UC Santa Barbara

Over the past decade, research on the teaching and learning of language in classrooms has focused on the relationship between the language used by students and teachers in the classroom. This study illustrates the ways in which situated definitions of language, literate actions, and academic practices are established and negotiated between a seventh-grade English teacher and her students through their oral and written discourse practices. The multiple perspective in the study, combining interactional sociolinguistic analysis with ethnographic perspective, provides a framework for describing the processes through which the teacher and students shape socially constructed nature of daily events in the classroom and for identifying how these events were locally accomplished and intertextually related. Central to the analyses of the patterns of interaction within and across days is a description of the concepts of intertextuality and culture in helping students construct a situated understanding of what counted as "English" in a secondary class.