to adjust their chairs so that they would be able to see everybody in the
room. Students were encouraged to speak without raising their hands, joining in
conversation when they saw the other person had ﬁnished talking. During the
community share, Ellen would make sure that each group was given a chance to
share what they had talked about in their group. Sometimes students raised
questions for the whole class; other times, students from other book club groups

would ask them questions or offer their comments. It was a time when students

60

 

{RN

   

could raise their own concerns to talk about. As the year progressed, students
began to generate more questions for discussion during community share as they
gained more knowledge and skills for effective participation and felt more
comfortable raising questions and speaking out. Students responded to each other.
Sometimes they built on each other's comments to construct meaning. At other
times, they challenged one another's thinking and explored new ideas. During this
time, Ellen usually acted as a coordinator, eliciting ideas ﬁ'om as many students as
possible. She intervened only when she felt students had dwelt on one topic too
long, or she needed to ask the student to elaborate or clarify a point. The class
discussion usually lasted about 15 to 20 minutes.
Mini-Lesson

Mini-lessons took place immediately after community share. The length of
the lesson varied, depending on the writing prompt for a particular day. If a new
topic was presented or if students seemed to have difﬁculty with the topic
previously presented, Ellen would spend more time talking about it; otherwise, the
time spent on mini-lesson was usually short. During the mini-lesson, Ellen would
introduce the topic of the day, for example, Author's Craft, or Me and the Book.
She would make sure that the students understood the prompt. If it was hard,
especially at the beginning of the year, she would ask other students to suggest, or
sometimes suggested herself possible topic sentences or key words to be used in
responding to the prompts. For example, they discussed about how to write

Compare and Contrast using different graphic organizers and shared examples of

61

 
 

/(7l

lead

 

«ea

comparing one's own life with the life of the character. Sometimes, the mini-lesson
was used for discussing special features of the book, such as character
development, story line, or themes of the book.
Group Reading

At the end of mini-lesson, students went back to their usual group to read
the day’s reading assignment. Ellen arranged these groups so that they would
consist of both boys and girls, whose personality and temperament more or less
matched each other and whose academic levels varied. Ellen intended that
members of these groups would help and support each other in their daily learning.
Sometimes they did group activities for science, math, or social studies. While
new Book Club groups were formed for each book unit, these small groups
remained stable all the year round unless Ellen felt the need to change someone
occasionally. During group reading time, the four or ﬁve students who scored the
lowest on the SORT test at the beginning of the year and had more difﬁculty in
reading would go to listen to the story on tape. This group of “listeners” changed
as new ESL students arrived and the year progressed. In the group reading,
students took turns reading a page aloud before another student continued. When
one student was reading, others would follow the lines silently. Sometimes if one
didn't know how to read a word and stopped, somebody else in the group would
read the word for him/her. When the chapters were too long, Ellen would have
students listen to part of them on tape and read the rest in their groups. However,

students always listened to the ﬁrst chapter of a book on tape if Ellen had it

62

 

(“lg

 

available; otherwise, Ellen would read it out loud herself to the whole class. She
wanted to use the opportunity to demonstrate to the students what good and ﬂuent
reading aloud was like. Students were encouraged to read and re-read the chapters
themselves in completing their responses to the writing prompts. The students who
listened to tapes in class could also borrow copies of the tape to listen to at home.
Individual Writing

When they ﬁnished reading for the day, students began to write to the
prompt. Usually students were asked to write two to four paragraphs, each one
addressing a question or a couple of questions in the prompt. The prompt consisted
of open-ended questions, asking students to summarize what they read, to analyze
it, to connect it to their own lives, or to formulate their own opinions about it. The
prompt questions gave students the opportunities to think about what they had
read, to connect their own experience and other texts, and to give supporting
evidence for why they said what they had said. With some topics, such as Me and
the Book, Ellen would give two prompts from which students could pick. Usually
one of them was asking students to compare their own similar experiences with
the character's experiences in the book, and the other would be putting themselves
in the character's shoes and thinking about what they would do if they were in the
character’s situation. She provided students with the choice so that if a student did
not have experiences similar to the characters in the book or if they didn't want to
talk about their own life experiences, they would have other equally acceptable

options available to them. Usually students were given about 10 to 25 minutes to

63

write their responses to the given prompt in class. If they didn't ﬁnish the writing,
it became part of their homework for the day.
Teaching by Telling:
The First Stage of the Journey

The beginning of the school year is an important period of time to establish
the routines and practices that the teacher and the students will follow in a
classroom. In this classroom, Ellen employed mainly the method of telling, or
explicit instruction, in helping the class learn the general rules to participate in
Book Club activities at this beginning stage, though she also attempted to involve
students in this telling process. In this section, I examine how Book Club was
introduced, how the class experienced their ﬁrst book unit, and what challenges
the students were facing.

Motion of Book Clap

Book Club was introduced to the students at the beginning of the school
year. In the introduction, Ellen provided three types of support to help make Book
Club successful. First, she emphasized the importance of creating a classroom
learning community in which students respected each other, shared with each
other, and learned from each other. Second, Ellen made explicit to the students
what her expectations of them were and encouraged the students to learn to be
responsible for their own learning by having them evaluate their group discussions
and their writing responses. Finally, she discussed with students how to ask “fat,

juicy questions” and how to write for a “know-nothing audience”, two key skills to

 

(is!

 

 

participate in Book Club. Discussions of all these issues helped students
understand what Book Club was and how to participate in the learning activities.
In this section, I discuss each of these three types of support.
Creating a Collaborative Leagning Community

On the second school day Ellen spent about 40 minutes introducing what
Book Club was and what students should do to participate. For Ellen, to make
Book Club successful, creating a conducive learning environment was essential.
Ellen also tried to help students see that talking to each other about books played
an important role in their learning, that they all had different ideas, but their ideas
were all valuable because they all came with different but unique experiences. In
her introduction, Ellen also attempted to involve the students in the conversation.

In her ﬁrst introduction to Book Club, Ellen emphasized the role of talking
about books in learning. From the ﬁrst day on, she tried to send the message that
"talking about books" would be a big part of Book Club and that they could help
and learn from each other through talking together about books. She also told the
students that having something for them to talk about was one of the criteria by
which she chose the books. She said to the students, “I’m going to choose a book
that you’re going to have something to talk about. I can guarantee you that all the
books I’ve chosen will have lots and lots and lots to talk about.”

To engage the students, Ellen asked them, "Why do you think I will give
You time to talk about it when we read the book? What are the reasons for that?"

One student said they would know what the book was about. Ellen challenged her,

65

asking if they would know what it was about by just reading it themselves and

without talking about it with others. She pushed the students to think the role of

discussion in their learning.

Ellen:

Adeline:

Ellen:

Adeline:

Ellen:

Adeline:

Ellen:

Adeline:

Ellen:

Adeline:

Ellen:

What might I have learned from talking about the book that I would
not learn if I'm not talking about the book? Question, why do we
talk about it?

Sometimes you learn more stuff that we don't know.

How is that, Adeline?

[Inaudible.]

Who tells you or what tells you more?

Myself?

Yourself? While you're talking about it? Who do you talk with
when you talk about it?"

Somebody.

Who might be helping you learn more stuff?

The book?

You and the book? Then why talk about it? Why take 15 or 20
minutes talking about it?

(Transcript, September 1, 1998)

Adeline thought that through talking about the books, they might learn

"more stuff' that they didn't know. However, Adeline seemed to focus on the

reader herself and the book she was reading. She didn't seem to be ready to think

in terms of other participants and how their interactions over the book would

affect each other's learning. Ellen continued to push students to think about the

importance of talking to each other. She said to the class, "If somebody else

doesn't know, you might help them. So it is a two-way street here. [Writing on the

board 'you (- book -) others'.] Okay, you’ve got the book right here, and you help

others and others talk to you." Ellen echoed what a student said when she repeated

"you help others and others talk to you." (Transcript, September 1, 1998)

66

In order to create a learning environment in which students felt respected
and comfortable sharing ideas and discussing issues of their own concern, Ellen
tried to disabuse students of the idea that the teacher was the person who had the
ﬁnal, correct answers to all questions in their discussion. She tried to inculcate the
idea that they all had unique life experiences and they could all learn from each
other. She told the students, "You might know lots of things that I don't know.
Okay, you have 23 different life experiences and I only have one. So your
different life experiences may give you information to help your peers in your
group better than I might be able to do by myself. " (Transcript, September 1,
1998)

Ellen also made the point to the students that they might be different, but
the difference didn't mean that one was right and the other was wrong. Ellen told
the students that many times in their reading of the book, there would be no right
answer; instead, there would be lots of answers. She said:

We're going to give you opportunities, when you're reading, to think about

[issues], and I would like to give you a prompt which Tu might answer

differently, Freddy might answer differently, and Hai might answer

differently and Michael might answer differently. All four of you might

have a different answer, but you all back up what you say. You can say, I

think this is bla, bla, bla. You explain yourself. (Transcript, September 1,

1998)

She asked the students to think, “What if my answer and Rico's answer are
completely different? Does it mean he's correct and I'm wrong or I'm right and he's

wrong?” Ellen further explained that she tried to get away from using the word

answer but response instead. “Usually with answer people think as right or wrong.

 

67

Ir"

 

\

 

   

While with response, we can have different responses but we could all be right.”
(Transcript, September 1, 1998)

In the ﬁrst introduction to Book Club, Ellen attempted to help her students
understand that (a) they could help and Ieam ﬁom each other through talking
about the books, (b) they, the students, might know more than the teacher as they
all had different life experiences, and (0) people all have different opinions but
there may be no wrong ideas to certain questions. These understandings helped
create a supportive learning environment for these students with diverse cultural
and linguistic backgrounds and made them feel safe to express their ideas in
public.
ﬁrmingto be Responsible Learners

Ellen made explicit her expectations of students in Book Club and involved
them in assessing themselves. On September 3 before they attempted their ﬁrst
group discussion (book clubs), Ellen handed out the “Student Self-Evaluation for
Book Club Discussions” sheet to the students (see Appendix B). She asked the
students to use the sheet to check their own behaviors during group discussions.
The class spent about 25 minutes talking about the criteria and how to use the
evaluation sheet. The sheet listed six categories, each being rated on a scale, and
an additional checklist of ﬁve off-task behaviors. The class ﬁrst talked brieﬂy the
meaning of evaluation and self-evaluation. They then went through the off-task
behaviors, which included writing on the log, playing with pencil or other object,

getting into other folders/work, talking with someone else in the group, not being

68

on topic, and getting out of the group to wander. They also had a discussion about
why these behaviors were off-task and how they would impede their discussions.
Some students said these were off-task behaviors because when one did these
things, one was not listening and participating in the group discussions. Besides,
some behaviors were also distracting others.

After that, the class discussed the six categories to be used to evaluate their
participation in the discussions. These categories included (a) is prepared, (b)
shares ideas, (c) listens and responds, (d) asks fat, juicy questions, (c) has positive
attitude, and (f) off-task behavior. These were each rated in terms of evaluative
symbols, such as plus (exceptional), check plus (very good), check (okay), check
minus (not good), and minus (not participating). The class ﬁrst talked brieﬂy about
the meaning of these evaluative symbols. Then they went through each of the
categories one by one. Ellen told the students that the ﬁrst criteria, being
“prepared”, meant having read the assigned chapter(s), written the entry for the
writing log and done a good job on it. She emphasized to the students that being
prepared was very important and said that if they were not prepared, "you're not
going to be a very good participant in the discussion” (Transcript, September 3,
1998). From the very beginning of the school year, Ellen was trying to cultivate
students’ commitment to their learning and their classroom learning community.

“Sharing ideas” also included listening and responding to other people's
responses. Ellen told the students, "To discuss is not just to share what you know,

share my paper and move on. A discussion is when you listen to other people and

69

you respond to them whether it's a question or you agree or disagree." She also
showed students speciﬁc things they could do or say in a discussion. She said to
them, "If I give you a question response, or someone reads theirs, you listen to
what they are saying and then you say something in response to them, not just say
'Okay, who's next?‘ You might ask some why-questions or say 'I thought about
that too', or 'I agree with that because ...', or you say 'I disagree because ...'." Ellen
also assured the students that they would get better at it as they kept practicing.
She told the students, "I don't expect everyone to be perfect the ﬁrst day or even
the ﬁrst book; but each book we read, I'm watching people to do better."
(Transcript, September 3, 1998)

The next category for the evaluation was asking “fat, juicy questions”. As
they had already had a big discussion on this two days earlier, Ellen reminded the
students of the conversation they had and reiterated that “a fat, juicy question is a
good question. It is open-ended. There’s no one right answer. A lot of people can
say a lot of other things about it” (Transcript, September 3, 1998). Introducing the
next category, “positive attitude”, Ellen told the students, “Positive attitude is very
easy to see. You’re participating; you’re doing your part. You know, you’re mad
about something, you’re forgetting you’re mad about it, and you’re participating in
the discussion.” She also shared with them the story of a couple of her previous
year's students who, at the very beginning of the year, didn’t like what was going

on and they developed a bad attitude. But “by the end of the year, they said okay

7O

and they thought about it and they joined their discussions. You know really it
isn’t worth it” (Transcript, September 13, 1998).

To summarize, the discussion on the student self-evaluation sheet gave the
teacher and the students another opportunity to talk about and review some of the
key elements that would enable students to experience more successful
participation. On September 9, Ellen introduced the term "one-foot voice" right

before they broke into groups, a term she referred to frequently later during the

year. She told the students to keep their voices somewhat low so that they wouldn't
interfere with other groups' discussions.

On this day, Ellen also shared with the students her scoring rubrics for the
written responses. In order to get a 4.0 grade, the response entry should meet the
following four criteria:

0 Entry focuses on designated topic.
0 Entry is written for a "know-nothing" audience.

Entry provides at least three or more well-thought ideas from the text, real

life, or other novels to support writing.

0 Entry is titled and dated.
(Scoring Rubric Handout)

To Ellen, focusing on the topic, writing for a know-nothing audience, and
making intertextual and personal connections were of primary importance. Getting
the codes correct was secondary. She told the students, "My ﬁrst priority is what
you write. That's the most important thing. The next thing is: do you have

complete sentences, punctuations, capital letters?" (Transcript, September 8,

1998). From the beginning of the year, Ellen tried to let the students know her

71

expectations of them and their work and attempted to involve them in meeting her

expectations.

Asking F at, Juicy Qaestitmsang Writingor a Know-Nothing Audience

Another support that Ellen gave to the students was to teach them the two
important concepts and the practice that went with them, among other things. On
the second day’s introduction, Ellen discussed with the students how they should
participate in Book Club. They brainstormed ﬁrst and then Ellen showed them the
transparencies she had prepared on how and what to share during Book Club
discussions. The list of how to share included the following: keep conversation
going; respond to questions; elaborate response; challenge interpretations; clarify
ideas; include all members of the group; take turns; and stay on task. The list of
what to share included: elaborate written response; formulate questions; share
personal response or experience; constructing meaning evaluate text, move beyond
literal interpretations; ask fat juicy questions.

However, there were two key skills in participating in Book Club: (a)
asking fat, juicy questions and (b) writing for a know-nothing audience. Ellen
introduced asking fat, juicy questions the ﬁrst day she introduced Book Club.
They held an extensive discussion on formulating questions and they made a
distinction between fat, juicy questions and skinny/lean questions. Ellen
introduced the concept of fat, juicy questions ﬁrst:

Ellen: I have two types of questions that I'm going to talk about. One type

of questions I call [writing the word "fat, juicy questions!" on
overhead]. What do I call?

72

Students: Fat, juicy questions.

Ellen: Yes, they have a big, fat question mark, and I call them fat, juicy
questions.

(Transcript, September 1, 1998)

Ellen then gave students several examples for them to evaluate whether
they were fat, juicy questions, such as " What color is the boy's shirt?", "When was
he coming home?", "Where is her mom at?", and "Why did he decide to cut his
hair like that?". Though a few students ﬁrst said that "Where is her mom at" was a
fat juicy question because one had more to talk about, they thought that the last
one was a fat, juicy question. Ellen then explained what fat, juicy questions were
like. She said:

A fat, juicy question has no “yes/no” answer; no right answer.... A juicy

question makes you think about the story, and the response to fat, juicy

questions could be different, thinking of your group members. They are
open-ended. In other words, you can't answer that in two or three words.

There's no absolute answer to that. (Transcript, September 1, 1998)

She also told the students that fat, juicy questions will often begin with
“how do you think” or “why do you think”. In the following excerpt, Ellen not
only told the students explicitly that she expected only fat, juicy questions for
Book Club, she also showed the students more examples of the skinny type of
questions and advised them to re-read the text themselves if they have these types
of questions because they usually asked for speciﬁc information that can be
located in the texts.

Ellen: I'm going to challenge you that when you ask questions, ask fat juicy
questions when we do Book Club. I don't want any [pointing at the

word “lean” on the overhead and asking the class], what's this word?
Several Students: Lean.

73

Ellen: I don't want any lean questions. There's nothing like having a
discussion when somebody says, "How old is the boy?" and someone
else says, "10". And someone else says, "What color is the shirt he
was wearing?" "Red. Didn't you read? Didn't you see?" Those are
what?

Several Students: lean questions.

Ellen: Those are all lean, boring questions. Now if you don't know or not
sure [of the answers to those lean, boring questions], what should
you do to ﬁnd them out?

Several Students: Ask.

Ellen: Should you ask? What could you do? What would be a more direct
way while you were reading it?

Kelsey: Go back.

Ellen: Yes, go back and re-read. We don't want to waste our discussion
on these boring, thin questions.

(Transcript, September 1, 1998)

However as encouraging as she was for students to ask fat, juicy questions
and to respond to each other and to the prompts according to what they thought,
Ellen also cautioned them not to come up with unsupported ideas. She told the
students the following. To make her point, she paused after each question for them
to think.

Are you just coming up with some crazy, off the wall things? Are you

thinking about what's happening in the text, in the book to make you think

in certain way? Is it that you just come up with any odd ideas? Do you
think about what you know about in your own life? And what's happened in
the book so far? What do you consider? If I say, who is the man in the
yellow suit? You say, he is just some crazy guy, I don't know. Is that a good

response? (Transcript, September 1, 1998)

In addition to asking fat, juicy questions, students needed to learn a new
genre in writing their response to the prompts as well. Ellen wanted the students to

write for a “know-nothing audience”. She introduced the concept as an audience

who has not read the text and therefore knows nothing about the book. She put

74

writing samples on the overhead projector to let the students judge whether they
were written for a know-nothing audience or not. She told the students that they
needed to write for a know-nothing-audience for Book Club. However, she also
pointed out to the students that writing in this way was not the only way to write.
She listed times that it was okay not to give all the details such as when people
wrote to their teachers, ﬁ'iends, or even themselves in forms of letters and diaries.
In order to write for a know nothing audience, Ellen expected students to
provide evidence from the book or/and from their own experience to support their
responses, and she also told them what elements to include in their responses. The
latter was very important as many of these students were second language
learners. She told the students:
Be speciﬁc about the plot, the characters, where it's taking place.
When you do your responses, you shouldn't be starting your response with
he, she or it. Why not? Yes, a know-nothing audience doesn't know who
he/she/it is. When I give a prompt, I'll ask you why or why not. I'm going
to say “support your response”. I'm going to say “give evidence from the
text to support what you say”. Give examples to prove you're right. If
I'm asking a question, you can't just give a one-sentence answer. Support
what you say. You're going to say, “I know this because this is what
happened in my life or in another book.” Give three or four well-thought
ideas from the text. Focus on the designated topic, and make sure you're
writing for a know-nothing audience. (Transcript, September 8, 1998)
So within the ﬁrst ﬁve school days of the year, the teacher introduced a
new set of language and concepts, such as “fat, juicy questions”, and “writing for a
know-nothing audience” with the hope that as the year progressed, these terms and

the practices they named would gradually become part of the students’ vocabulary

as they participated in Book Club activities. However important this introductory

75

step was, hearing these concepts being named and talked about would not be
sufﬁcient to make the students able to practice them. The journey towards
developing a shared literary practice for this classroom community had just begun.
First Book Clab Unit: Stone Fox

Concurrent with Book Club introduction, the class began their ﬁrst book
unit. From September 2 to September 18, the class experimented with their. ﬁrst
book, Stone Fox. Ellen told the students that the book was chosen because "it is an
excellent book, easy, plain, and simple, but it has a lot of stuff in it" (Field notes,
September 3, 1998). This early stage of development of Book Club was
characterized by three features: (a) the initial student resistance towards
participating in Book Club, (b) the initial teacher’s effort to meet the students’
needs, and (c) the dominance of teacher or teacher-led talk in conversations about
Book Club.
Jamal Stadent Resistapnpe

Book Club was a big challenge for these students. It placed new demands
on their comprehension of the readings, their participation in discussions over
texts, their ways of thinking, and their language in expressing themselves both
orally and in writing. For example, in doing Book Club, students needed to
develop a new way of thinking, such as what questions to ask, what information
was considered important in a story line, what the key ideas of the story were,

what message(s) the author was trying to send with his/her descriptions, etc.

76

On top of the cognitive challenges, second language learners also faced
social and linguistic challenges. The learning in the Book Club program was based
a lot on group and class discussions. Students constructed meanings of texts
through sharing with each other their ideas, challenging each other's ideas, and
exploring meanings together. This collaboration called for a new set of skills.
Students needed to learn when to talk, with whom to talk to, and how to agree or
disagree with others. They also needed to learn new concepts and language
usage(s) for expressing their reasoning, providing support, and arguing their
points.

However, none of Ellen's students had engaged in Book Club activities
before they came to her class. They had no experience engaging in such intensive
reading, writing, and talking about book as demanded by Book Club. Due to the
challenges of Book Club, it became a source of frustration for the students and the
teacher during this ﬁrst stage of Book Club.

Right from the beginning, students expressed explicit and implicit
resistance to Book Club activities. First they didn't ﬁnish their reading/writing
assignments. Later as they experienced confusion with regard to writing response
to the prompt questions, some of which was caused by the unfamiliar language
structures, they started to ask questions about their confusion and made it known
explicitly to the teacher that they didn't get it. Kelsey asked "What does it mean
how you feel about him?", which was one of the prompt questions for the day

(Field notes, September 10, 1998). Thi asked what "up against" in the prompt

77

meant and others complained that they “didn't get it” (Field notes, September 1 1,
1998).

How well students engaged in their thinking and writing over the readings
and prompts played an important part in how well their conversation went in book
clubs and community share. With many students not completing their reading and
writing assignments, it was hard to carry on a conversation about the readings in
the group and class discussions. Near the end of the second week, Ellen started to
check with students to see if they were prepared before they went out for recess. If
they were not, they were required to catch up with their work during recess time.
In my ﬁeld notes, I noted "in checking the writing responses, Ellen asked a lot of
students to give more examples to support their arguments. Many students worked
on their responses during the recess time" (Field notes, September 10, 1998). I
also noted "Many students forgot. If they wrote, they wrote little" (Field notes,
September 11, 1998). Getting students prepared for Book Club continued to be a
major challenge for the teacher in the second stage of development of Book Club
as well.

Close Observation of Group Discpssion Demonstrations

Besides checking students’ homework assignments and talking to them
about the importance of being prepared to ensure productive discussion, Ellen
made a series of efforts to help students overcome their initial difﬁculties and their
resistance to Book Club. She discussed more extensively in mini-lessons how to

write a response to the prompts. She tried to provide more assistance to students

78

on how answer directly to the prompt questions, how to pull out the evidence from
the book to support their argument, and how to interact with each other in their
small groups. Ellen also created opportunities for the students to observe what
discussions about texts were like among more "expert-like" peers. She showed
students a group discussion segment from the Book Club tape on Day Eight and
invited some students from the previous year to demonstrate a group discussion on
Day Nine.

The tape segment was only about two minutes long, but it was with real
students talking in a real classroom. After the class viewed the group discussion in
the tape, the teacher and the students discussed what they noticed in their
observation. Ellen was trying to help the students see what would make a good
group discussion.

Ellen: Were they going around the circle and say “Well, you go ﬁrst and

then 1”?

Students: No.

Ellen: What else? Kelsey?

Kelsey: They were listening to each other.

Ellen: They were listening and responding. They were listening and
responding. What else did you see? Thahn?

Thahn: They had positive attitude.

Ellen: They had very positive attitude. What else did you notice
about the discussion? Uh, JR?
JR' They ask fat, juicy questions.

Ellen: Uh, They, they asked fat juicy questions. Yes, they did. Alicia?

Alicia: (inaudible)

Ellen: They, I don’t think uh, they were using their own personal what?

Michael: Ideas.

Ellen: Own personal response, own personal opinion, own personal ideas.
What else were they doing?

Michael: Sharing ideas.

79

Ellen:

Thahn:
Ellen:
Thahn:
Ellen:

Sharing ideas, we’ve already said that. Anything else? Were they
just going in the circle? Round robin? Uh, Thahn?

(inaudible)

Pardon me?

They agree with each other.

Okay, they agree with each other.

(Transcript, September 14, 1998)

In this discussion, students noticed several key elements necessary for a

good group discussion, such as the group was listening and responding to each

other; they had a positive attitude; they asked fat, juicy questions; they shared their

own personal ideas and experiences; and they agreed with each other. At the same

time, Ellen also directed students’ attention to things that they didn’t notice

themselves. She questioned students whether it would “still be okay” to disagree

with each other and then helped students understand that it would be okay so long

as "they did in a positive way and they backed themselves up".

Ellen:

Students:
Ellen:
Student:
Ellen:
Alicia:
Ellen:

Students:
Ellen:

Okay, they agree with each other. But what happens if they disagree,
would that still be okay?

Yeah.

So long as they did what?

[inaudible]

Pardon me. I heard it but I don’t know where it came from. Alicia?
[inaudible]

They did in a positive way and they backed themselves up. They
didn’t say, uh, one of the boys said, “that’s stupid”, he was talking
about something in the uh

Book,

The book, he wasn’t talking about someone else’s idea. Okay,
you are going to be having opportunities to do this.

Viewing the group discussion about a book on tape and talking about how

the group members participated in the discussion seemed to have inspired Ellen’s

80

students. When it was time to go home in the afternoon, almost all students took
their Book Club folders with them.

The next day, Ellen invited four students from her previous year to come to
demonstrate a ﬁshbowl group discussion about the book they were reading in their
class. These students continued to engage in Book Club this year with their ﬁfth
grade teacher. Ellen’s students knew these guest discussants, with whom they
mingled a lot on the play-ground and during various POD (Projects of Discovery)
times — the school-wide learning activities/centers for students as alternatives to
lunch recess. Their demonstration gave Ellen's students the opportunity to see
directly what book discussion was like in action.

Before the ﬁshbowl demonstration, students discussed what to watch for
and included all the key ideas from their self-evaluation sheet. They decided they
would observe to see if the discussants wrote for a know-nothing audience, if they
would ask fat, juicy questions, and if they had positive attitude. They would also
observe how the group would share with each other, and how they would listen
and respond to each other. After the ﬁshbowl demonstration, Ellen asked the
group many questions so the discussants ended up sharing a lot with the class on
how to respond to the writing prompts, and the importance of being prepared to
have good discussions. They also shared with the class their favorite books and the
ﬁan they had in reading them, especially when they got into them. Ellen also
pointed out to the students that the guest group discussants agreed and disagreed

with each other on some of the things, but they approached them in a positive way

81

and by giving evidence from the book to support what they said. After the guest
discussants left, Ellen continued to share with the students what she noticed of the
discussion. She said that the group discussants could hear each other; that they all
focused on the person who was speaking and no one was playing with pencils or
folders; and that they were all prepared. One student raised the point that the group
was conﬁrsed over something in their discussion. Ellen thought that was when
they disagreed whether there was a river or not, and she told the students this was
exactly the purpose of Book Club discussion. She said, "I think they were trying to
clarify. One person says 'no, there is not a river' and another person explains. So
that is one purpose of a book club discussion, when you can't make ideas clear in
your head" (Field notes, September 15, 1998).
Mame of Teacher TMTeacher-Led Talk

The class worked on Stone Fox for 11 days in the ﬁrst three weeks. This
period was marked by a high percent of teacher talk or teacher-led talk about Book
Club and how to participate in Book Club activities. There was very little student-
centered discussion as in either book clubs or community share. During the 11
days when the class worked on Stone Fox, they spent an average of 71 minutes
each day for Book Club. Most of the Book Club time was used by the teacher to
introduce what Book Club was, to engage students in teacher-led talks on how
students should participate in Book Club discussions, or to provide instruction on
how to respond to the writing prompts. To be exact, these three types of teacher

talk and teacher-led talk took up an average of 37 minutes each day while student

82

had only 3 minutes per day to talk or share among themselves (i.e., during book

clubs and community share). The class time given to students to read the book and

write the responses consisted of 31 minutes per day in average (see Table 4).

Table 4

Day by Day Coant of the Time Spent on Bock Club Activities in the First Stage;

 

 

Date Student- Time Teacher Talk/ Time Student Time Total
Centered (min.) Teacher-Led Talk (min.) Reading (min.) (min.)
Talk & Writing
9-1 Introduction to 42 42
Book Club
9-2 Mini lesson 24 Reading 11 55
Writing 20
9-3 Book club 9 Talking about 26 Reading 12 76
Community 3 self-evaluation
share sheet
Mini lesson 20
9-8 Talking about 47 Reading 26 83
writing for a
know-nothing
audience 10
Mini-lesson
9-9 Book clubs 10 Teacher talk 15 Reading/ 28 83
Community 10 Mini-lesson 20 Writing
share
9-10 Teacher-led talk 21 Reading/ 35 85
Mini-lesson 29 Writing (30)* (30)
9-1 1 Teacher-led talk 16 Reading/ 35 75
Mini-lesson 24 Writing (40)* (40)
9-14 Watch and talk 13 Reading/ 52 80
about the tape Writing
Mini-lesson 15
9-15 Guest ﬁshbowl 20 Reading/ 50 77
and teacher-led Writing
talk
Mini-lesson 7

 

83

(table continues)

Table 4 (continued)

 

 

Date Student- Time Teacher Time Student Time Total
Centered (min.) Talk/Teacher- (min.) Reading & (min.) (min.)
Talk Led Talk Writing
9-17 Teacher-led talk 7 Writing 20 59
over the guest
ﬁshbowl
Mini-lesson on 32
Theme
9-1 8 Teacher 1 8 Students 50 68
introducing self- tidying up
evaluation reading logs

 

Note. Based on ﬁeld notes on the ﬁrst Book Club unit.
* Time spent on writing Book Club responses during recess time.

Table 5

Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Clab Activities in the First Stage;

 

Student-Centered Teacher Student Reading Total Time
Talk (min.) Talk/Teacher-Led and Writing (min.) (min.)
Talk (min.)

 

Total Average Total Average Total Average Total Average
11 days Per Day 11 days Per Day 11 days Per Day 11 days Per Day
32 3 406 37 339 31 783 71

 

hm, Based on ﬁeld notes on the ﬁrst Book Club unit.

Working with Stone Fox gave the teacher and the students an initial
experience with Book Club. This was also an exploratory period for them to ﬁnd
out the expectations, the potentials, and the needs they had, as well as direction for
what actions to take next. During this time, Ellen introduced students to the
concepts and practices of participating in Book Club, and students had the
opportunities to engage in all the Book Club activities, i.e., book clubs,
community share, mini-lesson, reading the book, and writing responses to

prompts. This stage was characterized by high teacher talk/teacher-led talk and

84

little student talk. When the class began the second book, they started to engage in
student-centered talk everyday in the form of ﬁshbowl discussions. Each day, one
group would conduct a ﬁshbowl group discussion when they shared their
responses to the chapter(s) they read for the day and discussed about them. The
ﬁshbowl also provided Ellen another opportunity to model how to participate in
talking about books in group.
Bool_( Clab Challengg

In this section, I discuss the challenges of Book Club faced by this group of
diverse students at the beginning of the year by describing (a) the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl
discussion, (b) the kind of questions students asked of each other, and (c) a
speciﬁc example in which JR experienced great difﬁculty in expressing his view
that was different from the majority view. Some evidence offered here to support
my claims actually occurred in the beginning of the second stage. The two stages
overlapped with each other because the criteria for distinguishing the second stage
from the ﬁrst one was how the teacher organized the learning activities and her
teaching techniques. Though the teacher released the podium/ﬂoor to the students
by having them engage in ﬁshbowl discussions, it didn’t mean that students knew
how to take it automatically. During the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl discussion, no real
communication took place except for deciding who should share next. Though Tu
made one comment and asked one question, his peers didn’t respond. Another
difﬁculty posed for these students by Book Club was asking the right type of

questions that would give students the opportunities to think and express their

85

ideas. The last piece of evidence documenting the challenge of Book Club was the
difﬁculty they experienced in expressing opinions different from other members of
the group.
First Fishbowl

The class had their own ﬁrst ﬁshbowl discussion on September 22. They
were reading their second book, Shiloh. The ﬁshbowl group was chosen by the
teacher to engage in a live discussion while the rest of the class sat watching and
evaluating them. Up to this time, the class had observed a book clubs discussion
on tape and a ﬁshbowl discussion by a group of students their teacher had taught
the year before. The writing prompt the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl group responded to was:

Character Map Construct a character map for Marty. Remember to include
how he thinks, feels, acts and his relationships with others.

The ﬁshbowl group consisted of 4 students, two boys (Osman and Tu) and
two girls (Rosie and Maria). Before the ﬁshbowl started, Ellen gave the rest of the
class each an evaluation sheet and asked them to grade how the people in the
ﬁshbowl participated in the discussion and how well they had prepared for the
discussion. In my ﬁeld notes, I noted the following about Tu’s sharing in the ﬁrst
ﬁshbowl:

Tu ﬁrst shared his reading log. He was well prepared and wrote about all

aspects of a character map explained the day before. When he ﬁnished,

everybody sat quietly and looked at each other. Ellen tried to get some
responses ﬁ'om the other members in the group. She asked, "Have you got
some response to him? All three of you? Do you agree with everything?

What speciﬁc thing do you agree with him? Or do you disagree with
anything he has said?

86

After each question, Ellen waited and there was a long silence. The three
students in the group responded to the questions by looking at each other,
sideways or down, and shaking their heads slightly. No one said anything. Finally
Ellen told the group, "Remember this, you need to ask each other questions and
think about what he's said." Then Rosie read her written response to the prompt
and Tu suggested that she use the words he or him instead of Marty all the time.
After that, Maria shared hers. No one said anything when she ﬁnished reading.
They looked at each other for a while and ﬁnally Rosie gestured Osman to begin.
Osman mumbled only one sentence, "Marty feels happy about Shiloh." Then Tu
asked Osman how he felt about Marty and what he did to be nice to Shiloh.
Osman looked at him but said nothing to respond to the questions.

At the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl, students didn't know what to say to each other and
how to carry on a conversation about the book in a small group. They simply read
what responses to the prompt each wrote and there were long pauses. They had
difﬁculty in responding to each other's sharing, in elaborating on one's own ideas,
and in managing the ﬂoor of conversation.

When the group ﬁnished their "discussion", Ellen ﬁrst asked the audience
to judge if the group were prepared or not, showing them each of their writings.
Then she asked the class to comment on their performance. One student said that
he could not hear what Osman was talking; another student asked why the group

didn't ask each other questions, except for Tu. The teacher stressed again that they

87

needed to ask each other questions and respond to what other people said. She told
the class that a discussion was different from sharing.
The KianQurestions Students Asl_g_e_¢at the Beginning of the Year

As evidenced in the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl discussion, one big difﬁculty that
students had in engaging in conversations about books was that they didn't know
how to respond to each other’s sharing. Students didn't know what questions to
ask, even though on the second school day, Ellen made a clear distinction between
"skinny questions" and the "fat, juicy questions". When introducing Book Club,
she showed the students examples of both types of questions and pointed out to the
students that the former usually expect a right answer while the latter usually
began with "What do you think about ...?” Or “Why do you think that ...?"
Students seemed to understand the concept of "fat, juicy questions".

However, when they began their book clubs and community share, students
didn't know what questions to ask and how to ask them. Even when they asked a
question, they were not clear themselves why they asked the question they did and
what to expect from the person who would respond to the question. The questions
students asked or comments they made early in the school year fell into three
types. The ﬁrst type of questions focused on the form, such as the words they
used, rather than the meanings they were making. For example, Tu suggested
Rosie use some other words like h_e or him instead of the boy's name, Marty
(Transcript, September 22, 1998). Michael pointed out to Tu the fact that he said

something twice (Transcript, December 3, 1998). Adeline asked Kelsey where she

88

put the word m on her comparison chart (Transcript, December 7, 1998). A
second type of questions were "skinny questions", to borrow Ellen's term. For
example, JR asked Shele, "Where did Judd kick Shiloh (a dog)?" and she
answered, "On his bottom?" (Transcript, September 24, 1998). Alicia asked JR
whether he said Judd, a character in the book Shiloh, killed the deer out of season
or in the season (Transcript, September 24, 1998). When Emir asked Jessey, "How
long would Marty work for Judd?", Ellen questioned, "Is it a fat, juicy question?"
(Transcript, October 2, 1998). The third type of questions were fat, juicy questions
starting with w_hy. These questions were usually taken directly from the prompts.
Sometimes students repeated or asked these questions, regardless of what the
others had shared, or they didn't seem to care what the other person responded.
Adeline asked Kelsey why the Watsons were weird, which was a question directly
from the prompt, and Kelsey told her that she didn't think the Watsons were weird.
Adeline seemed to be surprised to hear that, then she asked why she didn't think
them weird but had no follow-up comments or questions (Transcript, October 8,
1998). Like Adeline, since students were mimicking only the form of the
questions, they didn't know what to expect from the people who answered the
questions. They accepted any answers from the respondents, regardless of whether
these answers made sense to them or not. One explanation of this phenomenon is
that in learning to ask the fat, juicy questions for a literary discourse, students ﬁrst

learn to say the questions before they could fully comprehend what was being

89

F .

asked. Another explanation was that students didn't know how to listen in order to
carry on a conversation.
The Challenge for JR to Express his Different Inteppretations

Besides the challenge of identifying the right questions to ask, students also
faced the task of exploring the meanings of the text, expressing their conﬁdent or
tentative ideas, commenting on other people's opinions with appropriate support,
and challenging each other's ideas in their discussions. These tasks proved equally
as challenging as the question task. JR’s struggle in sharing what he wrote at a
ﬁshbowl discussion demonstrates this challenge of sharing personal opinions,
especially when these opinions were different from the majority views.

During the October 8th ﬁshbowl discussion over whether the Watsons were
weird or not, JR struggled hard to express his view, which was opposite to the
views of other people in the group. There were four students in the group and JR
was the last one to speak. Both Alicia and Kelsey who shared ﬁrst said that they
thought the Watsons were not weird; they were just different. They also cited
examples of what the Watsons did.

Thahn, the third child who shared, began his sharing by agreeing with the
two girls and said “I don’t think the Watsons are weird because they are just like
different people” (Transcript, October 8, 1998) though in his writing, the ﬁrst
sentence he wrote was “The Watson is funny because Byron he put his lips in the
mirror and Kenny try to help him” (Thahn’s Written Response, October 7, 1998).

Thahn was thinking that the Watsons were funny, but he didn't dare, or didn’t feel

90

comfortable to say that openly in the ﬁshbowl discussion. He also had a hard time

answering the questions from Michael.

Michael: Why do you think the Watsons are weird?

Thahn: . .. My ﬁiends, when I go to my ﬁ'iends’ house, and other friends
come, we do different things.

Michael: Well, but, well, why do you think they’re weird?

Thahn: Well, uhm, uhm,

Michael: [stood up and left the table]

(Transcript, October 8, 1998)

JR was the last and shared his response after questions for Thahn were

 

over. The ﬁrst sentence of his written response declared that “The Watsons are
weird and ﬁmny” (JR’s Written Response, October 7, 1998). However, seeing all
his group members have an opposite view of his, he hesitated in sharing his ideas.
His hesitation was demonstrated by the three unsuccessful starts he made to begin
reading his response. It was with the help of the teacher that he was able to read
his response.

JR: The Watsons are like a [stopping for a while and then asking Ellen
very softly] just read what I wrote?

Ellen: Uh?

JR: Just read what I have?

Thahn: Yes.

JR: Some parts do not make any sense.

Thahn: SO?!

Ellen: You ought to be making sure your writing makes sense to you. If it
doesn’t make sense to you, who else does it make sense to?

Thahn: Just add something [inaudible].

Ellen: [sensing something] You think the Watsons are weird.

JR: No.

Ellen: Then read what you’ve got.

JR: [Reading] The Watsons are funny and I don't know. When Byron
got his lips stuck on the mirror, I thought

Ellen: Could you speak louder please?

91

Ellen:

JR:

When Byron got his lips stuck on the mirror, I thought [stopping
again]

[walking up to JR] What have you got here? [reading from his paper
slowly for IR to read along] The Watsons are weird and funny. The
kids are...

[Joining Ellen and reading] Smart. Byron is [Ellen stopped reading
aloud] mean and not kind to his little brother and his little brother's
friend. I think the Watsons are weird because Byron did tell dumb
stories and he don't make sense when he is telling them. [Stopping
Thahn whispered to him, "come on."] I learned that Kenny is a smart
boy and funny and his eyes is not good. I have learned about Byron is
mean to his brother and I learned that Byron thinks he is a nice boy
and learned a lesson not to kiss the mirror. Kenny and Byron don't get
along with each other and next time I hope they get along.

(Transcript, October 8, 1998)

In the above scenario, JR was ﬁnding it very hard to tell his group that he

thought the Watsons were weird and funny because the majority of the group
stated that they were not weird, but only different. For several times, he tried to
conform to what others said. When he shared his response, he skipped the word
_vy_a_i_r;d in the ﬁrst sentence, he stuttered, he asked Ellen if he had to read what he
wrote, he apologized that some part didn't make sense to himself, and he lowered
his voice. Even when Ellen asked him explicitly whether he thought the Watsons
were weird, he answered afﬁrmatively, "No". Though Ellen constantly
emphasized to the class that all ideas were valid as long as they had support, what
JR tried to do, or what he tried not to do, showed that at the beginning of the year

it was deﬁnitely not easy for students to express a different point of view.

92

Teaching by Modeling and Scaffolding:
The Second Stage of the Journey

The beginning of the second book, Shiloh, marked the opening of the
second stage in the development of Book Club. With the implementation of
ﬁshbowl discussions, the teacher and the class shifted ﬁom talking about what
Book Club should look like to the actual enactment of Book Club. More time was
given to students to engage in talks about books among themselves, ﬁrst through
ﬁshbowls and later through book clubs and community share. Teacher-led
conversations about Book Club gradually gave way to student-centered
discussions about books. Through ﬁrst observing and experimenting with
ﬁshbowls and later participating in book clubs and community share discussions
and other Book Club activities, students learned to read the books, write the
responses, ask fat, juicy questions, and respond to each other's ideas; they became
more comfortable talking about their ideas and more interested in what others had
to say as they continued to engage in the discussions. Also, in this process,
students gradually gave up their resistance to Book Club and began to participate
in Book Club learning activities.

The teacher played an important role in facilitating this transitional process
that led to more students’ taking responsibility for their own learning. During this
stage, Ellen adopted a pedagogy of explicit and exploratory approaches and
engaged students’ learning in their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky,

1978). In this second stage, the Book Club activity structure, especially ﬁshbowls,

93

allowed Ellen, as well as the more knowledgeable peers, to model and scaffold the
skills necessary to participate in talking and writing about books. In February, as
students began to feel more comfortable and more knowledgeable with the book
discussion genre, Ellen challenged students’ "outlandish ideas", i.e., ideas that
were not supported by evidence from the text, and helped move the discussion to a
higher level.

In this section, I ﬁrst describe the two mediating tools, including the
ﬁshbowl discussion as a structural tool and the prompt questions as an
instrumental tool and how they helped mediate students’ learning. Next, I examine
the changes in activity structure that allowed for more student-talk time and the
changes in the participation patterns of Ellen and the students and in their
conversations. Finally, I discuss the different moves the teacher adopted in
facilitating the students’ learning.

Mediating Tools

All learning and thinking are mediated by tools. Fishbowl discussion as a
structural tool created a space for the following to occur: (a) for the teacher and
the more knowledgeable peers to model asking questions, giving feedback to each
other’s sharing, and interacting with each other; (b) for the teacher to scaffold
students’ participating skills; (c) for the group members and anybody from the
audience to come and practice participating in discussions; and (d) for all the other

students in the audience to observe and possibly internalize the practice. Prompt

94

questions as an instrumental tool helped students focus on certain issues, practice
and develop speciﬁc literary skills.
Fishbowl as a Structural Tool to Meﬂe Stpaents’ Learn_ing

The second stage began with the implementation of the ﬁshbowl
discussions. The Book Club groups took turns in conducting a ﬁshbowl discussion
each day when they were reading Shiloh and The Watsons Go to Birmingham:
1 963 from late September to late October. Later on December 3, they had a
volunteer ﬁshbowl discussion. Though the ﬁrst ﬁshbowl showed that students
didn't know what to say to each other and how to carry on a conversation about
text in a small group, ﬁshbowl discussions helped create a public space where
ways of responding, thinking and talking about texts could be demonstrated and
observed. Starting with the second ﬁshbowl, Ellen also added two extra chairs at
the ﬁshbowl table for anybody in the audience to join the group discussion to ask
questions or to make comments. This public space, especially the two extra chairs,
gave Ellen another opportunity to model and scaffold students’ knowledge and
skills needed in participating in group discussions and community share, such as
what questions to ask, how to ask them, how to listen and respond to each other,
and what language to use in a group discussion. The ﬁshbowl with two extra
chairs also enabled the more knowledgeable peers in the class to try out and
practice what they learned and the students in the audience to observe book
discussions in action as well. In this section, I use only the second ﬁshbowl

discussion to show how students’ learning was mediated. At the beginning of the

95

 

discussion, Ellen modeled how to ask questions and she then encouraged other
students to come ask questions. Later the ﬁshbowl conversation took up its own
momentum with members in the group and the “visiting” students who made use
of the two extra chairs.

The second ﬁshbowl discussion took place on September 23, when Ellen
put two extra chairs around the discussion group table for the ﬁrst time. The
discussion group had four students, Alicia, Michael, JR, and Shele. The prompt
questions for the group were, "What do Marty's words and actions tell you about
him? What do Judd's words and actions reveal about him? Support your response
with speciﬁc examples from the text." As soon as Alicia, the ﬁrst student, ﬁnished
sharing her response to the prompt, Michael started to read his response right
away. Ellen interrupted Michael and walked to the empty chair, "Wait, I have a
question for you." She then modeled asking a question.

Ellen: You said that Marty is a very determined boy. I'd like to know
what type of things he did that showed he is determined.

Alicia: He tried...

Ellen: Louder, talk to the whole group.

Alicia: He wants the dog. Shiloh is the one he wants. He tried to get
Ellen: What kinds of words did he say that tells that he is determined?

JR: He does not use bad language?

Ellen: Does that tell you that he is determined?

Alicia: He said, "Shiloh, I'll never let anybody mistreat you and kick you
again."

Ellen: Thank you. [to the group] The rest of you, think what Alicia said
and you need to ask her questions. Tell her that you agree or
disagree.

(Transcript, September 23, 1998)

96

In this excerpt, Ellen modeled asking questions — “I’d like to know what
type of things he did that showed he is determined” and scaffolded Alicia in
answering it — “What kinds of words did he say that tells that he is determined?”.
When Michael ﬁnished sharing his response, Ellen said to the class, "There's
something in there. The chairs are open and you can go." When Thahn indicated
and asked if he could go, Ellen waved her hand and said "go". Thahn was the ﬁrst
student to sit on the extra chair and asked a question.

Thahn: Why do you think Marty likes Shiloh?
Michael: Because in the book it says that he likes Shiloh more than his mom.

Thahn didn't think that Marty loved Shiloh more than he loved his mom,
but he could not convince Michael. Noticing that Freddy wanted to join the
discussion from his seat, Ellen waved her hand to signal him to join the group and
said, "Go, go, go up there!" Freddy came and clariﬁed that the book said Marty
loved Shiloh as much as he loved his mom. That satisﬁed all in the discussion.
Afterwards, students asked Michael a couple of more questions. JR, another
member of the group, wondered why Judd put Shiloh on a chain and asked
Michael whether he would mistreat Shiloh if he were Judd. Freddy challenged
Michael and asked "What if he [Judd] thought he was helping the dog [when he
was mistreating Shiloh]?"

JR shared his response next. The following conversation took place after JR
ﬁnished sharing. Students either questioned him or commented on what he said

after Ellen called on them.

97

Ellen: Okay, any questions for JR?

Michael: How do you know he killed the dog?

JR: Because he said that one of his dogs was killed.

Alicia: Did you say that he killed the deer out of season or in the season?

JR: Out of the season.

Ellen: How do you know it was Judd who kill the dog? I don't think Marty
knows.

JR: Because Judd don't like his dogs. Could that be the reason?

Ellen: [Looking around the group] Anyone else?

Alicia: Is it because that he does not like his dog? He may like them and he
may not.

JR: Because his dogs wander too much.

[Ellen pointed at the empty chair and encouraged other students to come. She
stood up and left. Adeline and J essey joined the group. ]

J essey: Only Shiloh is the dog that wanders off, the other dogs stay. They
know him and stay with him. Shiloh is the one who wanders.

Michael: Because Shiloh is the new one; he's just got him.

(Transcript, September 23, 1998)

Here the participants were questioning JR on what he said and why he said
certain things. At the same time, they were also constructing meanings together on
how Judd treated his dog and why he acted so, and why Shiloh wandered away.
Ellen played two roles in this situation. First she was a participant, asking
questions that she wanted to ﬁnd out when she reiterate Michael’s question.
Second, she played the role of a facilitator, inviting the audience to participate in
the discussion through her verbal and body languages. By directing JR’s question
at her to the group and saying “Anyone else?” and then leaving the group, Ellen
sent the students the message “I’m a participant. I’m not a judge.” All this took

place while the rest of the class were observing.

98

 

 

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Prompts as an Instrumentg Tool to Mediate Students’ Learning

Another tool Ellen used in Book Club to help mediate students learning is
the written prompts. The prompts were open-ended questions in different
categories grouped around a speciﬁc topic in the chapter(s) students were reading.
During the mini-lesson, Ellen would teach the category for the day and then
introduce the prompt questions (see Table 6). The categories of these questions
covered a wide range and they included Author's Craﬂ, Character Development.

Stog Graph, Questioning, Summary, Character Map, Picture, Compare and

Contrast Interpretation. Theme, Intertextaality, Prediction, Personal Response,

 

Me and the Book, Feelin s, Favorite/Least Favorite Part/Character, Point of View,
C_ri_t_ig% and Author's PaLpose. The prompts aimed to help students acquire the
knowledge and skills to engage in talks about books both orally and in written
form in a literary discourse community. The open-ended questions provided
students the opportunities to practice and develop their knowledge and skills for

effective participation.

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Sample Prompts

 

Book

Prompt items

 

Shiloh

The Watsons Go to
Birmingham-1 963

The view from
Saturday

Tuck Everlasting

Walk Two Moons

Lesson 3: Read chapters 5-6. Me and the book What does Marty do
against his parent's wishes? Why did he feel it was so important to
do? If you were Marty would you have done it too? Why or Why
not? Support your response.

Or
Have you ever done something that you know has gone directly
against your parents or some other adult's wishes but felt that you
had to do. What did you do and why did you feel so strongly that
you had to do it? Support your response!
Lesson #12: Theme
Assigned Reading: Chapter 15
Writing Prompt:
Identify one of the themes in this book. Describe at least two
situations in that illustrate the theme that you have chosen.
Lesson 3: Point of View
Assigned Reading: pp. 21-40
Writing Prompt:

How does Noah describe Alan? How does he feel about him? How
does Nadia describe Alan? How does she feel about him? (are there
any speciﬁc words or firings they say about him? Why might they
use these words?) How are their descriptions different? Does
Nadia's description tell us something that Noah's doesn't (or vice
versa?) Why do you think this is so? Support your response.
Lesson 16: Character Development
Assigned Reading: Chapter 23
Writing Prompt: Using a graphic organizer, or paragraph method
describe how Winnie has changed. You must clearly describe how
she was in the beginning of the story, the middle, and now near the
end.

Lesson 9: Interpretation

Assigned Reading: Chapters 19-20 (pp. 114-128)

Writing Prompt: What does Sal's dad mean when he says she is
trying to "Catch a ﬁsh in the air?" What is Sal trying to do that
could help explain what this expression might mean? Have you
ever felt as if you were trying to "catch a ﬁsh in the air?" Write
about a speciﬁc experience in your own life.

Note. From the students' prompt sheet Handouts.

The prompt questions forced students to think over serious issues and to

practice special techniques in making sense of the texts they read as well as the

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world around them. In responding to the prompt questions, the students learned to
analyze the text, synthesize it, interpret it, make personal and intertextual
connections with the text, articulate their own ideas, and provide support or
evidences to their arguments. Students also learned about writing techniques, such
as ways of organizing and presenting ideas and ways of arguing one's point.

In addition, students' written responses to the prompts became the sources
of their conversation during book clubs and community share. In sharing their
responses to these questions and interacting with each other over them, students
were exposed to other people's interpretations, which opened opportunities for
them to challenge one another's ideas, and clarify, evaluate, and revise their own
thinking in the process. Through the process of reading, writing, and talking about
books, students developed their literary skills and ways of thinking and viewing
the world. Prompts, as an instrumental tool, helped mediate students learning of
the literary knowledge and skills.

A Shift from Teacher/Teacher-Led Tallato StuQent-Centered Talk

Besides the change from talking about Book Club to implementing Book
Club, there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the content and the
participation patterns of their discussions that distinguish the second stage ﬁom
the ﬁrst stage. In the second stage, students were given the time to engage in small
group and whole class discussions. The participants began to listen to each other
and the conversations gradually became more focused. The teacher retreated from

being the key speaker to playing the role of a facilitator and occasionally a

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participant. In this section, I summarize the time allotted to teacher and student
talks, and analyze the changes in the participation patterns and their conversations.
Increased Student-Talk Time

In the ﬁrst stage of the development of Book Club, Ellen played a central
role in telling students what Book Club was, what kind of responses they should
write, and how they should participate in Book Club discussions. Ellen tried to
disabuse students of the notion that the teacher was the authoritative ﬁgure in
discussions and engage students in talking directly to each other. She encouraged
students to show respect and value each other's ideas. In the second stage, the class
began to conduct ﬁshbowl discussions. Opportunities were created for ﬁshbowl
members as well as the audience to engage in conversations with each other on
books. Fishbowls also gave Ellen the opportunities to model how to ask questions
and to respond others, and scaffold students' skills through her questions and
comments. Starting from Number the Stars in early November, the class began
book clubs and community share, and with these even more space was created for
students to engage in discussions about books. Tables 7 and 8 show that student-
centered talk occupied 32 minutes average per day, compared to an average of 3
minutes per day in stage one (see Table 4 & Table 5). Teacher talk decreased to an
average of 21 minutes per day ﬁ'om the 37 minutes per day average of stage one

(see Table 4 & Table 5).

102

Table 7

DaLby Day Cojunt of Lhe Time Spent on Book Club Activities in 1:15 Second Stag;

 

Date Student- Time Teacher Talk/ Time Student Time Total
Centered (min.) Teacher-Led (min.) Reading and (min.) Time

 

Talk Talk Writing (min.)
1-28 Book clubs 22 Checking if 5 Reading and 23 80
Community 13 students were writing
share prepared 17
Mini-lesson on
symbols and
what they meant
2-1 Book clubs 20 Checking if 2 Group 18 11 1
Community 10 students were reading 16
share prepared 48 Listening to
Mini-lesson on last two
conﬂict and chapters on
solution tape
2-2* Book clubs 20 Transition 4 Reading and N/A N/A
Community 10 Mini-lesson N/A writing
share
2-4 Book clubs 26 Transition 5 Reading and 45 95
Community 11 Mini-lesson on 8 writing
share personal
response
2-5 Book clubs 23 Transition 3 Reading and 50 90
Community 9 Mini-lesson on 5 writing
share story graph
2-9* Book clubs 15 Mini-lesson on 11 Reading and N/A N/A
Community 15 revision and writing
share editing

 

* Data not complete.
Table 8

Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Cljub Activﬁes in t3 Second Stage

 

Student-Centered Teacher Talk/ Student Reading & Total Time
Talk (min.) Teacher-Led Talk Writing (min.) (min.)
(min.)

 

Total Average Total Average Total Average Total Average
6 days Per Day 5 days Per Day 4 days Per Day 4 days Per Day
194 32 104 21 152 38 376 94

Note. Based on ﬁeld notes On January 28, February 1, 2, 4, 5, and 9, 1999.

103

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Participation Pattern of Book Club Discrgsions

In the second stage of the development of Book Club, Ellen moved into an
activity structure that offered students more opportunities to participate in
conversations about books. This section explore the following questions: What
were these conversations like? What were the teacher and the students talking
about? Who was saying what to whom for how long? What roles did the teacher
and the students play in these conversations? In this part, I analyze one of the
early community share conversations in mid-November and one book clubs (small
group) conversation in February to shed some light on the above questions.
During their November 18 community share, the class were working on Author's
M and the prompt questions were:

What kind of mood did you feel that this chapter had? What were the

speciﬁc events that happened that created this mood for you? (Prompt sheet

for Number the Stars)

Their conversation over the prompt questions were marked by two features.
First, the conversation looked pretty engaging and involved more than half of the
class members. In addition to the twelve students who were identiﬁed among a
total of 24 students in this class, other students also participated at the seven turns
when several students were talking all at the same time. Second, there was a high
frequency of turn switching. Within a 12-minute community share, there were 83

turn changes. Thirty-two of them were taken by the teacher and 51 by the students.

Ten students spoke three or more times.

104

 

 

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Table 9

Talking Turns Taken byﬁe Teacher and the Students During the 12-minute

Communiy Share

 

 

 

 

Teacher Turns Student Turns Total Turns
32 51 83
Percentage
39% 61% 100%
Teacher talk.

 

Functions of teacher talk were analyzed into 7 different categories. A
frequency count showed that one major function of teacher talk (29%) was to ask
students open-ended questions around the prompts, such as: “What kind of mood
did you guys talk about?” or “What do you think?” The teacher also pushed
students to provide speciﬁc evidence to support what they said (17%). The other
major function of teacher talk was for gate-keeping purposes (34%), such as
signaling students to speak or stop talking, asking students to speak louder,
advising students to talk to the whole class, or checking discipline. (see Table 10)

Table 10

Functions of Teacher Talk and their Fregpencies

 

 

 

Categories Frequency Percentage
Gate-keeping 12 34%
Open-ended questions 10 29%
Asking students to provide speciﬁc information 6 17%
Modeling 3 9%
Clarifying confusion 3 9%
Self-reﬂection l 3%
Total: 35 ~l 00%

 

Note. Based on transcript of Community Share on November 18, 1998.

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Near the end of the conversation, Ellen told the students that she now
understand what they meant by saying there was a happy mood in the room: the
relief point. In doing so, Ellen accomplished two instructional goals. First, she
showed the students that she was not the authoritarian person in the discussion but
an equal participant as they were, trying to understand what everyone else was
saying. Second, her action also modeled to the students what a reﬂective learner
was doing in making sense of the class conversation. After that, she tried to share
and make students see what she had come to understand of what some students
were meant by “a happy mood”. However, because she moved right into the next
activity, it was not clear whether students followed her point or not.

Ellen: In fact, I didn’t think about relief, the relief point, when you were
talking about being happy. Now I think you were more talking about
relief. If the soldiers had opened the casket and found what?

Students: Clothes.

Ellen: Then they would be in real trouble, wouldn’t they? So today, we

(Transcripffllllovember 18, 1998)

Student talk.

As students were learning to participate, to ask questions and to follow up
on each other's comments, their conversation at this early time of the second stage
seemed to be choppy and the conversation span over one line of thought was short.
When they focused, they seemed to focus on the factual information in the book.

In the following conversation, though the class was “talking” to each other, it was

hard to tell where the conversation was leading. The teacher ﬁrst questioned Hai

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about the mood of the chapter and Hai said it was “scared and fear” because “no

one was talking and, and doing nothing”. Instead of discussing further evidence to

support or dispute Hai’s assertion of the kind of mood of the chapter, Adeline

digressed the conversation by asking him how he knew “there was nobody

talking”. Immediately after, the class began to focus on what characters were

doing and saying as described in the book and made no effort to connect the

information they were trying to clarify and the assertion to make about the mood

of the chapter, which was their discussion question. The teacher’s end-of-

conversation self-reﬂection, as mentioned above, didn’t seem to follow upon what

went before in the conversation either.

Ellen:
Hai:
Ellen:
Hai:
Adeline:
Hai:

What do you say, Hai?

I say it as scared and fear,

Because...?

Because no one was talking and, and doing nothing.
How do you know that there was nobody talking?
Because

[Four or ﬁve voices were talking at the same time. Inaudible.]

Thi:
Freddy:

They didn’t bring food or anything.
But Peter was reading the bible.

Thi/Hai: Yes/yeah.

Freddy: That was one talks.

Hai: I know.

[Several students murmured something, occasionally. Inaudible.]

Hai: There was no ﬁghting.

Ellen: Okay, okay.

Michael: I think that was fast thinking, because mama didn’t say

Ellen: Wait, wait, wait,

Michael: Birte died of sickness, they will open it and may ﬁnd out the
clothes and stuff.

Ellen: What word were you using, Michael?

Michael: Sickness?

Ellen: No, no. You said you thought it was?

Michael: Fast thinking.

107

 

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Ellen:
Andy:

Fast thinking?

No, she didn’t say that. Annemarie said that the doctor said

Michael/several other voices: No, Mama said that.
[Several people tried at the same time to reason whom they thought said that.

Rico:

Ellen:

Students:
Ellen:

Inaudible.]

I thought Mama said that. Mama said that, that’s why, that’s why she
got slapped. Because she didn’t want [Inaudible.]

In fact, I didn’t think about relief, the relief point, when you were
talking about being happy. Now I think you were more talking about
relief. If the soldiers had opened the casket and found what?

Clothes.

Then they would be in real trouble, wouldn’t they? So today, we
will

(Transcript, November 18, 1998)

Their conversation showed that students had not grasped the Book Club

discussion genre yet. It was a challenge for them to make a point and then provide

support for it. In the next excerpt which occurred before the previous excerpt, Thi

made several attempts to explain that Mama would be in trouble if the German

soldiers opened the casket. Although Andy summarized Thi’s point, it was not

clear whether other students were following her arguments. Rico interpreted the

text literally and didn’t seem to see the connection between the German soldiers

opening the casket and Mama and others getting into trouble.

Ellen:

Thi:

Ellen:

Tu said that this chapter has a happy and sad mood. So could you
expand what you just said about not having a happy mood? Talk
more about that. It didn’t have a happy mood, because...

Because they were scared. They were scared because [Silence for
6 seconds]

Anyone else in the room can help out?

[Tu said something, too soft. Andy raised his hand and looked at Ellen]

Ellen:
Thi:

Ellen:

Don’t look at me, I am not calling on you.

Mama said that, uh, that, if the German soldiers opened the
casket, mama would be in trouble. [Ellen was silent. She looked at
students at Table One. Andy seemed to be confused]

Don’t talk to me, look at the rest.

108

 

 

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Andy: Did you say that if they opened the casket, they would be in trouble?

Thi: Mama said that in the casket is someone died and she had germs.
Rico: It was just an excuse, because there was no lady in the casket.
[Several people talked, overlapping each other]

Thi: If they opened it and there’s nobody in it, then mama would be in

trouble, because they would know she, she was lying.
[Few seconds of silence]
Ellen: Anybody else who has not been in the discussion?
(Transcript, November 18, 1998)

In the second stage, students were given the opportunities to talk about the
book. As indicated in this early community share conversation, students were
active in participating and speaking, but they didn't know how to present their
ideas and how to follow up on what others said. They were also having problems
interpreting events and connecting ideas. Their conversation was choppy and
unfocused. At the same time, the teacher played a big part in leading the
conversation, taking almost 40% of the turns. She asked students questions,
pushed them to provide details, and kept their attention and the conversation
focused.

However, toward the end of the second stage, students seemed to have
developed some sense of the book-discussion genre. They began to talk to each
other and their conversations started to focus on shared topics. The teacher began
to release her leading role in conversation to the students, and she continued to
take a detached stance with regard to ideas students shared and exchanged, and
reserve her evaluative comments. When she spoke, she asked students to elaborate

on their ideas or to provide more support to their argument. In the following part, I

describe a small group discussion ten weeks further into the school year, which

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demonstrated a very different participation pattern with regard to teacher and
student talk.

The book clubs on February 4 lasth 27 minutes from 12:04 to 12:31. Ellen
sat with a small group consisted of 5 students: Tu, Dang, Thi, Ia, and Kelsey. The
group discussed about character development and the prompt questions for the day
were: "Using a graphic organizer, or paragraph method to describe how Winnie
has changed. You must clearly describe how she was in the beginning of the story,
the middle, and now near the end." First, Kelsey shared her response. She
described how Winnie felt at the beginning, middle, and near the end. She said
that Winnie was happy and fell in love with Jessie, and that Winnie was also sad
because she didn't want Mac to go to jail. After Kelsey ﬁnished reading her
response, the group had a short discussion on whether Winnie fell in love with
Jessie or not. Everyone in the group, except for Tu, had something to say. Tu, for

whatever reason, changed the topic and asked Kelsey about Winnie’s other

feelings.
Thi: Why Winnie felt happy when she fell in love?
Ia: When you say Winnie fell in love with Jessie, she just like Jessie,

she didn’t fall in love with Jessie.
Kelsey: Yeah, because she said he was beautiful [She and several others

giggled].

Ia: Winnie just like him.

Dang: Winnie just want to be friend.

Thi: Winnie just want to be friend with Jessie, but Jessie thinks
differently.

Dang: Did he want to marry Winnie?

Tu: [Asking a question that changed the topic.] What are other feelings

of Winnie besides happy in the middle [of the story]?

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Kelsey: [Thinking] Mm, afraid, because when she got kidnapped by the
Tucks, she didn’t know what they would do to her.
(Transcript, February 4, 1999)

The role of the teacher also changed dramatically in this group discussion
as compared with the community share discussion ten weeks earlier. During the
whole 27-minute discussion from 12: 04 to 12:31, Ellen used once body-language
to urge Kelsey to participate in the discussion and asked four verbal questions near
the end. Two of the questions were ﬁmctional, one requesting a student to speak
louder and the other asking a student to repeat his question. The third question
helped clarify a point when the conversation seemed to get stuck. The last question
brought students back to focus on a thought-provoking question Thi raised. In the
beginning 16 minutes, Ellen simply sat listening and taking notes. All this time the
students were taking turns sharing their responses, and responding to each other's
responses by raising questions and clarifying confusion. I cite the two content-
related questions Ellen asked during this book clubs discussion. Ellen spoke for
the ﬁrst time at 12:21 when she tried to direct students to think in a different
direction. Here is the excerpt of the conversation beginning with Kelsey asking a
question after Ellen tugged her shoulder:

Kelsey: [Asking a question] Thi, why do you think she [Winnie] feels happy
when she went home, because when the stranger was going to try to
take her home, she didn't want to go.

Thi: Because she missed her family.

Tu: But then she'll miss the Tucks, Mae and others.

Kelsey: Because when the stranger tried to take her, she didn't want to go
with the stranger.

Thi: She miss her family, but
Kelsey: But why didn't she go if she misses her family so much?

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Thi:
Kelsey:
Thi:
Ellen:

She had to. Who's got to stop that?

Stop what?

Stop her from going home.

Did Winnie really know that she was going to be taken home by the
stranger?

Several Students: No.

Dang:
Kelsey:

Ia:

Maybe she freezes, never want to walk with the stranger.
Maybe she had a feeling that he can do something bad, like the
spring, how he had found out about the spring.

Yeah, like he would [inaudible]

(Transcript, February 4, 1999)

As shown in this conversation, Ellen’s question directed students to think in

a different perspective. Instead of putting Thi on the spot to come up with an

answer to why Winnie didn’t want to go home with the stranger, the whole group

began to offer ideas to this question. The second time the teacher spoke, she

repeated Thi's question on why Tuck took Winnie to ﬁshing, and brought students

back to explore further this thought-provoking question.

Thi:

Ia:
Kelsey:
Ia:
Kelsey:
Ellen:
Ia:

Kelsey:

1a:

Do you think the Tuck took her to ﬁshing and to the water, uh, is it
for some reason? Or they were just nice?

They were nice and they wanted to tell her about the spring.

Maybe since she met the Tucks, the Tucks didn't want others to
know their names and they didn't want anybody to ﬁnd out about
them.

But the stranger know who was their names.

Yes, I know. But I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about mom
and dad.

Could you talk a little more about that? [To class: excuse me, a
little bit too loud. One foot voice.] Why the Tucks took her to the
spring? What is the reason? Why?

Because they want Winnie to keep the secret that no one says
anything about the spring and knows about it, because if they know
it, they want to spoil it.

Why did they take her to the spring? She didn't know about it in the
ﬁrst place. Why didn't they just let her go?

The Tucks want to tell her about the life cycle and the wheel.

If she drinks the water, the world wouldn't go.

112

 

 

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Tu: The Tucks took her to the water, to spring, because if she was thirsty
at that time, she probably would drink the water.
(Transcript, February 4, 1999)
In this conversation, students dominated the talk. However, by repeating
Thi’s question, the teacher helped students focus on the issue that required them to
think more in depth. Looking across the conversations on November 18, 1998 and
on February 4, 1999, we see different participation patterns with regard to who
controlled the ﬂoor of conversation, what they were talking about, and how they
were interacting with each other on these topics. In the conversation on November
18, 1998, the teacher played a leading part by asking students questions and
keeping the conversation focused. In their conversation on February 4, 1999, the
students were interacting among themselves. Besides, the ﬁrst conversation
seemed choppy and unfocused while the second conversation was more ﬂuid —
students began to listen and talk to each other, and their conversations started to
focus on shared topics. These changes set the second stage apart from the ﬁrst
stage.
Teacher Moves: Maltiple Instructional Strategies
The changes in the second stage characterized the second stage as a

transitional stage in which students were gradually acquiring the Book Club
discussion genre. Like in the ﬁrst stage, Ellen continued to play an active role in
helping students develop the knowledge and skills needed to participate in Book

Club discussions. However, instead of telling, a teaching mode dominant in the

ﬁrst stage, Ellen now combined the explicit instruction with an exploratory

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approach. On the one hand, she continued to provide speciﬁc instructions on how
to read, write responses, and talk about books. Some of these instructions were
planned ahead of time, like the showing of students' writing response to the
prompts and many mini lectures during the mini-lessons. Others were carried out
spontaneously in the moment-to-moment interactions between Ellen and her
students during the learning activities. On the other hand, Ellen saw students as
knowledgeable beings with prior experience and knowledge, and she believed that
learning occurred in interactions with each other while participating in the
communal practices. She provided time for students to practice talking with each
other about books. She encouraged students to construct meanings of the texts and
explore their own self-identity and world views. She helped students make
connections between the new skills and concepts to what they already knew. She
also created opportunities for the more knowledgeable peers in the class to model
their thinking and reasoning when responding to books. She herself employed
multiple moves, especially modeling and scaffolding at this stage to help students
acquire the skills. In this section, I discuss the different moves she adopted in
facilitating students to acquire the literacy knowledge and skills in participating in
Book Club activities. These moves consist of (a) building on students’ prior
knowledge, (b) using peer knowledge, (c) modeling, and (d) scaffolding/

challenging students thinking and participation.

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BuildirygNew Knowledge on What Stu_dents Already Know

In her teaching, Ellen tried to create the zone of proximal development in
which students could make that leap from what they had already known to the new
learning. Every day's mini-lesson was a time designed for many planned direct
instruction to take place. Ellen used the time to introduce new literary concepts,
analyze the characters and character development, and model ways of thinking and
writing in the expected genres. The prompts for writing response became a place
to begin such instructions. Students read the prompts; they ﬁgured out what the
prompts were asking; and they discussed what format they could use to respond to
the prompts. In explaining new and difﬁcult concepts, Ellen ﬁrst asked students
questions or engaged students in tasks they already knew or were familiar with.
She then helped students make the connection between what they knew and the
new knowledge. Also when introducing a new task or concept, Ellen would do it
ﬁrst in class, a public space, where all students could observe, participate, and ask
questions before they tried it themselves and the more knowledgeable peers could
model. Here are a few examples. When the class made the character map for the
ﬁrst time, Ellen developed a character map in class, using the main character in the
class reading-aloud book, before asking the students to complete individually their
own ﬁrst character map with Willy in Stone Fox (Field notes, September 8, 1998).
For another example, ﬁ'om her previous year experiences, Ellen knew that making

a story graph was a challenging task for students. When time came for the class to

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draw one, Ellen and the students mapped a story graph together in class for Little
Red Ridinghood, a story that many students knew (Field notes, February 5, 1999).

Sometimes Ellen used characters and events that were easy for students to
understand as examples for them to practice thinking over more complex
characters and events. When writing to the prompt question, "What do you feel
about the tax collector?", many students didn’t know how to respond to it.
Noticing this, Ellen asked students what they felt about Grandpa ﬁrst. Grandpa
with his relationship to Little Willy was a simpler character for the students to
comprehend and relate to. After seeing the connections between their feelings
about Grandpa and the reasons to feel so, students were able to tackle the more
complex character in the book (Field notes, September 10, 1998).

In explaining the concept of "point of view", Ellen used the ﬁght the class
had on the soccer ground with another class the day before as an example to show
students that the story they told about the ﬁght was different from the story told by
the students from the other class. She explained that this was so because they all
had a different personal point of view. In this way, students understood "point of
view" with little difﬁculty (Field notes, September 14, 1998). In fact, when they
were making a story graph for Tuck Everlasting, Freddy asked whose point of
view they should take, indicating a transfer of learning (Field notes, February 5,
1999)

Another example was when Ellen tried to illustrate the point of "going

beyond literal interpretations". She ﬁrst asked the students what Charlotte’s Web

116

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was about, knowing that they had all read it the previous year. A student said it
was about a pig and a spider. Ellen afﬁrmed that it was right but she continued to
point out that this was a very literal interpretation. Another student said the book
was about friendship. Ellen juxtaposed the two views and explained that the
second view went beyond the literal interpretation. Seeing the differences of the
two interpretations about the book they were familiar with, students began to
understand what literal interpretations were and what it meant to go beyond literal
interpretations.
Creating an Environment in Which Stadenta Could Teach and Learn from Each
ch_eg

Besides helping students see the connections between what they already
knew and the new knowledge, Ellen also tried to create an environment in which
the knowledge and skills of the more knowledgeable students in class would
become public knowledge. There were four ways in which Ellen used to share
with the class what the more knowledgeable students knew. First, Ellen drew the
class attention to how these students respond to texts and interact with each other
after the class had witnessed their performances. Second, Ellen sometimes asked
the more knowledgeable students questions purposefully so that they demonstrated
how to think, talk, or approach the questions in action for the class. Third, Ellen
invited the more knowledgeable students to share what they knew with the class,
especially at times when new students joined the class. Finally, Ellen shared what

the more knowledgeable students wrote as model responses with the whole class.

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First, when someone said or performed something that promoted
collaboration or group discussion, Ellen would point that out to the whole class.
Near the end of their ﬁrst community share after a group discussion on character
map, Ellen pointed out to the whole class how Maria invited another student in her
group to participate and emphasized that it was very important to invite everyone
in the group to the discussion. She said:

Maria turned to Osman and said, “you need to say something.” One of
the nice things is that Maria said it very nicely to him. She didn’t say
“Share”, she didn’t even say, “You have to say something” [Ellen
mimicked]. She was very nice in her tone. So it was not taken offensively.
So Osman listened to her, and he made some sort of attempt to guess on her
picture. It’s very important as a group that you include everyone. This
person said something to encourage others to join in. (Transcript,
September 3, 1998)

In the volunteer ﬁshbowl discussion on Views from Saturday, both Michael
and Thahn tried to help another person clarify his/her ideas. After the discussion,
Ellen pointed this out and she praised Michael and Thahn for helping create the
opportunity for the other person to say something. She told the class:

Okay, I want to let you know a few things that I noticed. I really like and I

think it's really good. I notice that Thahn, Michael, and how people, when

someone asked a question and someone was not able to respond to it.

When some people say what do you mean and some people were not able

to respond, I noticed a few times I heard people say, "I think what she

means is . . ., or I think what he means is ..." It sounds like that you're
clarifying that and there's an opportunity for the other person to say, "Yeah,

yeah." or "No, that's not what I mean." So that's really good. (Transcript,
December 3, 1998)

Second, when introducing tasks requiring cognitive skills that might be a

challenge for students, Ellen would ask the more knowledgeable students to model

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ﬁrst so that they demonstrated how to think, talk, or approach the questions for the
class. Many prompt questions required students to provide speciﬁc evidence or
support to what they said, but many students found this a challenge. To illustrate
what she meant by providing support, Ellen asked the class a question on the book
The View ﬁom Saturday, "Do you think Ms. Olinski thought it was Julian who
wrote the word 'cripple' on the board? Why OR why not?" Then she called on
several students that she knew would be able to give evidence from the text to
support what they said. These students gave different evidence from the book to
support their opinions (Field notes, December 9, 1998). In having the more
knowledgeable students demonstrate their thinking and reasoning in the public
space created the opportunities for the less knowledgeable others to observe and
possibly to appropriate and internalize these skills gradually (Vygotsky, 1978).
Third, when new students joined the class, Ellen would invite the
“veterans” to share with the new students what they knew about Book Club and
how they should participate in Book Club. Several times during the year,
. newcomers from the DLP (developing language proﬁciency) classroom joined
Ellen’s class. These students were ESL learners and usually needed special help in
reading and writing. When Munira joined the class on December 9, 1998, Ellen
used the opportunity for the whole class to tell her about Book Club. First, Alicia
told Munira, "What we do in Book Club is we read the book and we write down
the prompts. Then the next day we'll discuss it and we'll have the whole class

discussion." Then Ellen asked the class to explain to Munira why they did group

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and class discussions. Some students said that if people didn't understand the
book, they could ask the people in their group, so it was a time for them to clarify
conﬁrsion. However, Dang, who joined the class three weeks earlier, said that they
could ﬁnd out who were doing the work and who were not. Ellen repeated what
Dang said to the class, and asked for their responses. Finally the class also
discussed about the importance of being prepared, a problem still facing some
students at this time. Ellen asked students what would happen if people were not
prepared and several students responded saying that they would have "bad
discussion", "boring discussion" or the discussion "gets ruined" — languages that
their teacher used in similar situations. Ellen also seized the opportunity to suggest
to the students that they should give each other pressure to get prepared, and she
said, "If someone in my group who is not prepared, I'll tell them, 'You guys ruin
our discussion'" (Transcript, December 9, 1998).

Aweiss and Hussain joined the class a week into the spring semester. To
help them participate in Book Club, the class again reviewed what their Book Club
was like. They also went through again the four lessons on Tuck Everlasting with
Aweiss and Hussain and showed them the process of reading, writing to the
prompts, and discussing the book.

By having the class share their communal practice with the novice
participants, students had an opportunity to articulate what it was and to reﬂect on
it as well. They considered not only what their practice was but also the objectives

of the practice and the essential features to make it a success. Besides, by sharing

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with the new students, the class conversation had an authentic audience. Students'
answers were addressed not just to Ellen, but mostly to the newcomers. At these
times, instead of evaluating what the students said, Ellen would help elaborate it.
Fourth, Ellen also shared what the more knowledgeable students wrote as
model responses with the whole class. Writing responses to the prompt questions
was a big challenge for the students. In spite of the fact that Ellen had spent time
explaining how to write responses to each prompt during the daily mini-lesson and
in individual conversations with the students, and that students had listened to
each other's responses in ﬁshbowl discussions, many students still had difﬁculty
addressing the prompt questions directly and providing speciﬁc support. To help
these students, Ellen picked up one or two sample responses from students’
writings on Stone Fox for each prompt category and showed them to the students
(Field notes, October 15, 1998). She read the prompt category and questions ﬁrst,
showed the sample writing, and then pointed out the strengths of each writing. She
emphasized the importance of understanding what the prompt questions were
asking and addressing the questions directly. Many times the prompt consisted of
multiple questions and Ellen would locate the appropriate part in the sample
response to show the class how the sample responded to all aspects of the prompt.
Sometimes, Ellen pointed out places that the authors could improve and she would
say things like "One thing he or she could have done here is to explain why," or
"They should also put capital letters or periods at where they belonged." While

pointing out the strengths of each response, Ellen also said that those sample

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responses were not perfect. However, she told the students that she was not
expecting perfect writing from them at this time either, but she expected to see
their writing improving over time.

Showing students' own sample responses gave Ellen an opportunity to help
students acquire the techniques in writing this type of genre. Reading and hearing
these samples allowed students to see what a comparatively good response would
look and sound like. Discussing about responses by their fellow students made it
easy for the students to relate to and see possible things they could do to change or
improve their own writing.

Telling/Modeling

In teaching, direct instruction is sometimes necessary (Fradd & Lee, 1999;
Roehler & Duffy, 1986). Ellen gave much planned, direct instruction when she
introduced Book Club at the beginning of the school year. Though she continued
to do so in the second stage, modeling and scaffolding became major modes of her
teaching. In this section, I cite some examples when Ellen was trying to tell and to
model what language to use and how to participate in discussions. In the next
section, I’ll focus on evidence of her scaffolding.

One extreme example of Ellen’s telling was captured by the camera and
occurred when Thi’s group had their ﬁrst turn at the ﬁshbowl discussion. Seeing
the group sitting there not knowing what questions to ask, Ellen came and squatted
beside Thi, and then whispered a question into Thi's ear. Thi looked back at Ellen

and didn't seem to get what she wanted. Ellen spoke into Thi's ear again and there

122

 

 

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was no reaction. But a little while later, Thi asked Long, the person who shared his
response, "What made you think that his secret is like a time bomb?" Though the
question was a direct quote from the prompt, it was now asked by Thi. She also
added a follow-up question of "Why?" When the next person in the group shared,
Thi asked him the same question without the prompt from Ellen, "Why do you
think his secret is like a time bomb?" (Field notes, September 28, 1998) Thi was
from Vietnam and this was the second year of her stay in the United States, and
the ﬁrst year for her to be in a general education classroom. She was a quiet and
shy girl, and she seldom spoke in class. By giving her the question and
encouraging her to ask it, Ellen helped reduce her anxiety in speaking up and drew
her into the group discussion.

In helping students enlarge their active sentence structures in expressing
themselves, Ellen was also explicit. Sometimes in mini-lesson, Ellen would write
down the exact sentence structure or the topic sentence(s) of the paragraph to
show the students how to directly address the prompt questions. When the class
worked on the prompt questions on interpretation and theme of the book for the
ﬁrst time, students collaboratively generated two themes that could be applied to
the book, which Ellen recorded on the board. Then she summarized the discussion
and explained to students how they could incorporate their class discussion about
the themes into their written responses. In my ﬁeld notes, I noticed, "Ellen almost
told them [students] word by word what to say in their paragraph." However,

though she gave students speciﬁc directions on how to write their responses, Ellen

123

 

 

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told the students that these two themes were not the only ones of this book (Field
notes, September 17, 1998).

As the year progressed, some students learned to respond to other's sharing
by saying "You said that Why?" and they used this response frequently. Ellen
noticed it and in the volunteer ﬁshbowl in early December, she pointed this out
and asked the students not to begin their comment with "You said that ". She
suggested they ask questions and use "When you talked about this and this, were
you talking about Izzy or Allen?" She explained to them that instead of assuming
what the others said, this question opened up for them to elaborate and clarify. At
the same time, she reafﬁrmed that "it is okay you see things differently. The
purpose of Book Club is to share how you would perceive and how others would
or wouldn't." Ellen also told the students to avoid the "you did — I didn't" type of
argument in their discussion (Field notes, December 3, 1998).

In many of the Book Club conversations, students challenged each other's
ideas and learned to begin their questions with "Why do you think ..." or "What
makes you think ...." These questions acted as a tool to help students ask "fat,
juicy" questions and think about complex issues. As the year progressed, students
used these questions all the time in their discussions. However effective these
questions were, Ellen felt that students needed to develop more expressions at
their disposal. Once when Tu, a vocal student, challenged the prediction by
students in another group in community share and asked "What makes you think

that Mrs. Cadaver will kill everyone?", Ellen seized the opportunity. She ﬁrst

124

 

 

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reafﬁrmed Tu that it was a good question, but then modeled a different way of
beginning the same question. She said "What evidence in the book that tells you
...?" She then asked Tu to repeat his question, beginning with "what evidence"
instead of "what makes you" (Field notes, May 7, 1999). At another time, Ellen
felt that students were using the phrases I_11Le_ and I don't like too often. She
talked with them about other possible ways of expressing the similar ideas in a
mini-lesson (Conversation with Ellen, January 22, 1999). In giving students the
exact language to use or questions to ask helped these second language learners
enhance their language ability and build their conﬁdence to participate in
discussions.

One other example of modeling collaboratively by Ellen and her students
occurred when she and the whole class modeled how to read a text, respond to it,
and discuss about it to the two newcomers, Aweiss and Hussain. This happened at
the beginning of the second semester when the class knew a lot about Book Club
already. On January 14, 1999, after the class introduced to Aweiss and Hussain
what Book Club was likeand why it was like that, the class went through the four
lessons again. They began by reading the book, Tuck Everlasting, and then
practicing writing response to and talking about the prompt questions. Led by the
teacher, the class read the story together section by section and responded to the
prompt questions. They ﬁrst picked up the expressions and words the author used
to describe the month of August and the roads when it belonged to the cows and

later to the people. Next, they identiﬁed three events that happened on this

125

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particular hot summer day and they generated a list of question around those three
events, which, Ellen told them, they would ﬁnd the answers as they read along the
book. In their discussion, Ellen highlighted some reading strategies for students to
use, such as following the story when others were reading, and re-reading when no
pictures were formed in mind after ﬁrst reading.

The review of the four lessons gave Aweiss and Hussain the opportunity to
witness how the "veteran" Book Club members would read, think, and respond to
books and at the same time, they also had the opportunity to actually join their
more knowledgeable peers and practice these acts. For the rest of the class, they
reviewed their work and came to a better understanding of the book as Ellen
highlighted the key elements in the story when they went through the lessons for
the second time.

ScaffoldinnghallengLng

Besides direct instruction, Ellen also engaged scaffolding and challenging
techniques as well in facilitating students’ learning. One of the big challenges for
the students to participate in Book Club was to understand what the prompts asked
and to write responses directly to the prompt questions. In early ﬁshbowl
discussions, Ellen would go to sit on the extra chair and ask students to elaborate
on what they had said. Many of the questions she asked were questions directly
taken from the prompts. In their third ﬁshbowl discussion, Ellen asked Vinnie

three questions and afterwards she explained to the students that they were the

126

 

EX

ICE

thou

exact questions from the prompt. In doing so, Ellen tried to scaffold students into

responding directly to the prompt questions.

Ellen:

Vinnie:

Ellen:
Thahn:

Kelsey:
Vinnie:

Ellen:

Vinnie:
Kelsey:
Vinnie:

Ellen:

Vinnie:

Ellen:

Thahn:
Ellen:

What did Marty do directly against his parents' wishes? In this
last chapter, what did he end up doing against his parents' wishes?
He ended up keeping Shiloh.

More. Anyone else can join in.

He hid it on top of the hill. He collected cans to keep Shiloh.
Because he would eat later and took some for Shiloh, like water.
He said if I ﬁnd him in the woods, I'll bring to him.

Why was it so important that, why did Marty feel so strongly that he
had to keep the dog and not return it?

Because he kick him and the stuff.

Because Judd said, if he found the dog, he would break his leg.
He said if he had no leg, he wouldn't be a dog to Judd.

If you were Marty, do you take the dog?

Yeah. Because it wouldn't be nice to kick the dog.

Okay, I just have asked you the three prompts that were on the
prompt sheet.

Because dog is living thing, you can't let a living thing die.

Okay, do you see how you need to respond directly to what the
prompts ask you?

(Transcript, September 24, 1998)

In the following excerpt, Ellen was trying to help Andy to articulate why he

thought a touch-me-not appearance house was white. She pushed him to think

further, asked him to think on his own feet, and also provided him with hint to

guide his thinking. Also evident in this excerpt is the helpﬁal role Andy’ peers

played in shaping his thinking.

Ellen:

Andy:
Ellen:
Andy:
Ellen:
Andy:
Ellen:

What would a touch-me-not appearance house have in it? What does
it look like? Andy?

Maybe white, uh,

Maybe white?

Yeah.

Why white?

Because, because,

Why do you think white?

127

h;

 

3am

Andy: Because if it’s uh, it’s black
Student: (inaudible)
Andy: Yeah, better

Ellen: Use your own thinking; don’t use his thinking. I think you were
coming toward it, just keep going.

Andy: Because, uhm, because, maybe, maybe

Ellen: What’s touch-me-not mean?

Student: Don’t touch me.
Andy: OH, because it is white, if you touch it, it’ll get dirty.
(Transcript, January 14, 1999)

One effort Ellen constantly made was to help students think from different
perspectives and develop their understanding of the differences between
themselves and others. In the ﬁshbowl discussion on The Watsons Go to
Birmingham — 1963, Michael said that he thought the way Rufﬁrs said "you all"
was funny. In the following excerpt, Ellen challenged this idea by showing the
students that people had different accents and that people in the south might think
them funny for the same reason they found the southern accent funny.

Ellen: What was so ﬁanny about him saying "Hello, you'all"?

Michael: Because how he said it, that was funny.

Ellen: I am confused as to what about it that was funny.

Michael: (silence)

Freddy: (sitting at another table) His accent? (Ellen gestured him to come to
join the group and he complied.)

Michael: How he said it and his accent?

Freddy: That's the country accent. Maybe that's the one that was funny?

Ellen: If you went down, down south and you said, "Hello", and people
would say "Hello", would that be funny? Because that would be an
accent too. That'll be the northern accent. You know that?

Michael: Yeah.

(Transcript, October 12, 1998)

On another occasion, Ellen was trying to make the students see that the

same thing might be viewed differently by people with different perspectives.

128

 

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When they were reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, one of the early

prompt questions asked students if they thought what they had read was funny or

not. Michael and a couple of others said that they thought it was funny when

Kenny, an eight-year-old boy in the book, was beaten up. Ellen tried to help them

see the event from multiple perspectives by ﬁrst suggesting students put

themselves in the position of Kenny, then sharing what she would feel if she were

Kenny, and ﬁnally citing examples of how the students themselves behaved in

class to show how people from different perspectives would see the same thing

differently.

Michael:
Ellen:
Rico:
Ellen:
Michael:

Ellen:

Every time it says Kenny gets beaten up.

Is that funny?

The way he says it.

Are you talking about the survival of the blizzard?
No. It's when the kids beat him up.

Okay, This one is a good example if you think about what
happened that could be funny. What happens if you, you were
Kenny, how many people think it will still be as funny? If it were
you who was getting thrown, and hurt, and wanting to cry? I'm
going to be real honest with myself and looking at the whole story.

I know if it were me, I wouldn't want that to happen to me and I
don't think it would be funny. I think if you are being real honest
with yourself, if you were that person, it probably won't be as funny.
I know this because if that was the case, I would never hear anyone
in this class saying, "Mrs. Fitch, so and so is doing something I don't
like."

(Transcript, October 8, 1998)

But Michael argued that it was funny because Kenny started laughing when

he got knocked down. The complex situation in which Kenny felt the need and

pride to hang out with his brother's friend, "Bup-Head", who was a bully at the

129

school, and at the same time Kenny became a victim of Bup-Head's "tricks" might

be beyond the comprehension by students of this age. However, Ellen pointed out

to the students that "the survival of the blizzard part one is a very good example

of how the situation is humorous if you look at it in one way and, but it's not so

humorous in another way" (Transcript, October 8, 1998).

Another example of Ellen’s scaffolding was when she tried to make

students realize that whenever they asked a question in discussions, they should

have a point to make. During the volunteer ﬁshbowl in early December, Ellen

warned the students not to pick at each other. However, Michael still commented

that Tu said "Allan was too young to live in the Century Village" two times. It was

not clear to Tu and others why Michael was saying this. Through interactions with

Michael during the ﬁshbowl discussion and the reﬂective talk afterward, Ellen

tried to make her point to the class, i.e., "When you ask a question, you need to

have a point to make" (Transcript, December 3, 1998). In the following excerpt,

Ellen put Michael on the spot to think hard about why he made the comment.

Ellen:

Michael:
Ellen:
Michael:
Ellen:

Michael:

[To the whole class] I want you to keep in mind something I want to
add, I like how some people are responding, but I'd like you to
remember that your questions should be focused on something, good
questions that you want to know more. Don't pick. Don't say, "you
said this, you said this." Ask a question.

[Joining the ﬁshbowl group. To Tu.] You said "Allan was too young
to live in the Century Village" two times.

Can you explain that, Michael?

He said that two times.

Michael, why you are saying that? [Michael was silent] What's the
signiﬁcance of that statement?

[inaudible]

[Tu looked at his writing and found that he did say that at two different places]

130

Ellen:

Michael:

Ellen:
Michael:
Ellen:
Michael:

Michael, what's your point? He said that two times. Is there
something wrong about the Century Village? Explain your point.
Noah said that Allan was too young to live in the Century Village.
That was what he thought.

Who is he?

Noah, [Ellen: Okay.] and he wrote that two times.

And?

I don't know.

(Transcript, December 3, 1998)

As shown in the excerpt, Michael was stating the fact, but he was not clear

of the point he wanted to make or if he was, he didn’t know how to articulate it. In

the debrieﬁng after the ﬁshbowl, Ellen brought up this issue of making a point

again after she praised the students in the ﬁshbowl group for helping each other to

clarify ideas. She tried to make Michael and other students see the reasons for

asking questions.

Ellen:

Michael:
Ellen:

Michael, I'm not picking you in particular but for example, you
went up to Tu and said, "Why did you say it twice?" Is that what
your main point? What's your point when you're asking that? For
example, you could go up and said, "Is it your point that he doesn't
live in Century Village?" Or is it your point that Tu said twice
instead of just once?

I didn't really understand it.

Well, to do that you say "I'm confused about what you meant about
him being too young to stay in the Century Village. So you're giving
Tu the opportunity to clarify it. Then we know your point is that
you're confused about it. Instead when you come up and say, "You
said so and so." That really doesn't tell the person whom you're
talking to what your point is.

(Transcript, December 3, 1998)

By pushing Michael to think hard about his reasons for making the

comment, Ellen tried to make him understand that in a real discussion, people did

not ask questions only for the sake of asking them, but rather we want to

131

communicate something and have a point to make. As this happened while the
whole class was observing, the point was also taken by other students.

One other technique Ellen used to scaffold students’ thinking about books
was to end discussions by asking students some questions on issues raised during
the discussions. She asked them to think further, "I want you to keep thinking
about it as you read. You don't have to answer it now" (Field notes, December 9,
1998; Field notes, January 15, 1999).

Learning by Doing:
The Third Stage of the Journey

The third stage of the development of Book Club differed from the second
stage in that now students played a more important role in leading discussion than
they did in the second stage. The "no outlandish ideas" event in February marked
the beginning of the third stage. In the second stage, Ellen focused her efforts
continuously on getting students to participate in discussions, to share their
thoughts about the books and to respond to each other’s sharing. With the no-
outlandish-ideas event, Ellen began to help students participate in Book Club
conversations at a higher level: it was not enough for the students to speak up their
thoughts; their thoughts needed to be reasonable and grounded in evidence from
the text and their own experiences.

In the third stage, more opportunities were created for students to practice
and develop their cognitive skills, social skills and linguistic skills needed to

participate in a literary discourse. Students became more interested in the books

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and they learned to comprehend the books better; they learned to express their
ideas and support their opinions. Students became more interested in learning
about each other's thinking. They learned to share sometimes their different and
tentative ideas. They learned to interact with each other, asking questions and
listening to each other's opinions. They learned to uptake other's ideas and keep
discussions focused and going. Students also developed a perspective towards
differences and diversity. They began to see that people had different ideas and
learned to see things from other people’s perspectives. At the same time, students
learned to function in multiple activity structures and cope with the authority and
freedom of speech in a structured, democratic community.

In short, students in Ellen's room were practicing and developing their
literary knowledge and skills necessary to participate in conversations about books
in a literary discourse community. At the same time, through working with literary
texts, these students were also forming personal world views and developing traits
that would help guide them in a diverse, democratic society. In this section, I ﬁrst
examine how Ellen helped students realize that outlandish ideas would ruin their
discussions and they should learn to engage in talks at a higher cognitive level.
Then I discuss opportunities created at this stage for students to practice and

develop their cognitive, social, and linguistic skills.

133

Leamirggto Engage in Book Discussions at a Higher Level: “Outlandish Ideas
Need to Stay Out of the Discussion!”

When the class engaged in book clubs and community share discussions at
the beginning of the year, students didn't know how to respond to each other. Long
pauses were common. As students became more comfortable in their community
and learned the language and skills for participation, they were eager to share their
thoughts on what they read, not even hesitating in expressing purely imaginative
ideas. While they were reading the end of the book, Tuck Everlasting, students
were fascinated by the magic water. When Mae Tuck, a key character, was put
into jail, students were concerned that the secret of the magic water might be
revealed because she was not able to die. In one discussion, the topic became how
to help Mae escape from jail. One student suggested that she could pretend to be
dead, and another said that she could ask to use the lady's room and then run away
(February 2, 1999). In another discussion, students expressed that Winnie was
made of water and the teacher thought the discussion was sidetracked (Field notes,
February 5, 1999). Finally on February 9, the class read the epilogue of the book
and knew Winnie, the main character, died at the age of 78. In the following
excerpt, students were attempting to ﬁgure out why Winnie didn't drink the magic
water.

Ellen: Okay, Group Two, what did you talk about?
Andy: We talked why didn't Winnie drink the water? JR said maybe

because she hit her head something and then she couldn't remember
the spring and anything that happened.

134

 

 

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Rico: What do you mean by something hitting her head? When the
lightening . . . [inaudible]

Michael: Maybe something like she hit her head on the door something.

Ellen: I want to stop you at this point. What happened in the story that
made you think of that?

(Transcript, February 9, 1999)

Ellen wanted the students to stop at this point because there was no
evidence in the book that suggested the students’ conﬁguration. However, the
students were interested in talking about Winnie’s death. In the next excerpt, a
couple of students thought that Winnie was hit by a tree at the age of 78 when she
went to look for the spring. At this point, Ellen not only pointed out that the idea
was outlandish, she also tried to make the students see why it was outlandish. She
asked students how realistic their idea was and told them to examine evidence
from the book to support their ideas. She told the students that she was “all for
coming up with ideas, but it needs to be well supported”.

Andy: Alicia said that maybe the reason they came up with is that the tree
fell and there was no spring. But she was 78 at that time.

Michael: Maybe it's been a long time since she met Jessie and she just
remembered the spring and she's like, "oh, yeah."

Freddy: Wouldn't it be so weird? You can't remember it?

Ellen: Okay, realistically, would she, at 78 years old, go to look for the
spring and have the tree fall down on her?

Students: No.

Ellen: That's another outlandish idea. Remember it's good to be thinking
but you want to be using evidence from the text to support what
you're saying. Okay, what would it be more likely to happen at 78
years old, the tree fell on you and you die or you die of old age?

Students: Old age.

Ellen: When was she supposed to drink the spring?

Students: 17.

Ellen: Okay, how many years apart from 78 to 17?

Students:

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Ellen: 60 years? So how realistic is this idea of a tree fall on her head? I
don't like to sit and direct the discussion, but you need to keep in
mind the outlandish ideas need to stay out of the discussion. Okay,
Using evidence from the text, how realistic that a tree fell on her
head? [Silence. Someone said "not very"]. I said it before: it ruins
the discussion. I'm all for coming up with ideas but it needs to be
well supported. It's not going to be outlandish. You all know what I
mean by outlandish? Ridiculous. This is a fantasy, but there's
nothing in the story that leads us to believe that a tree fell on her
head. Why did the author tell, inform the tree is no longer there?
What does it mean? The tree is not there, so the spring is not there.

(Transcript, February 9, 1999)

In discussions on these three days, Ellen tried to make students see that in I
discussions, claims needed to be supported by evidence from the books, even at
the risk of shutting the students up. The teacher and the class had come a long way
to reach this point. At the beginning of the year, Ellen tried different efforts to
"turn on" students’ conversation; now she was trying to "turn off" their talking.
Ellen dared to challenge students' outlandish ideas at this time because the class
had created a comfortable environment for participants to share ideas and explore
meanings. “No-outlandish-ideas” would not stop students from sharing opinions
with each other. Rather, it guided students to developing ways of talking and
thinking at a higher level that accorded with the norms and values of the larger
literary community, such as using logical reasoning and presenting well-supported
arguments.

Book Club Discussions Created Learning Opportunities for Students

Engaging with books through reading, writing, and talking about them in a

literary discourse community creates learning opportunities for students to develop

l36

 

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their literacy, social, and linguistic skills. While reading and talking about the-
literary texts, students go through a vicarious and "aesthetic" experience in a
"second world" (Benton 1985; Rosenblatt 1978). Students also have opportunities
to reﬂect on their own experiences while trying to make sense of the second world
and their real world. In addition, the process of learning to participate in the
discourse of a literary community is also a process for students to learn to develop
their literacy, social, and language skills that are needed to participate in the
cultural practices of a diverse and democratic society. In this section, I ﬁrst
describe the activity structure that allows time and space for students to engage in
talks among themselves. Then, I examine the opportunities created for students to
construct knowledge and develop skills collaboratively.
Activity Structure

Like the end of the second stage, the third stage continued to see students
enjoy a reasonable amount of time to share their understanding and responses to
the books in small group and in whole class discussions. Instead of the extended
planned direct instruction witnessed a lot in the ﬁrst stage, the planned instruction
in the third stage was brief. Table 11 and Table 12 show the different amounts of

time the class spent on various Book Club activities.

l37

 

Table l 1

Day by Day Count of the Time Spent on Book Club Activities in the Third Stage

 

Date Student- Time Teacher Talk/ Time Student Time Total
Centered (min.) Teacher-Led Talk (min.) Reading/ (min.) Time

 

Talk Writing (min.)
5-3 Book clubs 23 Transition and 5 Reading 45 96
Community 13 checking to see if and writing
share students were
prepared 10
Mini-lesson on "me
and the book"
5-5 Book clubs 21 Transition and 5 Reading 45 92
Community 10 checking to see if and writing
share students were
prepared 1 l
Mini-lesson on
"prediction"
5-7 Book clubs 17 Transition and 2 Reading 48 91
Community 16 checking to see if and writing
share students were
prepared 8

Mini-lesson on
"personal response"

5-10 Book clubs 20 Transition and 3 Reading N/A N/A
Community 17 checking to see if and writing
share students were
prepared
Mini-lesson N/A

 

Note. Based on ﬁeld notes on May 3, 5, 7, and 10, 1999.
Table 12

Average Time Per Day Spent on Book Club Activities in the Third Stage

 

Student-Centered Teacher Talk/ Student Reading Total Time
Talk (min.) Teacher-Led Talk and Writing (min.)
(min.) (min.)

 

Total Average Total Average Total Average Total Average
4 days Per Day 3 days Per Day 3 days Per Day 3 days Per Day
137 34 41 14 138 46 279 93

Note. Based on ﬁeld notes on May 3, 5, 7, and 10, 1999.

138

Opportunities for the Development of Literacy Skills

Opportunities for literacy development derive from the nature of the Book
Club tasks. Students were required to use evidence from the books and their own
experiences to support their ideas in both their written responses and their
discussions. They were also expected to ask each other fat, juicy questions.
Participating in Book Club activities, students began to (a) make intertextual and
personal connections; (b) develop an aesthetic appreciation of literary texts; (c)
approach a situation or problem from multiple perspectives; and (d) formulate
their own world-view.

Making connections.

Reading and discussing texts in Book Club gave students the opportunity to
learn to make connections between what they read in the book and what they
experienced in their world. Sometimes the connection was made because the
prompt questions required the students to do so; some other times, students made
the connections because they wanted to use the examples to support their opinions.
In the discussion of Walk Two Moons on May 7, Thahn thought Mrs. Cadaver
killed people. When challenged, he asked, "Why did the author say she came back
late [if she didn’t kill people]?" Andy used his own uncle and aunt as an example
to explain to Thahn that doctors and nurses usually worked late hours, and since
Mrs. Cadaver was a nurse, it was not abnormal for her to come home late (Field

notes, May 7, 1999).

139

Sometimes, the prompt questions asked the students to make the
connection. On May 5, students were given the opportunity to share and chat
about their own schooling experiences. In their book clubs, they were asked to
compare Mr. Birkway, a teacher in Walk Two Moons, with their previous teachers.
In this particular group, Thi went to school in Vietnam for three years and Andy
went to kindergarten and third grade in Ecuador. Though the other two members
of the group, Tu and Vong, both went to school in the United States, Tu was
Vietnamese and Vong was Hmong. In their discussion, Thi shared with the group
that she had a teacher in Vietnam just like Mr. Birkway. She described both
teachers using the same language such as "excellent" and they both patted students
on the back. Yet, her teacher in Vietnam would whip students if they didn't do
their homework. She told the group that she didn't like that teacher, nor teachers
like him.

The following conversation occurred after Thi ﬁnished sharing. Two
features marked the conversation. First, the conversation was focused around
schooling experience and whipping in speciﬁc. More information was presented.
Andy shared the story his third grade teacher in Ecuador told him, saying that
“when you did a very bad job and you didn’t bring homework, they whip you”
with “this cable with open wires”. Thi added that in Vietnam if students didn’t
know how to do math problems, the teacher would whip them. Tu described what
it was like when the teacher whipped a student. Thi also compared teachers in

Vietnam and in the United States: “. .. in here, if the teacher whip the students they

I40

can’t teach no more; but in Vietnam, it’s different.” Second, the atmosphere was
relaxed. Students had a genuine interest in each other and they asked Thi and
Andy if they got whipped, “Did the teacher whip you?” They also related what
they hear to themselves and to others in their class. For example, Tu commented
that “It’s a good thing that I didn’t went [sic] to school in Vietnam.” Andy
suggested that one student in their class might be whipped for she seldom ﬁnished

her homework.

Tu:

Did you say that the Vietnamese teachers, they whip you?

Andy: Did the teacher whip you?

Thi: Yeah.

Tu: [laying his palms on the table] Yeah, they whip you, they use a stick
and whip on your hands.

Thi: Yeah, the principal, it's like, in here, if the teacher whip the students
they can't teach no more but in Vietnam, it's different.

Andy: I know, my mom, in south America, my teacher, you know I went
for one year to Ecuador in third grade, because my mom want me to
learn more Spanish. My teacher in recess, she told all of us when she
was little, it was bad because whenever, they had this cable with
open wires, when you did a very bad job and you didn't bring
homework, they whip you with that and it hurts. You got to carry
something like this [gesture having a bag on back] and they whip
you like this [gesture].

Tu: Did they whip YOU?

Andy: No, my teacher.

Tu: It's a good thing that I didn't went to school in Vietnam.

Andy: Can you imagine they had Jessey and they had Book Club, Jessey,
she would be just like, oh, man! [They all giggled a little]

Thi: See, if you go in front of the class and if you do some math and you
do wrong, he told you to do it again and if you get it wrong again
and he would whip you. He told you to lie on the table.

Vong: [unbelievingly, his eyes wide open] If you do it wrong, they whip
you?

Thi: mm.

(Transcript, May 5, 1999)

14]

I

Comparing the teacher in the book and the teachers students had created
opportunities for these students with diverse backgrounds to bring in their rich
prior cultural knowledge while constructing new knowledge. The opportunity also
enabled students to practice interactive skills in conversations. They shared
personal information, asked each other for clariﬁcation, and offered comments and
extension of other’s story. At the same time, learning about the differences in
teaching practices may make students appreciate more what they had currently.

Developing an aesthetic appreciation of books.

As students in this class developed a relationship of mutual respect,
members of the group began to feel comfortable sharing ideas, and conversations
about books became entertaining to students as well. As we have already read
about it, when Thi shared that teachers in Vietnam would whip students if they
didn't do their homework on time, Andy asked his group to imagine what could
happen to Jessey, a student in their class who seldom ﬁnished her homework on
time. He commented, "Can you imagine they had Jessey and they had Book Club?
Jessey, uh, she would be just like, oh, man!" (Transcript, May 5, 1999)

Sometimes the relaxed atmosphere in group discussions led to more
appreciation of the book they read. They had an audience who were interested in
each other’s ideas, they felt free to express whatever their imagination took them,
and they enjoyed each other’s conversation about books as well. On June 2,
students were critiquing Walk Two Moons in book clubs. When My Linh ﬁnished

sharing her written response, Tu asked My Linh what she thought the author could

142

 

 

do to improve Sal, the main character. In the following excerpt, the idea of turning
the main female character into a male character amused the group and the laughter
showed that they were having fun.

Tu: What do you think the author can do to improve Sal?

My Linh: [Thoughtfully] They can write more about what is going to happen
to Sal's father and Margaret.

Tu: What about turning her to a boy?" [All laughed] That'll be better.

Hussain: No, because

Thi: I don't think that's necessary,
Andy: I know, because only girls' stories are sad. Boys' stories are "lived
happily ever after."

Tu: That's right, that's right.
(Transcript, June 2, 1999)

Develoning multiple perspectives.

In book discussions, students learned to provide support from the chapters
they read and from their own experiences to warrant whatever claims they made.
For example, during the community share on January 14, the class discussed what
a house that had a touch-me-not appearance looked like. Two opposite
interpretations of the color of the house were presented. Quite a few students
suggested that it was white because dirt would show out easily on white. A couple
of others thought the house was black and shining. Finally, Ellen summarized that
they could imagine it to be however they wanted as long as they could support
their interpretations.

Ellen: What would a touch-me-not appearance house have in it? What does
it look like? Andy?

Andy: OH, because it is white, if you touch it, it’ll get dirty.

143

Ellen: YEAH, that’s what I am thinking. That might be right or there might
be something else. Anyone else has any ideas of what, what this
touch-me-not house might look like?

Kelsey: It might be nice and shining and they don’t want to get anybody’s
ﬁnger prints on it.

Ellen: Okay, no ﬁnger prints on it. Very, very what?
Several students: Clean.

Ellen: Clean and, Rico?

Rico: Tidy.

Ellen: They’re tidy and orderly. Anyone else Aweiss?
Aweiss: If it is tidy, if you touch it, it won’t shine.

Ellen: It wont’ shine anymore. Okay, So this house...

Aweiss: If you touch it, it won’t, you won’t see, it won’t be white.

Ellen: Okay. (to Hussain) Yes?

Hussain: If you have mud in you hand and you touch the house, it

Ellen: But the house says touch me not. Don’t touch me, because I’m very
clean, I don’t want your dirty prints on. Don’t come around me.
Touch me not, touch me not, touch me not. (to Rico) Yes?

 

Rico: It might be black. Because it’s black and shining and the appearance
(inaudible)
Ellen: Maybe, That’s possible. My picture in my head was white. Your

picture in your head could be black. Does the author tell us what
color the house was?
Several students: No.

Ellen: No, so you can imagine it how you want to, but you need to support
it. Okay? (to Andy) yes.
Andy: I don’t think the owner likes it black, because, because if someone

sees it, he might think uh, they come to a house black, becoz, uh,
they have a lot of dirt, and they touch the house uh, it won’t show.
(Transcript, January 14, 1999)

Engaging with literary texts, students also learned to take different
personal, cultural, and historical perspectives. The book, View from Saturday told
the story from the perspectives of ﬁve different people. Reading and talking about
especially this book helped students develop different perspectives. Also many
prompt questions required students to take a different character’s point of view.

The following are two brief examples that demonstrate students’ ability to begin

144

viewing things in more complex ways. On February 2, the class discussed what
Mae Tuck could do to escape from prison and some suggested that she could
pretended to be dead and would be taken to the hospital. Thi questioned if they, in
the early 1800's, had hospitals like we have today. This historical perspective was
picked up again in their discussion on February 5 when Rico asked if they had the
same court system at that time as we have today.

Rico: I mean to get her out, was it like that you can pay a ﬁne so you can
bail him out? Was it like that way back in the 1800s? To bail him
out? Are you sure? I don’t think so.

Freddy: Why not?

Freddy: Why couldn’t they bail him out?

Rico: I don’t know maybe it wasn’t like that, say maybe it was not like
ours to pay to bail him out.

(Transcript, February 5, 1999)

Developing a personal world view.

The book clubs and the community share provided students opportunities to
interact with the teacher and each other, to share their tentative understanding of
the book, to explore the connections between the text they read and their real life,
and to formulate their own world view. These were all attributes that would help
students participate in a diverse, democratic society. In their conversations,
complicated issues were brought up either by the prompts or by the students
themselves. Discussions of these issues helped students explore and develop their
own world-views and value systems. Some of these complex issues included the

meanings of life, the meanings of friendship, the meanings of stealing, the

meanings of law and responsibility, personal views of what was right and what

145

was wrong, etc. Some of the conversations were deep, and some were not.
However, they all forced the students to think about real issues in life and this
helped students think independently and make their judgments and choices based
on reasons.

During one discussion on the book Walk Two Moons, Andy said that he
thought Grandma and Grandpa were crazy because they stole a tire from a
Senator’s car in Washington. Tu challenged his assumption and said they were
only borrowing. In the following conversation, though they didn't come to
agreement on whether Grandma and Grandpa were “stealing” or “borrowing”, two
different perspectives were presented in public. Besides, students were also trying
to provide support for their opinions.

Tu: How are they crazy?

Andy: Of course they are crazy, because only crazy persons are going to go
to rob tires from a [Senator].

Tu: They didn't rob it.

Andy: Yes they did. They stole it.

Tu: They borrowed it to them.

Andy: SO, they stole them.

Vong: That's the kind of borrowing.

Andy: So I go and steal someone's video games and I'm just borrowing
them?!

Tu: To them they are borrowing and to other people they are stealing.

(Transcript, May 3, 1999)

During the community share on May 10, the class was discussing the
prompt question: What do you think the message “Don’t judge a person until you

walk two moons in his moccasins” means? In the following excerpt, both Tu and

Andy shared examples of how their moms judged people especially teenagers by

146

their appearances. While Tu disagreed with what his mom said and Andy partially
agreed, Ia stated that she thought their moms were right.

Tu: Sometimes I heard some sayings that I don't agree.
Ellen: Say it louder, I don't think anyone here could hear you, Tu.

Tu: Some sayings I think are impossible or untrue. Like my mom says
that when you comb your hair like in the middle, like on the two
sides [gesturing], she said if you comb your hair like that, you would
be bad. She said that people who do that are bad.

Andy: Oh yeah, my mother says, you know how, that teenage boys dye
their hair? She says that, my mom says, whenever she sees one of
the people like that, (gesturing hair brushed towards back), they dye
their hair, she thinks they are bad kids. Like some have tattoos in
their arm, she thinks they are bad. [Class laugh]

Ia: I think your mom's right. Because no ordinary people comb their
hair in the middle and dye their hair.

[Some students tried to quiet the noise down, for Ia always spoke in a soft
voice.]

Ellen: Ia, what did you say? Did you ask a question? Yes? Can you repeat
it a little bit louder?

Ia: I think your moms is right. Because most of the people, like in
middle school, some people like comb their hair in the middle of
their head, and they dye their hair like in different kinds color, they
need to do like other people.

Tu: It depends. My mom is judging someone from his appearance.

Andy: It just gives you a bad impression. Like someone dyes his hair way
yellow it gives you a bad impression

Ia: Most people dye their hair yellow the most.

Tu: I have a friend who is bigger than me, he is in high school or
something, he dyes his hair way yellow and combed it in the middle
and he's still good.

Andy: It gives you a bad impression.

Rico: Andy, you know your mom says about people who have tattoo. Not
necessarily. My mom has a tattoo and she is not a bad woman.

Andy: You know my friend. He dyes his hair a little bit, just a little bit,
because it matches his hair and it looks good, but my mom, it looks .
really good, but my mom says it's still bad to dye your hair. I go like,
"it's nice".

(Transcript, May 10, 1999)

 

147

In this discussion, three views were presented. One was that we should not
judge people from their appearance; another was that some appearance gave other
people a bad impression; and the other thought that an appearance different from
that of most people was bad. Both Tu and Rico employed speciﬁc examples to
support their point of view. Though no particular conclusion was reached, the
process of discussing these thorny issues was more important in helping students
develop their own thinking. The earlier discussion between Tu and Andy on
whether the act of taking the tires was borrowing or stealing was another example.
Still another example was the conversation they had over Walk Two Moons. In the
book, Sal's mother leﬁ home and died in a trafﬁc accident. Andy and Thi
wondered why she went away by herself.

Andy: Vong, it's not about your paper, but why do you think Sal's mom

went away?
Tu: How about she went for a vacation?
Thi: Why do you think that she leﬁ her children and go on a vacation?

Andy: I think she wanted to visit relatives. [He later elaborated on what
relative, a cousin, in Idaho.]
Tu: By herself.

Thi: I don't know. Maybe not.
(Field notes, June 2, 1999)
The students appeared to be comfortable leaving complex issues at a
standstill. This was no surprise, as Ellen quite often asked the students to think
further about issues raised during the discussions without coming up with a

deﬁnite answer: "I want you to keep thinking about it. You don't have to answer it

now". (Field notes, December 9, 1998 & January 15, 1999).

I48

Opportunities for the Development of Social Skills

Book Club activities provide students lots of opportunities to interact with
each other. With the guidance of the teacher, students gradually developed their
social skills to engage in book discussions. They learned to monitor the group
discussions, challenging each other’s thinking and sharing different and sometimes

only tentative ideas.

Monitoring group discussions.

 

Small group and class discussions are important components of Book Club.
During those discussions, students learned how to engage in conversations with
their peers over literary texts. They learned to talk to each other and listen to each
other; they learned to monitor and maintain their conversations, including bidding
for the ﬂoor, inviting others to talk, asking for clariﬁcation, and requesting others
to speak louder; they learned to express and accept different opinions; they learned
to challenge each other's ideas as well.

In their small group discussions, students also learned to direct their own
conversations. They learned to say "I can't hear you. Could you speak louder
please?"; "You should listen to him."; "Do you have any questions for him?";
"Could you do it slowly so we can answer your questions?" (Transcript, November
2, 1998); "Can I ask a question?" (Transcript, April 15, 1999); "... I know what
you mean, but I want you to be speciﬁc ..." (Transcript, December 3, 1998).
Through engaging in discussions, students learned to monitor their own

conversations.

I49

Challenging each other and sharing different and tentative ideas.

In the discussions, students learned to ask and think about fat, juicy
questions. During book clubs, students constantly asked each other questions like
"Why do you think ...?"; or "What made you think. . .?"; or "Can you give an
example?" These question structures gave students a tool to frame their thinking.
Hussain came to this class from the DLP class (developing language proﬁciency)
in January. On June 2, Hussain shared his response to Walk Two Moons and said
that he felt the ending was sad, because Sal's mother and grandmother all died. He
also compared his prediction of the story with the ending of the book, saying that
he thought that Sal would be crashing in the end. Andy asked him, "Why do you
think that? Could you support that?" Hearing Hussain say “no”, Tu asked, "Why
do you say that if you can't support that?" Being a novice of the Book Club
practices, Hussain answered, "I don't know. I just liked it."

In discussions, students also learned to explore how to go about challenging
other people’s views and expressing different opinions. In the following two
occasions, Thi was trying to ﬁnd a way to challenge what other group members
were saying. In one of their book clubs over the book Tuck Everlasting, the group
had a very heated conversation over whether Winnie would drink the magic water
or not. Later the conversation turned to how Winnie could tell her family about the
magic water. Thi believed that Winnie would not tell the secret. Period. At an
earlier point, she reminded the group, "But that's the secret." However, nobody

paid any attention to her remark and they continued to discuss how Winnie might

150

f .

 

share about the water with her family so that they would believe her. Finally,
instead of saying that she thought Winnie would not tell her family about the
water, she asked her group members, "But do you think that Winnie will break the
secret or what?" A couple of others said "no". Then Thi asked again, "Then how
can the family know about the water?" (Transcript, February 4, 1999).

On another occasion, Thi asked the people in her group to explore deeper
meanings behind the literal language. In the book Walk Two Moons, Grandma
constantly mispronounced Sal's friend's name, Phoebe. Thi wondered if it was

done on purpose.

Thi: What do you think of Grandma when she says /’pi:bi:/? What do you
think of her?

Vong: I think [being cut short].

Tu: I think she is crazy. She doesn't listen, maybe.

Thi: Do you think she try to be humorous sometimes?

Tu/Andy: NO.

Andy: (acting) Just like that, "Peebee, what happened to Peebee?"

Tu: I think it's funny. They are goofy, they're goofy, man.

(Transcript, May 3, 1999)

Opportunities for the Development of Language Skills

Most of Ellen’s students were second language learners, who spoke a home
language other than English. Thus participating in the reading, writing and
discussion of literary texts with an authentic audience provided the students with
the opportunities to develop their linguistic skills in meaningful contexts. Students
acquired the skills to express their ideas in a way that other people could
understand them. They learned to use appropriate language to elicit other people's

ideas, to provide uptake to their thinking, and to challenge them. Besides, the

151

 

Book Club vocabulary work asked students to ﬁgure out the meaning of words
within context. Students could also ask questions on word meanings in their
discussion groups. Thi once asked "What does 'up against' mean?" (Transcript,
September 11, 1998). In the following conversation, Andy, Thahn, and Michael

explained the meaning of the word “divorce” upon Thi’s request. They told her:

 

“you marry someone” ﬁrst; when you don’t want to be married and “you sign
paper” to “get divorced” and become only “friends”; in other words, “you dump
them” (Transcript, December 3, 1998). It is also an example of how group

members listened to each other, built on each other’s ideas, and collaboratively

 

helped one group member understand the meaning of a word.
Thi: What does divorce mean?
Andy: When you marry someone and you want to marry
Thahn: And then you don't want to marry them and you sign paper
Andy: Then you get divorced and you can only be friends.
Thahn: You divorce.
Michael: You dump them. [laughter and smiles from all group members]
(Transcript, December 3, 1998)

As students engaged in writing responses to the prompts and talking in their
discussions, they learned to use more appropriate language to speak to an
audience. Some language usage, which was not heard in the ﬁrst stage, began to
appear regularly in their discussions as the year progressed. Students started to
quote from the book to support their views, such as "Ethan told us in the book that
..." (Field notes, December 3, 1998). They learned to acknowledge a classmate’s

views while giving their own, such as "Like Alicia said that ...". They also

presented different points of views when reporting group discussions during

152

community share time, such as "Some of us think that and some of us don't"
(Field notes, February 5, 1999).
What is Learned Beyond Talk in Book Club Discussions
The school year witnessed the changes in students’ participation patterns in

Book Club discussions as they gradually acquired the literary discourse and

 

formed a literary community in the classroom. Are these changes related to

students’ learning in reading and writing? Evidence from the data shows that

 

students also increased their vocabulary and they became more metacognitively
strategic in reading. Students also improved their writing skills, as their written
responses became longer and demonstrated more analytical and reﬂective thinking
towards the end of the year.

In this section, I analyze students’ literacy development as demonstrated in

their sight word gains measured by Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) (Slosson,

 

1963), their increased awareness of meta-comprehension strategies in reading
shown by the Metacomprehension Strategies Index (MSI) (Schmitt, 1990), and
their Book Club written responses over the year — focusing on Thi’s writing
samples. Finally, I discuss brieﬂy students’ self-appraisals on the changes in their
reading and writing over the year. I
Slosson Oral Reading Test
At the beginning and the end of the school year, students were tested on the
Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT). SORT is a test of word recognition. The word

list consists of 10 groups of twenty words each, which correspond to grades primer

153

through high school. A conversion table provides an estimated grade reading level
based on the number of words a student can recognize. According to Erickson,
Silberg, Rutter, Simonoff, Meyer, and Eaves (1996), “the SORT raw scores have
been reported to have high concurrent validity (correlations of .88 or greater) with
other widely used reading tests (e.g. Brown, 1976; Haynes & Jenkins, 1986;
Nicholson, 1988, cited by Slosson Educational Publications, Inc., in Slosson,
1963)” (p. 428). Data collected for each student consist a raw score of words
he/she read correctly and a calculated equivalent grade level.

Scores from 19 students in Ellen’s class were complete and used for
analysis. As shown in Table 13, their average pre-test raw score is 86.4 and their
average post-test raw score is 123.5. The gain in raw score is 37.2 words, which is
equivalent to 1.8 years of growth. The average increase for the students from the
beginning to the end of the year is 43%. Almost 95% of the students gain more
than one year of growth in reading vocabulary. The one student who fails to
achieve one year’s gain achieves an increase of 36.7% between her pre- and post-

ICSIS.

154

Table 13

Students’ Gains from Pre to Post SORT Test Scores (N = 19)

 

 

 

 

 

Pre-SORT Test Post-SORT Test Gains Increase
Name Grade Raw Reading Raw Reading Raw Reading Percent
Level Score* Grade Score“ Grade Score“ Grade %
Level Level Level

Thi 5 8O 4 143 7.1 63 3.1 78.8%
Rico 4 90 4.5 152 7.6 62 3.1 68.9%
Osman 5 82 4.1 142 7.1 60 3 73.2%
Kelsey 4 77 3.8 129 6.4 52 2.6 67.5%
Adeline 4 50 2.5 98 4.9 48 2.4 96.0%
Rosie 4 90 4.5 133 6.6 43 2.1 47.8%
Vinnie 4 84 4.2 123 6.1 39 1.9 46.4%
Thahn 4 61 3 99 4.9 38 1.9 62.3%
Vong 5 64 3.2 100 5 36 1.8 56.3%
Xa 5 69 3.4 105 5.2 36 1.8 52.2%
Jessey 4 125 6.2 157 7.8 32 1.6 25.6%
My Linh 5 50 2.5 79 3.8 29 1.3 58.0%
Shele 5 45 2.2 72 3.6 27 1.4 60.0%
Maria 4 138 6.9 165 8.2 27 1.3 19.6%
Alicia 4 136 6.8 162 8.1 26 1.3 19.1%
Tu 4 149 7.4 174 8.7 25 1.3 16.8%
Michael 4 139 6.9 162 8.1 23 1.2 16.5%
JR 5 63 3.1 85 4.2 22 1.1 34.9%
la 4 49 2.4 67 3.3 18 0.9 36.7%
Total 1641 81.6 2347 116.7 706 35.1

Average 86.4 4.3 123.5 6.1 37.2 1.8 43.0%

 

*Raw score = the count of actual words students could recognize.
Meta-comprehension Straggy Index (MSD
At the beginning and the end of the year, the Meta-comprehension Strategy
Index (MSI) (Schmitt, 1990) was given to students to measure their awareness of
the strategic reading process. The questionnaire has 25-items with each consisting
4 multiple choices, one of which indicates metacomprehension strategy awareness.
The questions ask students to choose what they believe to be a good thing to do to

help them understand a story better before, during, and after they read it.

155

According to Schmitt (1990), the MSI assesses students’ awareness of a variety of
meta-comprehension behaviors that ﬁt within six broad categories: (a) predicting
and verifying, (b) previewing, (c) purpose setting, (d) self questioning, (e) drawing
from background knowledge, and (f) summarizing and applying ﬁx-strategies.

The MSI has been shown to be a reliable measure of metacomprehension
strategy awareness (Schmitt, 1990). Lonberger (1998) reported an MSI internal
consistency value of .87 using the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20. Schmitt (1988)
compared the MSI with The Index of Reading Awareness (IRA) (Paris, Cross, &
Lipson; 1984; Paris & Jacobs, 1984). A statistically signiﬁcant correlation was
found between the M81 and the IRA (r = .48, p < .001), suggesting both
instruments are measuring similar constructs. Schmitt (1988) also compared the
relationship between the performance on the MSI and other tasks (error detection,
cloze) commonly used to measure students’ metacomprehension ability and found
statistically signiﬁcant correlations between them.

Throughout the year, Ellen never engaged any formal instruction on these
strategies, except for a couple of times at the beginning of the year when she was
introducing a new book, she asked students what she should do before she began
reading it. She then modeled examining the book covers and predicting the story.
The majority of students scored higher in the post-test than in the pre-test (see

Table 14).

156

Table 14

The Differences Between Students’ Pre and Post Scores in MSI (N =20)

 

 

Differences:
Name Pre score* Post some“ (post score —
pre score)
Osman 7 2 -5
Jessey 7 5 -2
Vinnie l 1 11 0
JR 9 10 l
Kelsey 15 17 2
Shele 8 10 2
Alicia 10 13 3
Vong 7 11 4
Maria 6 11 5
Rosie 6 11 5
My Linh ll 17 6
Tu 17 23 6
la 6 12 6
Adeline 7 15 8
Michael 8 18 10
Xa Yang 4 14 10
Thi 10 21 11
Rico 3 15 12
Thahn 8 20 12
Andy 2 l6 l4

 

* Scores = number of correct answer out of a total of 25 questions.

Table 14 shows that the difference between individual student’s total pre-
and post-scores of MSI varies a lot. Two students score lower (2 and 5 points
each) in their post survey than in their pre-survey. One student made no change.
The rest improved from 1 to 14 points respectively. A t-test has been conducted at
the conﬁdence interval of .05 and the result shows that the differences between the
pre- and the post-scores (see Table 15) are statistically signiﬁcant, suggesting that
students became more aware of and used more of these reading comprehension

strategies in their reading at the end of the year as compared with the beginning of

157

the year. Further analysis of the paired mean differences of the six categories
shows that after one full year of participating in Book Club, students improve their
strategy use especially in self questioning, drawing from background knowledge,
summarizing and applying ﬁx-strategies, and predicting and verifying (see Table
15).

Table 15

Analysis of Paired Mean Differences for Pre a_nd Post Scores in MSI (N = 29)

 

Mean Differences Standard Error

 

Pair 1 1.45" .4838
Predicting and Verifying (7 questions)

Pair 2 .40* .1835
Previewing (2 questions)

Pair 3 .60* .2847
Purpose Setting (3 questions)

Pair 4 1.05" .2348
Self Questioning (3 questions)

Pair 5 1.15“ .3574

Drawing from Background Knowledge

(6 questions)
Pair 6 .85" .2741

Summarizing and Applying F ix-Strategies
(4 questions)
Total (25 guestions) 5.50" 1.1251
*p< .05 **p_< .01
Book Club Written Responses

As an integrated approach to literacy instruction, Book Club aims to create
opportunities for students to engage in reading, writing, and talking about quality
children’s literature. In Ellen’s class, the writing component is in the form of

responses to books. Each book unit consists of a number of lessons, such as

Character Map, Me and the Book, and Themes, and for each lesson, Ellen

158

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generates a group of questions, known to students as the writing prompts. Certain
prompts consist of two optional questions and students can pick one to write
about. Occasionally there is a free choice prompt when students decide what to
write. Each book unit consists an average of 13.6 prompts, the shortest containing
8 prompts and the longest l9 prompts. Over the school year, students wrote
responses to a total of 122 prompts for the 9 book units (see Table 16).

Table 16

Book Club Units and Number of Promms

 

 

 

 

Book Unit Number of Prompts
Stone Fox 9
Shiloh 8
The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 13
Number the Stars 15
View from Saturday 14
Tuck Everlasting 19
Mildred Taylor Unit 12
Yolanda ’s Genius 13
Walk Two Moons l9
Totalyrompts 1 22
Average prompts per book unit 13.6

 

Each time students read a chapter(s) for Book Club, they responded to a
prompt question(s). They then share their written responses in small group
discussions the next day. At the beginning of the year, students were given the
Scoring Rubric for evaluating the written responses. To earn a 4 point, the writing
should (1) focus on designated topic, (2) be written for a “know-nothing”
audience, (3) provide at least three or more well-thought ideas from the text, real

life, or other novels to support writing, and (4) be titled and dated. At the end of

159

 

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each book unit, students were given the End—of-Book Self-Assessment sheet and
they evaluated the book and their own work according to nine questions (see
Appendix D). They also chose a best entry for each book and explained its
strengths. After the teacher graded their written responses (see Appendix E),
students ﬁlled a Reaction and Goal-Setting form in response to the teacher’s
evaluation (see Appendix F).

A complete collection of the written responses to seven book units (out of
nine) was collected for the six focus students. For the ﬁrst book unit on Stone Fox,
only their best entries were collected. The intern teacher taught the book unit
Yolanda ’s Genius, the written data 0 f which were not collected. In this section, I
analyze the two sample responses by Thi, one of the six focus students. I ﬁrst
describe Thi brieﬂy, then quote her “ME Poem”, which she wrote in late March,
1999, and ﬁnally analyze her two writing samples. One was written for the ﬁrst
book unit in the beginning of the year and the other was for the last book unit.

Thi was a ﬁfth grader. She came to the United States from Vietnam in 1997
and she had been in the United States for only one year when the current study
began. The year before, she was in the DLP classroom because she needed
intensive English language instruction. At the beginning of the year, she was quiet
and seldom spoke either in her group or in class. She also appeared constantly
confused and didn’t seem to know what she was expected to do. At the end-of-
year interview, she commented that she initially hated Book Club because she

“didn’t get it” (interview of Thi, June 8, 1999). However, she was a diligent

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student and eager to learn. The teacher also tried to accommodate her needs. In
one of the ﬁsh-bowl discussions, Ellen squatted beside her, told her the question,
and urged her to ask(say) the question to another student in her group. Towards
the end of the year, Thi was active in small group discussions and spoke up

occasionally during community share. Thi was an active listener. She shared at the

 

end-of-year interview that she liked community share and enjoyed listening to -
different ideas and opinions from her classmates. Thi described herself in her “ME 1
Poem”, which depicts a unique and at the same time common adolescent girl. She

loves nature, cares for her family and friends, feels sad to have moved away from

her country, values education and cooperation with others, longs for happiness,

looks forward to seeing another part of the world and her future, and feels scared

of bad things. Above all, she values and longs to see a world where “everyone

respect to each other”. This is demonstrated by her use of the word respect four

times in this 84-word poem. She also mentions that she “fears ﬁghting” and feels

“frustrated when someone bothers me”. The following is Thi’s “ME Poem”.

“Thi

Truthful, cheerful and respect.

Daughter of Duc and Nao.

Lover of nature, happiness, family and friendship.

Who feels sad to move away from my country, scared to go home by
myself at midnight, frustrated when someone bothers me.

Who needs respect, education and a happy life.

Who gives respect, help and cooperation to others.

Who fears ﬁghting, when someone dies and something bad happening.
Who would like to see another part of the world, my future and everyone
respect to each other.

Nguyen.”

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Quiet, introverted, and eager to learn, Thi began the year of Book Club with
limited English proﬁciency. From all the 9 responses in Stone Fox, Thi chose
“Prediction” as her best entry. She explained: “I think predition [sic] is the best
because is specaily [sic] and is short and is important thing in the book. And is
easy to answer” (Reading logs for Stone Fox). Here are the prompt questions and
her response:

The prompt:
Lesson 5: Read chapters 5-6: Prediction What is little Willy up against? Do
you think he has a chance at winning the race, or is he just wasting his money?
Support your response. (from Prompt Sheet for Stone Fox)

Thi’s response (see Appendix C):

Lesson 5 Predition Thi N. 9/11/98
Little Willy is up against winning the race so willy can make money to

help his grandfather And I think Willy has a great chance of winning the race
and Willy is not going to waste his money. I know that because Willy looks
really smarts and his face tell me that Willy is going to win. That is my
Predition for chapter 6-7. ..

This response contains 64 words. Each sentence answers directly to one of
the prompt questions. Thi provides two supports to her judgment that Little Willy
has a great chance of winning the race and he is not going to waste his money. Thi
also adds one reason why Little Willy decides to compete in the race and has a
concluding sentence at the end. However, Thi provides little elaboration to what
she says. A know-nothing reader is leﬁ wondering about what race he will be in,
who is the opponent he is going to compete against, and what has happened to his

grandfather. Besides, Thi’s support to her judgment, which is based on Little

Willy’s looks, is not enough to convince the reader either. In conclusion, Thi’s

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response addresses the prompt questions stringently, and it lacks the details for a
know-nothing audience to follow the story. Technically, Thi answered all the
questions using the language directly from the prompts, which is a result of pattern
drill training popularly used by ESL teachers. Her response also shows a lack of
conﬁdence and her inability to express ideas freely.

However, Thi’s “Prediction” response to the last book, Walk Two Moons,
witnesses some improvement with regard to the content employed and the
language used. This prompt was chosen from the last book unit because it shared
the same topic, prediction. Similar to the prompt for the ﬁrst book unit, this
prompt also asked the students to support their ideas with evidence from the
reading. Here are the prompt questions and Thi’s response:

The prompt:
Lesson 7: Prediction
Assigned Reading: Chapters 14-15 (p. 8497)
Writing Prompt: What is your own theory about Mrs. Cadaver? Be speciﬁc and
NO outlandish ideas! ! l ! !! Predict what you think will happen next in the story.
Why do you think this? Be prepared to support whatever you say with
evidence from the reading.

Thi’s Response (see Appendix C):

Walk Two Moon
Prediction Thi N. 5/6/99
My own theory about Mrs. Cadaver is that Mrs. Cadaver isn’t a killer

like what Phoeby think. Phoebe just have an stronge imaginary about a
character, about how Mrs. Cadaver choped her husband and bury him. But I
think even Mrs. Cadever doesn’t choped her husband and bury him. I think
something is hiding under the bush because, if it just only that she was

replanted the tree. Than why would she need to be hurry back, when Mr.
Birkway was there. I also think Mrs. Cadaver isn’t a normal person because,

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L.

why would dad been really sad when he wasn’t at Marrgret house. Sal dad
were much sadder when he isn’t at Marrgret house, than his wife left him.

I think what will happen next is that, Sal will end up to like Marrgret,
because she will learn more about Marrgret, and how Mrs. Cadaver react to
her. I think Sal mother would come back to live with her dad and Sal when
they go visited her mother at her birthday. And I think the boy like Sal because
of her long black hair.

I think Sal mom would come back and live with her family because Sal
mom would might feel that her family is care about her because her family had
travel a long way for her birthday. I think the boy like Sal because when Sal
said that she’s going to cut her hair and that boy told her not to cut. And he
also said she like Sal hair.

Thi’s response to Walk Two Moons is composed of 254 words as compared
with her 64 word response to Stone Fox at the beginning of the year. Instead of
answering each question with one sentence, Thi responds to each question with a
paragraph. In the ﬁrst paragraph, she offers her reading of Mrs. Cadaver. She ﬁrst
states that Mrs. Cadaver “isn’t a killer” even though Phoebe, another character in
the book, believed she killer her husband. She then explains why she disagrees
with Phoebe because “Phoebe just have an stronge [sic] imaginary about a
character, about how Mrs. Cadaver choped [sic] her husband and bury him”.
However, Thi does not end it here. She continues to raise another belief of hers:
that though Mrs. Cadaver doesn’t kill her husband and bury him, she “isn’t a
normal person” either. Thi gives two speciﬁc pieces of evidence from the text to
support her opinion. One is the fact that Mrs. Cadaver hurries back when Mr.
Birkway is there, and the second is that Sal’s Dad is really sad when he is not at

Margaret’s (Mrs. Cadaver) house. Thi presents Mrs. Cadaver as a more complex

character compared with Little Willy in Stone Fox.

164

 

In the second paragraph, Thi predicts what will come next in the book. She
anticipates that Sal will end up liking Margaret, that Sal’s mother will come back,
and that the boy will like Sal. Though she enlists a couple of supports from the
book for her predictions in the second paragraph, Thi gives more speciﬁc evidence
in the third paragraph. She believes that Sal will end up liking Margaret, because
Sal will learn more about Margaret and because of “how Margaret will react to
her”. Thi also explains why she believes that Sal’s mom will come to live with Sal
and her father, because “she might feel that her family is [sic] care about her” as
they “travel a long way for her birthday”. Thi explains that the boy likes Sal
because he likes “her long black hair” and “told her not to cut” it.

To summarize, compared to her response to Stone Fox, Thi’s writing for
Walk Two Moons demonstrates that she has a better understanding of the book she
is reading and that she has much more to say. She learns to support her claims by
citing the appropriate information from the text as well as using her prior
knowledge. She also begins to think more analytically. She asks herself questions:
“Why would she need to be [sic] hurry back, when Mr. Birkway was there? ...And
why would dad been [sic] really sad when he wasn’t at Margaret house?”

Though Thi is still making many errors in her use of conventional spelling
and grammar, she is not letting this improﬁciency prevent her from revealing her
feelings. In her written responses, we see an assertive, conﬁdent, and ﬂuent writer
who has a lot to say about the prompt questions as compared with the author of her

ﬁrst response who sounds timid and struggling.

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Students’ Self-Evaluation of Their Progress Made in Readjgg and Writing

What do students think themselves about their literacy learning? At the end
of the year, students were asked to comment brieﬂy in writing on the changes that
occurred in their reading and writing during the year. Analysis of their comments
shows that students believe that they became better readers and writers alter the
year’s practice. Students’ actual writing of the comments also demonstrates that
they have learned to use support and speciﬁc examples to illustrate the points they
are trying to make. Table 17 summarizes their comments.
Table 17
Summary of Students’ Self-Appraisal on Changes in Their Reading and Writing

Performance over the Year

 

Number of mentions

 

Explicitly stating he/she is a better reader and/or writer at the end 14
of the year

Listing speciﬁc improvements in their reading and writing 15
Commenting on how the improvements occurred 4

Other 5

 

A total of 23 students responded to the question. No students remark that
he/she has not changed for the better. Nineteen of the 23 students either comment
explicitly that they become better readers and/or writers at the end of the year
or/and list speciﬁc areas of improvements. For example, Alicia comments that she
makes “her writing clearer”. Thi believes that she is better at reading and writing,
because “in reading I understand the book better than I have. And in writing I

Ieam to support what I said and what I have write about.” Tu also describes the

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changes in his reading and writing: “I understand what I read and I give speciﬁc
examples in Book Club.” Kelsey explains why her writing improves, “I think this
is because I write more and I think more about what I’m going to write. I became
better because I done it a lot through the year in school.” Andy becomes more
reader-oriented and he comments that he makes his writing clearer because “I
want someone who reads my writing to understand.” Xa describes the strategy he
uses when he writes his responses, “When I’m going to write I think ﬁrst and not
just write.”

Among the four students who did not say explicitly that they have
improved their reading and writing, one comments on the change of his attitude
. towards reading: “. .. in the beginning of the year, I didn’t like to read that much.
In the end of the year, I like to read more and more about different things.”
Another says that she had no time to read and write before and now “I’ve been
reading and writing at school and at home too.”

It is also very interesting to note that many students employed the language
frequently used by the teacher and in the prompt questions in describing the
changes, such as “support what you say and what you write”, “give speciﬁc
examples”, and “think before you write”. The teacher and the students developed a
shared language and a shared literacy practice over the school year. Students’
comments not only provide us with a venue to see how students evaluate their own

learning, they are also demonstration of their learning of the writing practice.

Students comment explicitly on the changes they have made in their reading and

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writing, support their claims with speciﬁc examples, and some even explain how
the changes happened.

Over the school year, students developed their ability to read, write and talk
about books through engaging in Book Club. They learned to participate in
discussions about books, increased their vocabulary, became more
metacognitively strategic in their reading and began to write longer and more
analytical responses. As students comprehended the texts better and engaged more
analytically and reﬂectively with the texts in their written responses, students were
able to generate more ideas to share in their discussions and their conversations
about texts became more lively and experience-related. Reciprocally, book
discussions exposed individual students to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking
of their peers, which in turn enabled them to be more thoughtful in their written
responses. The development of students’ knowledge and skills in reading, writing,
and talking about books suggests a reciprocal relation among these literacy

practices and points to creating an integrated approach to literacy instruction

(Raphael & Hiebert, 1996; Morrow, Smith, & Wilkinson, 1994).

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CHAPTER FIVE
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Findings

Analysis of data delineates the road the teacher and her class of culturally
and linguistically diverse students traveled in learning to engage in the literary
discourse in a community of learners. It is a success story, but not without
struggles and frustrations. What pulled them through were the teacher’s
unwavering belief in the students that “they would do it” and her persistence in
continuing to push the students and providing them with support. In this chapter, I
summarize the evidence to answer the two research questions the study set to
explore.

Research Question 1: What learning trajectory did a class of diverse students take
to learn to participate in Book Club, a literature-based instructional program?

The learning trajectory of the students in this classroom progressed through
three stages, though they are not as clear-cut as the three distinct categories might
suggest; rather they overlap with each other substantially. Over the year, there was
a gradual release of responsibility (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) from the teacher to
the students in their small group and whole class discussions and in their reading
and writing tasks. Students became apprenticed into Book Club practices. At the
beginning of the year, the teacher engaged in a lot of direct telling. As time went
on, the teacher became less dominant in the conversations and by the end of the

year, the teacher played the role as a facilitator and a participant as the students

169

took up the responsibility of discussing issues in small groups and during
community share time. By the end of the year, students were performing tasks
performed exclusively by the teacher at the start of the year, such as initiating
topics, asking each other questions, and commenting on each other’s ideas.

Stage One is labeled as “Teaching by Telling” as teacher and teacher-led
talk dominated the discourse at this stage. During this time, the teacher introduced
to students, sometimes through didactic conversations, what Book Club was and
how they should participate in the Book Club activities. She discussed with
students the importance of talking with each other about books they read. She told
them to ask “fat, juicy questions”, to comment on each other’s responses, and to
write responses to a know-nothing audience. She also introduced how to self
evaluate their performance in group and whole class discussions and showed
students the rubrics for grading their own written responses. Apart from telling the
students what they were expected to do to participate in Book Club, the teacher
also tried to cultivate the idea in the students that they were a classroom learning
community. She told the students that they all had unique experiences to
contribute to their group and class discussions and, because of that, they could all
learn from each other. She made it clear to students that it was okay to have
different Opinions and many times there would be no right or wrong answers to
Book Club questions.

Another marked feature of this stage was students’ resistance. Book Club

required students to read the book, to write responses to the prompt questions, to

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share their responses, to ask each other questions, and to make comments on each
other’s responses. As this was the ﬁrst time for these students to engage in this
type of literacy activities, many of them didn’t know how to participate. Many
came to the classroom having not ﬁnished reading the book, nor writing the
responses. They also complained openly to the teacher that they “didn’t get it”.
Book Club was a challenge to these students cognitively and socially. Because of
the challenges, students were given very little opportunity to engage in student-
centered talk in this ﬁrst stage.

The second stage began on September 22 as the class embarked on the
book, Shiloh, and ﬁshbowl discussions. At this stage, students began to play a
more active role. They acted as discussants in the ﬁshbowl, or they were
“teachers” who evaluated the discussants. But before they began their own
ﬁshbowl discussions, the teacher prepared the students by showing them a video
clip of a group discussion on tape and conducting a discussion on how the
discussants interacted with each other in the discussion. The teacher also invited a
group of her previous year students to demonstrate a ﬁshbowl discussion for the
class, and used the opportunity to engage the class on discussions about what the
group shared and how they talked to each other. Students made observations and
comments, and asked questions. After students observed and discussed their
observations, they began their own ﬁshbowls. All six groups took at least 2 turns
as the ﬁshbowl group. The ﬁrst ﬁshbowl demonstrated little exchange among the

members, a fact that was noticed and commented by the “teachers”, i.e., the rest of

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the class. Starting from the second ﬁshbowl, the teacher added two extra chairs to
invite anybody from the audience to enter the conversation, to ask a question or
make a comment. This also gave the teacher the opportunities to model what
questions to ask and how to make sense of the text, and question students to
scaffold their thinking. Fishbowl created opportunities for students to observe,
learn, and practice talking about books. With the two extra chairs, ﬁshbowl
became not just a space for the focus group members to demonstrate how well
they could discuss the day’s reading, but also a space for the more knowledgeable
peers, including the teacher, to join the collective construction of book meanings
and to demonstrate that process to all members of the community. Evidence from
the early community share conversations in mid-November shows that after the
ﬁshbowl practices, students knew they had to participate and say something in the
discussions, even though their conversations were choppy and information
oriented. After the ﬁshbowl discussion period, the class began the full cycle of
Book Club including book clubs, community share, mini lesson, reading, and
writing. When community share was added to Book Club, students were given
even more time to engage in talks about books among themselves, which was
essential for them to develop participation skills. So the key distinction between
the ﬁrst stage and the second stage was the amount of student-centered talk. With
the ﬁshbowl discussions, and later community share, time and space were allotted
to students to engage in conversations of their own and the teacher was joining

them, as compared with the dominant teacher/teacher-led talk in the ﬁrst stage.

172

The distinction between second and the third stages is the quality of
student-centered conversations. Evidence shows that over the school year, student
conversations became more “expert like”. Students learned to “speak” to one
another, asking each other questions and sharing thoughts on the common topic;
and their conversations became more focused. They learned to engage in talks
about texts critically and reﬂectively; their conversations shifted from focusing on
factual information to focusing on more in-depth meaning making of the texts and
of their own life experiences. They learned to appreciate the literary texts and
enjoy conversing with each other as well; conversations seemed to become
enjoyable for them.

The changes in the student participation over the three stages in this one
school year depict the road trotted by the students on their way to learn to
participate in literary discourse. At the same time, the analysis of the pre and post
test scores of the Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) shows greater than normal
increases (an average of 1.8 years of growth), suggesting that students increased
their vocabulary through reading, writing, and talking about good quality
literature. The differences between the pre and post results of the Meta-
comprehension Strategy Inventory (MSI) (Schmitt, 1990) are statistically
signiﬁcant (p < .001), indicating that students became more metacognitively

strategic in their reading at the end of the year.

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Research Question 2: What learning opportunities were created for the students in

doigg Book Club and how were they created?

Data analysis shows that Book Club created learning opportunities for
students to practice and develop their cognitive, social, and language skills needed
to participate in conversations about books. They learned to make sense of texts by
using clues from contexts and connecting to their own experiences; they learned to
enjoy good literature; they learned to develop different perspectives and a personal
world view. They also learned to communicate with each other, such as sharing
different and tentative thoughts, engaging each other in conversations, and
challenging each other’s ideas. They increased their sight word capacity and
employed more meta-cognitive strategies in reading.

Analysis of the changes over the year shows that learning opportunities in
Book Club were created for culturally and linguistically diverse students due to the
following features of Book Club implemented in this classroom.

(a) The teacher believed that all students bring with them rich experiences and
knowledge to contribute to the discussions and tried to cultivate this belief
among students to create a community of learners.

(b) Students were given the time and space to share with each other their responses
to quality literature, and they were encouraged to construct meanings
collaboratively.

(0) Students were pushed to think critically and reﬂectively about what they read

by writing responses to high level thinking questions.

174

(d) The teacher employed multiple modes of teaching, from telling, modeling,
scaffolding, facilitating student discussions, and participating as a member (Au
& Raphael, 1998).

(e) The teacher persisted in challenging the students and maintained high
expectations of the students.

These ﬁndings on creating learning opportunities agree with many of what
Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole (1999) summarized as elements of effective
instruction and culturally responsive teaching, including (a) encouraging a
community of learners, (b) treating students as competent and believing they can
succeed, (c) keeping a balanced instruction and providing explicit modeling and
scaffolding, ((1) high pupil engagement and much time spent in reading/language
arts activities, (e) organizing appropriate, meaningful, and challenging activities
that extend students’ thinking, (f) high pupil expectations, (g) helping students
make connections between community, nation, world, and self (p. 22).

Lessons Learned from the Study

In this section, I discuss what we can learn from this study with regard to
learning/development and teaching, especially in the context of teaching students
with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Finally, I raise some
potential questions for further study.

On Learning and Development
According to Vygotsky’s socio-cultural perspectives, learning and

development is a process of socialization/enculturation and it occurs in

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interactions with other members of the community in meaningful contexts
(Vygotsky, 1978; Schieffelin & Ochs 1986). Students’ acquisition of a literary
discourse is facilitated by more knowledgeable members of the discourse
community while they participate in the communal practices. The current case
study of students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learning to
participate in Book Club demonstrates this process. In this classroom,
opportunities were created for students to participate in reading, writing, and
talking about literary texts. Knowledge of participation norms and new
understandings of the texts were constructed as different ideas were shared,
challenged, probed, and examined in their book clubs (small groups) and
community share (whole class) discussions. Intemalization of cultural practices
occurred as members of this classroom community created the learning space or,
as Vygotsky (1978) called it, the zone of proximal development (zpd). Students
learned and developed literary skills in their interactions with each other over the
books. In this process, not only the teacher but also the students became more
knowledgeable others to other students’ learning. Like Mei and her peers in
Raphael and her colleagues’ study, (Goatley, et al., 1995; Raphael & Brock,
1993), each child’s unique experience and understanding of the text and the
community practices positioned them as more knowledgeable members of the
community in speciﬁc situations.

Evidence from this study also helps to explain the process through which

learners internalize the meaning of the practices of a literary community.

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According to Vygotsky (1978), the development of all higher order psychological
processes occurs at two levels: ﬁrst, on the social/public level, and later on the
individual/private level (Gavelek & Raphael 1996). Vygotsky terms this transition
from social arena to individual psychological sphere as internalization. According
to Kozulin (1994), though Vygotsky did not have time to elaborate on this
internalization process, he was interested in the problem of internalization of
psychological tools that required two different forms: the “external actions” of
using the tools and the internal understanding of their “psychological functions”.
Intemalization is “the process of transformation of external actions into internal
psychological functions” (p. xxvi). Basically, what this means is that children
begin to engage in an activity before they fully understand its communicative
ﬁJnction. Kozulin uses an example of how Vygotsky thought about the
development of the grasping gesture to illustrate this sequence. At the “gesture-in-
itself’ stage, the grasping movement is a random gesture from a child. When
mother comes to the aid of the child, she interprets his grasping movement as. an
indicatory gesture. At this stage, the grasping movement is a “gesture-for-others”.
Only aﬁerward does the child become aware of the communicative power of his
movement and the gesture becomes a “gesture-for-oneself” (Kozulin, 1994,
p.xxvii). Vygotsky’s gesture example illustrates the process of internalization of
higher order psychological processes from the social level to the individual level

as learners associate/assign the psychological functions to external actions.

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Evidence from this case study demonstrates this internalization process.
Students ﬁrst performed the external actions before they came to understand their
functions. For example, when students ﬁrst began to ask fat, juicy questions, they
didn’t seem to know what responses to expect. They asked those questions for the
sake of asking them, because their teacher modeled how to ask the questions and
expected them to do so. Even though they learned to perform the action, i.e.,
asking the questions, these questions didn’t seem to carry the same meanings to
them at the beginning stage as they did at the later stage. In other words, an
understanding of the psychological functions of the action of asking fat, juicy
questions did not occur to the students even when they could perform the action at
the initial stage. This internalization process from being able to perform the
external action (asking fat, juicy questions) to understanding the psychological
meaning(s) of the action has important implications for our understanding of
teacher’s roles and explicit instruction. These issues will be discussed further in
the next section on teaching.

On TeachingLEspecially in the Context of Teaching Students with Culturally and
Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds
Employ Multiple Instructional Strategies to Create ZPD for Students with Diverse
Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds

The analysis of this case study reveals a gradual release of responsibility

from the teacher to the students (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983). The shift went

through several stages. First, at the very beginning, students didn’t know what

178

questions to ask and how to respond to each other’s ideas. Soon as being
instructed and modeled, they realized that they were expected to TALK about the
part of the book they had read and they began to participate. They repeated the
questions modeled by the teacher or from the prompt sheets, but they didn’t care
what answers they received, for they might not have understood the psychological
functions of asking these questions. Another example indicating this lack of
understanding of the psychological functions of “talking” was the community
share discussion they engaged in October when more than half of the class spoke
in one way or another, but the conversation was choppy and unfocused. In early
February, the teacher faced another challenge when she tried adamantly to stop
students from sharing “outlandish ideas” and make them realize that they needed
to support their opinions. However, towards the end of the year, not only students’
conversations became more focused and coherent with questions and uptakes
around a shared topic, their conversations also demonstrated a stronger voice of
their own as they became more conﬁdent in their ideas and learned to support their
opinions with evidence from the text and their own experiences.

This learning trajectory suggests that learning occurs at different levels.
Changes in external actions do not always bring understanding of the
psychological and cultural functions of the actions. Emergence of the use of
language comes before the appreciation of the concepts the language represents,
especially for students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Asking or

saying the fat, juicy questions in this case becomes an important step en route to

I79

understanding of what the action means. The action of talking to each other about
text leads to understanding of what it means to be an expert participant of a
discourse community. This internalization from the external actions to
psychological functions calls for explicit instruction especially at the beginning
stage of learning something new. However, in this case, the explicit instruction
was given in meaningful and authentic contexts, i.e., the students were sharing
their understanding and interpretation of literary texts. The imitation of the
external actions were not only “gestures-in-itself” but also “gestures-for-others”,
before they became “gestures-for—oneself”. Learning to “talk-the-talk” did not
happen in an isolated skill setting but within a meaningful context.

In addition to explicit instruction as carried out through modeling, Ellen
employed other instructional strategies to create instructional opportunities that
allow students to work within their zpd as they learn to participate in reading,
writing, and talking about literary texts. She scaffolded students’ participation
through teacher-led talk, as well as students’ initiated talk; she acted as a facilitator
in discussions and sometimes she participated as one of the participants, reﬂecting
on her own learning (Field notes, October, 1998) and asking real questions. As
Gee (1992) suggests, the teacher in this class “supplied rich, interactive
apprenticeships in Discourses” to her students and she also knew “where and how
to say ‘look at that’ at the right time and place” (p. 137). For example, based on

her observation of students’ level of development, she whispered a question into

180

the ear of an ESL child for her to repeat, and she “picked on” Michael for not
making a point when asking questions.

However, two practices of explicit instruction that Ellen utilized may worth
of further thought. They are (a) the use of written prompts all through the year,
and (b) the effort Ellen made in stopping students from sharing outlandish ideas.
In this class, students wrote responses to prompt questions and used their
responses as the basis to begin their book clubs and community share discussions.
Prompt questions seemed to function as a mediational tool to push students to
focus on and think more deeply about certain issues. Evidence from the
discussions near the end of the year shows that students did not seem to stick to
the prompt questions but instead took the space opened up by the prompts to
initiate issues of their own concern for discussion. For example, the prompts for
discussion on May 10, 1999 asked students to comment on the message “Don’t
judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins” and to make
connection with their own life. Tu initiated the discussion by saying “Sometimes I
heard some sayings that I don't agree” (Transcript, May 10, 1999). Students also
asked their own questions as they were responding to each other’s sharing. For
example, Tu responded to what Andy said, “How are they crazy?” (May 3, 1999),
and on another occasion, he asked My Linh after she shared her ideas on what the
author did well with the book(?) “What do you think the author can do to improve
Sal?” (June 2, 1999). Sometimes, students asked each other questions not directly

in response to their sharing. For example, Andy asked Vong after he ﬁnished

181

sharing, “Vong, it's not about your paper, but why do you think Sal's mom went
away?” (June 2, 1999). Thi, in the following conversation, really wanted to ﬁnd

out why Grandma called Sal’s friend, Pheebee, /"pi:bi:/.

Thi: What do you think of Grandma when she says /’pi:bi:/? What do you
think of her?

Vong: I think (he was cut short).

Tu: I think she is crazy. She doesn't listen, maybe.

Thi: Do you think she try to be humorous sometimes?

(Transcript, May 3, 1999)

This evidence suggests that though students had the prompt questions, their
discussions were not limited only by the questions. There seemed to be transfer of
learning from responding to the prompts to generating questions of their own
concern. One example of this kind of transfer occurred when Freddy asked the
teacher “Whose point of view” they should take in making a story graph for the
book Tuck Everlasting (Field notes, February 5, 1999). Another piece of evidence
came from the brief conversation over what response they should write on Jan. 15,
1999 when they had the ﬁrst Free Choice as a prompt. Michael asked if they could
do Vocabulary and received a “no” answer. Others suggested they could respond
to Character Map, or Point of View, or Prediction, etc. Instead of asking what
questions they should respond to, students were using Book Club language and
thinking in terms of response categories. This example also indicates that although
prompts dictated students to answer speciﬁc questions, they transformed the

assignment into a more general task, i.e., to develop questions that ﬁt into the

182

 

taxonomy of literary tasks that Ellen had used to frame the questions. In other
words, the questions were offered as prompts but received and used as tools.

However, because these students were not given many free choices, it still
leaves us wonder what it would be like if students were taught only the tools, the
kind of responses they could write, and then they decided on what to respond and
what tool to use. What would the students’ responses and conversations in
discussions be like?

The other practice that I count as an instance of explicit instruction is the
teacher’s direct confrontation with students’ outlandish ideas. For three days in a
run, Ellen was trying to st0p the students from sharing their outlandish ideas (see
discussion about the beginning of the third stage in Chapter 4). There are two
alternative ways to handle this situation: (a) to encourage students to further
explore their imagination; and (b) to leave it as it was without saying or doing
anything. However, Ellen had a very clear teaching objective and she wanted the
students to learn the ways of participation in a literary discourse of the “culture of
power”. Namely, she told the students to stop sharing outlandish ideas and to
provide support to what they said with evidence from the text or from their own
experiences. The teacher’s intervention raises two pedagogical dilemmas: (a) the
balance between valuing students own ideas and valuing the larger discourse
community’s accepted ways of thinking and acting; and (b) the balance between
exploratory and explicit instructions. Ellen’s intervention in this case raises a

serious pedogical question: Are there conditions to the pedagogical principle that

183

teachers should value students’ own ideas and thinking? Does it mean that we
should only value and encourage students to express their own ideas to the extent
that they do not violate the norms and values of our larger community — in this
case that ideas must be logically reasoned and supported by evidence? If it does, at
the practical level, how much exploratory room should students have and how
much explicit instruction would be required to allow students to balance their own
creative thinking with the skills and knowledge required within the discourse
community? At what time should the teacher intervene with student-generated
ideas and re-direct them so that they are consistent with the socially "appropriate"
genres or ways of thinking and talking?
Create a Classroom LeamingLommunity for Students with Diverse Cultural and
Linguistic Backgrounds

A tenet of socio-cultural theory of learning and development is that
learning occurs in interactions with more knowledgeable members of a community
in meaningful contexts. Studies of literacy classroom instruction have also shown
that when teachers turn their classrooms into learning communities in which
students prior experiences and knowledge are valued, more learning opportunities
are created for the students to participate in literacy learning and to develop their
skills. In this case study, one of the teachers’ goals was to create a classroom
learning community. The teacher had high expectations of the students. She
believed that all her students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds were

capable of learning to participate in Book Club discourse no matter how

184

challenging the task was for them at the beginning of the year. She also believed
that all students with their unique experiences and knowledge would be able to
contribute to each other’s learning. On the ﬁrst day of school, she told the students
that they all had different experiences and hence, they could all teach each other.
She organized community building activities for students to engage to understand
the importance of collaboration. In introducing Book Club, she told students that
for many of the discussion questions, there was no one right answer. They might
come up with different answers and they could all be right. She also modeled and
scaffolded students on how to ask questions and how to respond to each other’s
sharing. At the same time, students were asked to pick up names of three people
(deﬁnitely not their friends) they would like to work with each time they formed
new book clubs.

In addition to creating a classroom learning community, the teacher
continued to push the students to engage in the challenging tasks of Book Club
and to provide them with the assistance they needed. Holding high expectations
for her students and believing that they would be able to learn to engage in Book
Club discourse like the students from previous years, the teacher persisted in Book
Club instruction even in face of strong resistance from the students at the
beginning of the year. This study shows that sometimes “persistence pays”

(Teacher’s words, 1998).

185

Use Book Club to Promote the Literacy Skills of Students with Diverse Cul_tugl_
an; Linguistic Backgrounds

This study demonstrates that as a literature-based instructional program,
Book Club has the potential to engage students with diverse backgrounds in
reading, writing, and talking about texts at a high psychological level. It helps
create a classroom learning community and the time and space for its members to
participate in the practices of a literary community. Because Book Club engages
students with quality literature and emphasizes interactions with more
knowledgeable members of the community in meaningful contexts (Raphael &
Hiebert, 1996), participation in the discourse over a secondary world created by
the book (Benton, 1983) — in relation to students’ real world — becomes the end as
well as the means of learning. The process of participation or the transformation of
participation helps to empower the students with diverse backgrounds as they
learn from appreciating written texts to formulating their beliefs of the real world
while practicing and developing their analytical, critical, and reﬂective thinking
skills.

What happens in this classroom shows that Book Club helps create
opportunities for students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to
practice and develop skills that are necessary to participate in the literary discourse
of a classroom learning community, even though these students made lots of
grammatical errors, exhibited limited vocabulary, and spoke with heavy accents.

Students in this class learned to make sense of the text and of their own

186

experiences, to respond to and converse with each other over the texts, and to
construct their own understanding of the word and the world through the teacher’s
assistance and interactions with peers. They also developed their sight word
recognition ability, became more metacognitively aware of the comprehension
strategies they used, and wrote longer responses with a stronger voice of their
own.

The current case study is a story of how a teacher and her fourth/ ﬁfth grade
students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned to participate in
Book Club over a school year. Though diverse students were the focus participants
of the study, this is not a direct study of diversity. My purpose in conducting this
study is not to explore the different communication and learning styles of students
from diverse backgrounds, though I believe it is of great importance for teachers to
be aware that different students learn and communicate differently and to adjust
their teachingstyles accordingly. However, I also share the concern by Cazden
(1999) when she cautions us that emphasizing how one group of students learn
and act differently may reinforce the bias towards that group. Besides, the
classroom in this case was a multi-cultural and multi-lingual classroom and
children came from all over the world. I observed how this class developed a
shared literacy practice among its members over the school year and here is the
story.

Two features of instruction in this classroom help make it an encouraging

story: (a) teacher’s creation of a classroom learning community; (b) teacher’s

I87

implementation of multiple instructional strategies based on students’ needs at

different times of the year. The real story in this study is about the unwavering

beliefs of the classroom teacher. She believes that students are knowledgeable
beings, that learning occurs through participation, that instruction must be based
on students’ needs, and that if she, as a teacher, is as persistent in challenging
students as she is supportive in helping them meet her challenges, there is no limit
to what they can learn.
Questions for Further Research

This study was conducted in one unique classroom, with a unique teacher
and a unique group of students. Many students in this class came from Asian
family backgrounds. They responded to the teacher’s instruction and her style, and
they worked hard to please her. The teacher had taught Book Club for three years
before the study began, and her previous experience told her that these students
were capable of engaging in the “grand conversations” about books.

I wonder:

o What if Book Club was implemented in an ESL class with a large percentage
of students coming from other cultural traditions instead of Asian family
background? Would students react and respond to the teacher the same way or
differently and how would that affect students’ learning as a whole?

0 What if I had studied a teacher who was implementing Book Club for the ﬁrst
year? In what ways would it be different or similar to what has happened in

this classroom?

188

 

 

 

 

I also wonder:
What would their conversations be like if students read more books by
minority authors and about the growing-up experiences of minority children
that were closer to their experiences?
What would their writing be like if students could respond to texts in whatever
way they wanted, unencumbered by prompt questions? How would they be
different?
How would reading different books, selected either by the teacher or students
or collaboratively, affect how students read and how they participate in class
discussions instead of everyone reading the same book at the same time?
How does participating in Book Club affect how students read and write in
other genres or types of texts? Would participating in Book Club affect how

students learn other school subjects?

189

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APPENDIX B: STUDENT SELF -EVALUATION

FOR BOOK CLUB DISCUSSIONS

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I91

APPENDIX C: THI’S WRITTEN RESPONSES

Thi’s Response to Stone Fox Book Club Unit

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Thi’s Response to Walk Two Moons Book Club Unit

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APPENDIX D: END-OF-BOOK SELF -ASSESSMENT

. Name Date 9 H7 . .131

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End-of-Book Self-Assessment

1. Did you like this book? Yes No Why or why not?

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4. What has been your favorite book this year?

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I will try to give you one of your three choices.

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6. Look through your log. Find the best entry you did. Write me a sticky
note on that page, telling me why it is your best.

7. What Is one thing you will do differently In your log next time? Why?

 

 

 

 

 

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194

APPENDIX E: TEACHER’S GRADING SHEET

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Book Club Evaluation: Reading Log

You are graded in two areas—Quantity and Quality.

  

Quantity. During this book, you needed to demonstrate mastery of the
following skills and strategies. You have demonstrated the ones I have
highlighted. Others either were not attempted or were not mastered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Summary Favorite/Least Favorite Feelings quntof View ; f .5”;
Sequence Wonderful Words . Me & the Book Title Explanation
Vocabulary Compare/Contrast lntertextuality Critique
Author’sLCraﬁﬁ‘Special Story Part Author’s Purpose Interpretation :..:

 

You have accomplished L’i skill? and strategies out of a total of 8 .

This is equivalent to a grade of

Quality. The quality of your reading log was determined by assigning a

grade to the first IQPentries in your log. They were graded on completeness
and accuracy of information, as well as length and amount of detail provided.
They were not graded on spelling, mechanics. etc. I numbered them as I read
them. Here is a record of your grades.

Excellent

  

Excellent A e

    

These ten grades average out to a grade of_\l_:t_.

Overall Readin Log Grade. Your reading log grade is half quantity \/+' and
half quality . This gives you an overall reading log grade of "' .

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How do you feel about these marks? Why?

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196

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