Hearing the Connections in Children's Oral and Written Discourse

This paper is a case study of two occasions of teacher response, shaping, and evaluation of students' texts. In one case, the text is oral — a “sharing time” contribution by a first grader. In the second case the text is written — a sixth grader's composition about a favorite circus act. The two examples are taken from different classrooms at different grade levels. Nonetheless, they evidence striking parallels in regard to teacher-assigned task, text structure, and teacher–student interaction. Both students attempt to introduce personal knowledge or experience into a simple descriptive account. In doing so, they use complex associative strategies which entail shifts in topic, time, and focal characters. In both cases, the teachers have difficulty interpreting the students' texts, which lack lexical or graphic markers of the associative shifts, and which are not organized in the way the teachers were expecting. In the end both teachers fail to expand on and clarify the students' complex communicative goals. Moreover, in their push for simpler texts which “stick to one topic” the teachers fail to appreciate the logic and complexity of the students' initial attempts. Following a detailed description of the tasks, texts, and outcomes of these classroom encounters, explanations are proposed which may account for the similarities found in the two examples. The proposed explanations focus both on schools as institutions (with institutionalized practices and values for teaching literacy skills) and on the complex interpretive processes at work in urban, multiethnic classrooms, processes which add significantly to the sociolinguistic demands on teachers.