From story to book: Discourse analysis between teacher and student in the creation of a culturally relevant text

Abstract

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children’s literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally relevant texts and used for beginning reading material in classrooms. To truly capture a student’s story, especially if the student is an emergent bilingual, a teacher must listen very closely and take care when adjusting the child’s story. Two Bakhtinian concepts support the careful examination of a teacher’s scribing of story in this study: chronotope, used here as the time-space sphere above the text, and revoicing, or the retelling of a child’s story that is paraphrased or altered. Findings show that gesture within the chronotope of the story is an especially generative tool for student storytelling and that teachers must reflect closely on intentional or unintentional reasons for revoicing a child’s story. Language experience approach holds possibilities for the creation of children’s culturally relevant texts. As such, it is important that teachers reflect on their language experience approach techniques so that the book remains true to the child’s story.