Shows how one first-grade teacher explicitly modeled her own authorship processes and how students took up those processes in their own writing. Analyzes classroom discourse to illustrate how the teacher and students shifted roles in the participation framework of writing activity among teacher, author, co-author, and overhearer to facilitate the co-construction of written texts.

This article focuses on the role of overhearer participation in learning to write. Using Goffman's notion of the participation framework as a linguistic structure that organizes and is organized by talk and interaction in activity, data drawn from an ethnographic study of kindergarten journal writing activity will be presented in a discussion of how shifts in participant roles contribute to text construction.