"There Wasn't a Conversation Going On": How Classroom Norms Can Short-circuit Language Learning.

Teachers design their classroom to facilitate learning, yet considerable research has shown that children are not necessarily learning what the teacher expects. Perhaps a better understanding of classroom culture, certain norms and values that may conflict with the teaching curriculum, might help teachers in their classroom design. Analyses of classroom discourse has suggested that there are discursive processes going on in classrooms that reflect and reinforce implicit classroom norms. The study described in this paper takes classroom culture into account to explain an apparent disconnect between a teacher's planned curriculum and the actual discursive processes that she fosters and even participates in. This year-long ethnographic study of a two-way bilingual (Spanish-English) Kindergarten classroom analyzes how one teacher's explicitly stated pedagogical design for conversation was actually constrained by other explicit and implicit normative classroom practices. It should be understood from the beginning that this study is not about a particular teacher teaching badly, but in fact it is about how the practice of even a skilled and caring teacher can be undermined by unrecognized assumptions and conflicting allegiances. These forces are so powerful exactly because they form part of the invisible everyday business-as-usual of classroom practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]