Abstract

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

Journal
Literacy in Composition Studies
Published
2021-02-12
DOI
10.21623/1.8.2.5
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