From Conversation to Oral Composition: Supporting Indigenous Students' Language for Literacy

The development of oral language and specifically increased control over literate discourse is critical to students' ability to create and comprehend texts in the early years of schooling and beyond. For students with home languages that differ from the forms of language used in school, the development of oral language through carefully designed teacher-student interactions has particular importance in assisting students to access literacy skills and to display the knowledge required for learning in educational settings. This paper reports a study of two teachers providing an early literacy intervention to two Indigenous students and the techniques used in conversational interactions to scaffold oral language and to compose texts for writing. The conversations are closely analysed to reveal patterns in teacher talk that support students' appropriation of literate discourse. The findings indicate that careful attention to students' utterances and the contingent scaffolding of language by teachers, who clearly understand the ways that context-embedded language can be used as a bridge to the context reduced language of school, supports students' development of language for literacy learning.