UC Santa Barbara

The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), since 2010, has led to a growing concern among education scholars and practitioners about how the new standards will impact the educational trajectories of students from minoritized linguistic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds (Bunch, Walqui, & Pearson, 2014; Hakuta, Santos, & Fang, 2013; Lee, Quinn, & Valdés, 2013). In the area of English Language Arts (ELA), the close reading of texts, particularly informational texts, is identified as one of the primary reading skills students are expected to acquire, and is presented as central to students’ academic success in school and beyond. The CCSS narrowly define close reading as the practice of extracting knowledge and evidence from texts, paying limited attention to students’ broader learning contexts and existing funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992).

The CCSS’s conceptualization of close reading contrasts with a sociocultural orientation to literacy (Castanheira, Crawford, Dixon, & Green, 2001; Hull & Moje, 2012) in which students’ language and literacy practices are viewed as socially situated and constructed. Drawing on the latter perspective, as well as on Neo-Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Rogoff, 1990) and a sociocultural linguistic framework (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), the present study examines student interactions within and across instructional activities designed to support the acquisition of literacy skills required for close reading and analysis of complex texts. This dissertation presents a discourse analysis of classroom interaction in a 6th grade public school classroom in Southern California that was documented over the course of five months using video and audio recordings, participant observation, field notes, and samples of students’ work. The observations and analysis focus on peer discussions involving emergent bilinguals (García, 2009) from Latinx immigrant backgrounds, several of whom had been recently transitioned out of the school’s English Language Development (ELD) program.

Findings suggest that students fluidly employed a range of linguistic and cultural resources, such as the use of their funds of knowledge and various linguistic registers, to make meaning and co-construct their understanding of texts with others. Students often used academic language as part of these interactions and demonstrated strong awareness of their language choices—particularly how they were connected to discourses about “standard” and “academic” language. Lastly, students’ engagement in different literacy tasks was locally constructed and influenced by factors such as the characteristics of specific texts and students’ affective responses to those texts. These finding have implications for how teaching practices associated with reading can be designed to leverage students’ knowledge and interests and expand learning opportunities for linguistically and racially marginalized students. Based on the findings, I propose an integrative and dynamic sociocultural approach to conceptualizing, teaching, and assessing students’ literacy practices in the classroom.