Writing their way into talk: Emergent bilinguals’ emergent literacy practices as pathways to peer interaction and oral language growth

Abstract

This paper explores the idea that young children’s emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali- and Turkish-speaking three- and four-year-olds learning English in their first year of school. Using neo-Vygotskian activity theory as a guide, this paper examines the children’s classroom literacy practices, particularly around writing and the alphabet, in order to understand, first, how literacy functioned as a socially embedded activity for these students (sometimes in ways that contrasted with the official literacy practices of the classroom), and second, how that activity facilitated students’ interaction across language backgrounds. Finally, this paper offers a genetic analysis, or an analysis across time, of how students’ interactions with multimodal composing functioned as contexts for emergent bilinguals’ oral language development, and in particular, vocabulary acquisition.

Keywords

Emergent bilinguals early writing oral language peer interaction preschool/prekindergarten

The relationship between oral language, social interaction, and literacy development is a multifaceted and multidirectional one. Some of these facets and directions are well established: for instance, the positive influence of children’s oral language abilities on early literacy development; the positive influence of social interaction on children’s enjoyment of and growth in reading and writing; and the importance of interaction for oral language development, in both first and subsequent languages. Other aspects of the relationship between oracy, literacy, and interaction, however, have been less explored. This paper investigates one of those dimensions – the influence of literacy practices on social interaction and, thus, on oral language learning – in a population for whom language and literacy are both developing: emergent bilinguals (EBs)¹ in early childhood.

The paper begins with a brief review of the better understood pieces of the oracy, literacy, and interaction puzzle. I begin with what is known about the influence of oral language on early literacy. I then turn to work that illustrates how social interaction contributes to literacy growth, and I suggest that this is a reciprocal relationship, in which literacy also supports oral interaction. Finally, I review research on the role of social interaction in second language development, narrowing the vast work on this topic by focusing on second language development in young children. Bringing these bodies of work together, I propose that literacy, by supporting social interaction, can also support oral language growth, particularly for young children learning a second language in school.

In the main body of the paper, I turn to an analysis of activities around writing and the alphabet that took place over a year in one preschool classroom where 11 of 17 students were learning English as a new language. I show how student-initiated activities around writing and letters differed markedly from teacher-initiated ones and that, in students-led activity, writing was inherently social and created interactions across language backgrounds. I also illustrate through close discourse analysis that, over time, these peer literacy interactions facilitated oral language growth for the EBs who participated in them. Finally, I outline the theoretical and practical implications of this work.

Background

Oracy supports literacy

The question of whether and how oracy serves as a foundation for literacy is not a new one. Decades of reading research show strong relationships between preschoolers’ skills and knowledge in spoken language and their later literacy achievement (Dickinson and Snow, 1987; Dickinson and Tabors, 2001; Roskos et al., 2009; Snow, 1983). The predictive power of factors such as vocabulary (Hart and Risley, 1995; Ouellette and Beers, 2010; Ricketts et al., 2007), phonological awareness (Stahl and Murray, 1994; Stanovich et al., 1984; Vellutino and Scanlon, 1987), and letter recognition/naming (Foulin, 2005; Manis et al., 1999; Misra et al., 2004; Neuhaus and Swank, 2002) has spawned much research about how to cultivate these skills, as well as research into who has them and who lacks them. Together, these lines of work provide support for preschool programmes focusing on the development of these skills, especially for students who are at risk for falling on the wrong side of the achievement gap, such as EBs (Diamond and Baroody, 2013). The logic of catching these students early rather than remediating later has found the support of both policymakers and researchers, in terms of academic as well as economic outcomes (Barnett and Larny, 2013; Castro et al., 2011).

Some have argued, however, that this ‘ounce of prevention’ thinking for students considered to be at-risk is part of what has led to the push for early and direct basic skills teaching, where literacy practices are ‘separated into teachable parts that [are] decontextualized from their use’ (Larson, 2002: 67; see also Christie and Roskos, 2006). Others (Gutiérrez et al., 2009; Gutiérrez and Orellana, 2006; Orellana and Gutiérrez, 2006) have pointed out that while this ‘at-risk’, ‘achievement gap’-oriented framing may be invoked with good intentions (i.e. as a rallying call for support around students), it also keeps the focus on what students lack. Orellana and Gutiérrez (2006: 120) suggest asking instead, ‘ “What do our students know?” “What can they do?” “What are their skills, contributions, or experiences that can be useful for them or for the world?” ’. These authors view literacy not only as a set of sub-skills but as a range of complex social practices. From this perspective, literacy cannot be understood apart from what people do with it, whether making lists, writing love notes, reading the bible, clipping a recipe, or doing schoolwork. From this perspective, literacy is inherently a social activity.

Classroom interaction supports literacy…and vice versa?

Indeed, work on early literacy development has found that students’ social interactions around reading and composing texts are crucial for their development as readers and writers (Gundlach et al., 1985). Wells (2003) argued that children learn to read and write by making a connection between words on the page and the language that they hear and speak, and that this connection comes from having multiple, rich opportunities to talk about text. Other work (Boyle and Charles, 2011; Floriani, 1993; Kissel et al., 2011; Pahl, 2009) illustrates how classroom and student discussions shape student texts and that talk and text must be seen as interdependent (Jones, 2003; Kennedy, 2006). The pre-K students in Kissel et al.’s (2011) six-year ethnographic study, for example, were able to produce more new ideas and more sophisticated writing when they wrote interactively than when they wrote on their own, and when pairs of peers helped one another with writing, both students’ work was pushed forward. This echoes Gutiérrez’s (1993) finding that, in classrooms where teachers allowed collaboration around journal writing, students texts – first oral and then written – were richer, more on-topic, and in the end, more clear than those written alone. Similarly, Daiute (1986) and Daiute and Dalton’s (1993) foundational work showed that students writing collaboratively were more focused on their developing texts and more reflective about what they were writing than students working alone. In fact, Daiute and Dalton found that 95% of the revisions that students made to their work came from their peer conversations.

Additionally, a small, but important body of work has shown that even when classroom procedures mandate individual, non-collaborative literacy work, children find ways to interact as they read and write. Sterponi (2007) found that second- and third-grade students managed to subvert silent independent reading time, finding hidden spaces in the room to carry out shared book reading and discussion. Two decades of Dyson’s work (e.g. 1989, 1993, 1997, 2003) have illustrated the many ways that spirited, innovative, and ‘curricularly unruly’ (Dyson and Genishi, 2013) first-grade children appropriate the official and individual writing activities in the classroom and transform them into arenas to enact social dramas and negotiate peer relationships. In the slightly different context of examining children’s play at a classroom computer, Wang and Ching (2003) describe how children took the waiting list, the timer, and the list of rules – all meant to shape computer use into an individual activity – and drew on different affordances of these artefacts to accomplish the aim of creating a collaborative and group-oriented computer norm.

Work like Sterponi’s, Dyson’s, and Wang and Ching’s supports the argument that social interactions around literacy are crucial for children’s development as readers, writers, and in general, symbolic tool users. Yet they also point to an inverse process – one that literacy research has not addressed – that students who are just embarking on the path to reading and writing may also use their emergent literacy as a tool to create and to mediate peer social interaction. Work like Sterponi’s, Dyson’s, and Wang and Ching’s is replete with examples of how classroom literacy practices, even ones meant to be individual or regulatory, afforded students the need and desire to interact and play with texts and tools in the first place.

In early childhood research, the call for an integration of play and literacy is not new (see, for instance, Morrow, 1990; Pellegrini, 1980), but the focus has traditionally been on the ways that play supports literacy, and not the other way around. In Roskos and Christie’s (2001) critical meta-analysis of the approaches and assumptions of studies linking literacy and play interaction, they found that, at the most basic level, each study made the claim that ‘play serves literacy’ which led them to conclude that, for researchers, ‘indeed literacy is “king” and play the “jester-clown”’ (2001: 77). Roskos and Christie questioned the implication of this – that we should care about interaction and play only insofar as they support the ‘real’ goals of school – and they called for investigations into how reading and writing might instead serve interaction and play. The findings in this work respond to that call.

Interaction supports second language oracy in young learners

Yet, while interaction and play are important for the social growth of all young children, and as the studies above illustrate, key for their literacy work, for emergent bilinguals (EBs), interaction and play are crucial to learning a new language. Beginning with Evelyn Hatch’s foundational work (Hatch, 1978; Wagner-Gough and Hatch, 1975), and continuing in the work of scholars like Merrill Swain and Michael Long, interaction has been understood in second language research not just as a place for learners to perform what they have already acquired but as the locus for learning itself. As Hatch wrote, ‘One learns how to do conversation, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of the interaction syntactic structures develop’ (1978: 404). While the work on social interaction in second language learning has exploded in the past four decades – in 2007, for instance, Mackey and Goo meta-analysed no less than 28 experimental studies on social interaction and second language (L2) acquisition and found a clear and significant relationship between them – I focus here on studies of young second language learners, a group of learners for whom interaction has been found to be no less important.

Genesee (1994), for example, showed that teacher input is not enough for young language learners and that peer social interaction is necessary for learning. Clarke’s (1999) work found quality interaction to be the key element in four Vietnamese-speaking prekindergarters’ English growth over their first year in school, while Long (2004) illustrated how young children act intentionally as one another’s teachers. Other work has shown that successful language learning depends on learners’ abilities to negotiate identities and friendships that give them enough access to play and to talk with speakers of the language being learned (Hruska, 2007; Toohey, 2000).

Several studies with young learners focus on play as a particularly significant type of interaction for language learning. In early work on this topic, Peck (1980) illustrated how participation in language play provided affectively positive chances to practice as well as opportunities to focus on form and phonology. Ervin-Tripp’s (1981, 1986, 1991) work showed that by drawing on prior knowledge of games and play, children could enter into peer play interactions even when they were new to a language, and that play thereby scaffolded acquisition of the second language. She found that the most supportive games featured both repetition and words that were redundant to action, and that all games – even when they resulted in dispute – provided motivation for children to come to a mutual understanding. These finding are echoed by Long (1997), whose work illustrated how common play routines allowed interaction between three seven-year-olds – two native Icelandic speakers and one novice – and allowed the Icelandic learner to have entry points into the language. Piker (2013) found that, for four Spanish-speaking children in a bilingual Head Start classroom, play served the dual function of providing motivation for English use as well as input for building students’ linguistic repertoires. Yet, she also found that not all students were invited into interactions with English speakers and that this influenced how much students participated in the new language.

From their varied perspectives, all of the studies in this section highlight the importance of interaction for young children learning a new language in school. Yet, many also show that entering into interactions in the first place is not always straightforward (Drury, 2000; Piker, 2013). Tabors (1987, 2008) described this as the ‘double bind’ of beginning school in a new language: Children must gain access to the interactions that will facilitate their language learning, without yet having the language to facilitate those interactions. This paper suggests that literacy practices, including alphabet knowledge and joint composing, can support those crucial interactions, and thus, can support second language learning.

Theoretical framework

Language as social activity

Although social interaction plays a role in nearly every theory of language learning, it plays a more significant role in some than in others. From an innatist perspective, for instance (i.e. Pinker, Chomsky), children’s language development happens on a built-in course, and interaction simply provides the input that sets the course in motion. At the other end of the spectrum, in sociocultural theories of language and literacy learning, drawing on theory originating in Vygotsky’s work, social interaction plays a more complex and significant role.

For Vygotsky (1978), all development is socially derived: Through interaction with others, children are able to accomplish what would be just out of reach were they to go it alone. Social learning thus paves the way for development: New skills appear first on a social plane, mediated by more-expert others, and later, on an individual plane. While the more-expert others are often thought of as teachers or parents, studies of language and literacy learning from a sociocultural perspective have shown how interactions with grandparents (Gregory et al., 2007), siblings (Gregory, 2001; Volk and De Acosta, 2004), and peers (Long, 2004; the studies reviewed above) are just as valuable for learning and that mediation can be reciprocal, with the ‘novices’ at times driving learning for the ‘experts’.

Through these interactions, children learn to use artefacts, or tools, to mediate their goal-driven activity. In Vygotsky’s conception, artefacts range from simple tools, like hammers or spoons, to more complex symbolic tools, like maps or language. These artefacts range from the concrete – spoons and cups – to the abstract, like clocks and language. Vygotsky’s model of human activity can therefore be portrayed as in Figure 1. In this scheme, a child (subject) might first eat food (object) with his hands but will later use a spoon (artefact) to mediate his eating. Similarly, a student (subject) in preschool might grab a toy that he wants from another child (object), before later learning to use language (artefact) to mediate the interaction. Thus for Vygotsky, children learn language through interaction with others at the same time as they learn to use it to mediate those interactions.

Building on Vygotsky’s work, Leont’ev (1978) and then Engeström (1991) developed iterations of activity theory that included both history and culture. The expanded activity system (Figure 2) portrayed in Engeström’s (1991) and Engeström and Miettinen’s (1999) work includes not only a subject, object, and mediating artefacts, but also community, rules and norms, and roles/division of labour.

Thus, to revisit the earlier examples, the eating child would not only have a spoon, but he would be at the table with his family (community), who might have prepared and served him his food (division of labour), and who might sit with him and remind him not to use his hands, because in their culture, three-year-olds are old enough for spoons (rules/norms). In the classroom example, teachers would have expectations for sharing and turn-taking behaviour (rules/norms) within the classroom (community) and would remind and support students’ use of words, and not hands, in peer interactions (division of labour).

Activity theory in second language acquisition

Jim Lantolf, who has written extensively on sociocultural theory and second language acquisition (Lantolf, 2000, 2013; Lantolf and Thorne, 2006, 2007), argues that the idea of mediation is the most important element in Vygotsky’s work for understanding second language (L2) learning. Lantolf divides mediation in L2 learning into three types: (1) mediation by others in social interaction, (2) mediation by the self through private speech, and (3) mediation by artefacts. The first type, mediation by others, happens in two ways: through imitation and through the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Imitation, in the Vygotskian sense, differs from simple mimicry in the imitator’s understanding of the goals behind another person’s action use: The learner does not just repeat words and structures, but appropriates others’ intentional ways of using language to participate in activity. The ZPD, on the other hand, is the range of activities that a person cannot yet complete independently, but can complete in cooperation with another person, and is therefore indicative of what an individual will be able to do on his or her own in the future. Thus, for an L2 learner, interaction with other speakers serves as a model for ways of using the L2, as well as a support for the learner’s use of the L2 in ways that he could not yet do alone. The second kind of mediation – through private speech – might involve rehearsing a new form on one’s own before trying it out publically. The third kind of mediation, through artefacts, could range from doing grammar worksheets to using a dictionary to watching TV in the L2. It is important to remember, however, that both private speech and cultural artefacts have social origins, even when they are deployed by a lone person, and that all three kinds of mediation are therefore socially derived.

This sociocultural model, including Engeström’s (1991) expanded activity triangle and Lantolf’s ideas about mediation in L2 learning, will serve as a framework for understanding literacy activity in the pre-K classroom as well as how that activity mediates social interaction and L2 learning.

Methods

This paper comes from an ethnographic study of children learning English as a new language in their first year of preschool. Ethnographies of young multilingual children, through extended immersion in children’s lives, have been able to capture what children are ‘up to’ – whether with the support and participation of teachers who are themselves multilingual (Axelrod, 2014) or ‘beyond the gaze of the nursery staff’ (Drury, 2007). Ethnographic works have provided windows into where and how young multilingual children learn to be readers, writers, and speakers (Kenner, 2004) and how they draw on and blend their multiple meaning-making resources in seamless ways (Gregory et al., 2013), ways that adults may not anticipate. I have taken an ethnographic approach here in an effort to learn what students know and what they can do (Orellana and Gutiérrez, 2006), over time, in the context of their relationships, stories, play, work, struggles, and victories.

Site and participants

The preschool classroom where I spent a year was part of the United States’s federally funded Head Start programme, a programme providing free preschool for low-income children ages 3–5. The school was located in the so-called Rust Belt of the US, in a formerly industrial city with a new and fast-growing multilingual population. The classroom opened in Autumn 2012, at the start of data collection, in response to an influx of families, many of whom were recently resettled refugees. The largest populations of families were from Iraq, Burma, and Bhutan, and at the time of data collection, the city was home to the largest Nepali-speaking Bhutanese population in the US, at 5000+. The population growth from refugee resettlement represented a significant change for a city characterized in the year 2000 by demographers at the Brooking Institute as ‘mostly white, slow growing’ (Frey, 2000) and that, in 2010, was ranked 98 out of 100 major cities studied for recent immigration (Singer, 2010).

The classroom was selected for the large number of emergent bilingual (EB) students and for the fact that all of the EBs were starting school for the first time. All but one child in the class participated in the study, resulting in 10 Bhutanese Nepali speakers, one Meskhetian Turkish speaker, and six American English speakers participating. Students were 3–5 years old and all fell beneath the income cap required to participate in the free Head Start programme. The EBs in the class were, except for one student, beginners in English. All spoke their first language at home and in their immediate communities, and although most of their fathers used English at work, only one mother felt confident enough in English to speak with the teachers. Thus, for the EBs, this first year in school was also their first sustained experience in an English-dominant setting. Many of the EBs’ parents, however, prepared them for school in other ways. The teachers were surprised to find, for instance, that when they assessed students on alphabet knowledge, many of the Nepali-speaking students knew nearly all of the letters.

The teachers were not new to teaching, but this was their first time working with a multilingual student population. One challenge of the class make-up, lamented by teachers and backed up by my observations (Bernstein, 2014), was that students from the two main language groups in the class, Nepali and English, did not interact very much. Because children in each group had plenty of playmates from their home language, spontaneous play interactions were rare. The teachers struggled to find ways to facilitate these interactions.

Data collection

Over the course of the school year, I followed the class one day per week for the 6 h school day, watching, playing, helping teachers, and joining in class activities. I took field notes and I also video recorded for 1–2 h per week on a scheduled rotation of activities and locations (e.g. circle time, the dress-up corner, the writing centre). This resulted in approximately 150 h of observation/field notes and 40 h of video. These notes and videos focused primarily on four EB students in the class – Kritika (age 4,7²; female, L1=Nepali), Padma (4,7; female, Nepali), Rashmi (4,4; female, Nepali), and Hande (4,11; female; Turkish) – but because of the nature of free play, meals, and whole class activity in preschool, all of the children in the class feature in these records. In addition to video and notes, I also interviewed teachers in the autumn and spring and collected written artefacts from students (n= +/- 200).

As a participating observer, I allowed myself to be drawn into play or into helping students and teachers, but I made it clear to everyone – explicitly to teachers and implicitly to students – that I would not settle disputes or enforce rules, unless someone was in danger, because I did not want to be seen as a teacher or an authority (c.f. Corsaro, 1985). Instead, I wanted students to know that I was someone who did not care so much about breaking rules and who would not ‘tell on’ them, and who could therefore be trusted to watch interactions that would have been unsanctioned by teachers.

The interactions recorded in the video and notes took place in both English and Nepali. While I learned many Nepali words and phrases during the year – from students, with the help of a few bilingual parents, and on my own – I hired a Nepali speaker to transcribe and translate videos for me throughout the year. Having access to students’ Nepali-language play and talk across the year, even a few days after the fact, via transcripts, was imperative for understanding classroom life. It was also eye opening for the classroom teachers, who, for example, were surprised by the richness of the cooking and food vocabulary used in the Nepali-speaking girls’ dramatic play in the kitchen area.

Like many ethnographers, I entered the classroom with only general questions. In this case, the questions were about second language learning in preschool. Given students’ ages and beginning levels of English, writing practices were not originally part of these questions. Yet, during my time in the room and in watching and logging videos, I noticed that children were doing a lot of under-the-radar writing and talking about letters. In late autumn, I thus began to focus, in addition to my original focus on oral language development, on writing events. Data for this paper therefore include teacher interviews, students’ written artefacts, and all field notes and video transcripts that document writing events (n = 143). I define ‘writing event’ here as any activity involving writing/composing or talking about writing (including spelling/letters of the alphabet/sounds), bounded by other activities not involving those. Fifty-four of these events were teacher orchestrated and occurred primarily during morning sign-in time and circle time (see ‘Official literacy activity in the classroom: a time and place for everything’ section). The remainder (n = 49) were student orchestrated and teachers either entered briefly into these (n = 13) or not at all (n = 36). The student events all took place during free play time or snack time, and lasted anywhere from 45 s to upwards of 10 min. Thus, while writing activity did not make up a large proportion of classroom time, at least one official and one unofficial writing event occurred on every single of my 26 visits throughout the year.

Data analysis

After school ended and I had transcribed, with the help of my Nepali-language transcriber and translator, much of the video data, I began my analysis for this paper by coding my notes and video for three things:

Type of literacy event

^ reading

^ writing

^ talk about letters/spelling

Participants

^ teachers + students

^ students

students + researcher

Location

^ writing centre

^ dress-up corner

^ art table

^ rug

^ small toys table

^ library corner

Once events were coded, I used ethnographic microanalysis of interaction (Erickson, 1992, 2006), a method of close discourse analysis that looks beyond language alone, to tease apart the activity that was taking place in each event, guided by the elements of Engeström’s (1991) activity model. This involved a back and forth between transcripts and videos.

Having created an activity model for all of the writing/letter events, I then looked for patterns across models. The largest pattern consisted of differences between teacher-centred activity and student-centred activity, particularly for writing and for talk around letters. In the remainder of this paper, I present teacher and student practices around these activities, along with a composite model for each activity system. I refer to the teacher practices as the ‘Official Literacy’ activity in the classroom, and to the student practices as ‘The Literate Underlife’ (to borrow from Goffman (1961), the term ‘underlife’, which has been taken up in wonderful ways by Gutiérrez et al. (1995) and by Larson and Gatto (2004)). I choose to term students’ practices the ‘literate underlife’, rather than simply ‘unofficial literacy’, as these practices were not just unsanctioned, they were almost entirely unseen and unheard, taking place under the radar of the teachers and of the institution that created the very space in which they existed.

Findings

Official literacy activity in the classroom: A time and place for everything

The classroom had two officially designated literacy spaces: the writing centre – a two-person study carrel with lined paper and coloured pencils – and the library corner, which held the class’s books. While the spaces were permanent, students could only spend time in them during free play time. Additionally, in order to help keep the room organized, teachers frequently reminded students to keep the books in the book corner and the writing materials in the writing corner. Thus, writing materials were not to be brought to the art table or vice versa, meaning that construction paper (art materials) and pencils (writing materials) never crossed paths, just as markers (art materials) and lined paper (writing materials) never met.

There were two other spaces that functioned as literacy spaces in the classroom but only during certain times of day. The first of these time/spaces was morning name writing. When the students arrived in the morning, the two tables in the dress-up area became the place where students stopped with their parents to trace or write their first names on their weekly sign-in sheet, a paper with five boxes, one for each day of the week, either blank or with a dotted outline of the child’s name. Children brought their pencils and folders to the table and put them away again after, so that when all of the students had finished, the tables returned to being a non-literacy play space.

The second literacy time/space was circle time, when the rug (which at other times was a block-building space or napping space) became the site of book reading and of letter-of-the-week talk. In the official curriculum of the classroom, the letter of the week held a central place. Each week, a new letter was introduced to students during circle time. It was written on the board, its sound was introduced, and it was connected to a related word. Thus, on C week, the students were asked what kind of cookie they liked and the teachers graphed students’ responses; on D week, the teacher read about dinosaurs. Sometimes the teacher invited students up one by one to write the letter in a drawing app on the iPad. Throughout the week, students then continued to do activities related to the letter. On K week, they made kites that hung from the ceiling. On P week, students coloured paper P’s. In the autumn, when I asked teachers about their goals for the year, Ellen, the lead teacher, told me:

For the Nepali children, getting them to speak English. Being able to write their names, being able to know the alphabet. And not just the ABC song, really KNOW, mixed up, “That’s a B,” upper and lowercase. And maybe some numbers. Um the colors, the shapes, the usual things that you would teach any preschooler. But that’s what I would like them to know by the time they go to kindergarten. Like when they come in in the mornings, I have them write their names and I have dotted lines. (Ellen, Interview, 16 November 2012)

In the spring, when asked to reflect on the year and what they had accomplished, both teachers mentioned these activities again:

What do the kindergarten teachers tell us? They want them to write their names. Check. We have been working on it every day. (Lucia, Interview, 11 June 2013)

I think some of them learned the alphabet, some of them, you know when I tested them a lot of them did know them. I’m gonna do that again this year. We’re gonna have another whole year of it and try and REALLY get them to do the sounds a little bit better. And I mean a lot of them are writing their names now, so by then it’ll be great. (Ellen, Interview, 11 June 2013)

For the teachers, then, name writing and the alphabet were the cornerstone skills of preschool because of their foundational importance for kindergarten. While the teachers saw pre-K literacy practices as a tool, they saw it as a future-oriented tool, mediating success in kindergarten, where students would need to be able to write their names on their own work and to begin to use letters in reading and writing. Thus, for the teachers, writing and letters operated in their classroom as shown in Figure 3.

In this activity system, writing was a stand-alone activity, separate from playing/drawing, and was an individual task, perhaps even one to be hurried through to get to breakfast. Getting the letters right, through tracing or copying, was important. Letters were taught one by one in curricular sequence, they stood for sounds and context-free objects, like cookies and kites, and learning them was an aim in and of itself. The whole system was oriented towards the future, to kindergarten readiness.

The literate underlife

Letters belong to people, not things

While for the teachers, letters belonged to objects – pumpkins, kites, cookies – the students sometimes had trouble seeing the connection to these things, especially when they had limited experience with the things in question. During P week, for instance:

Miss Ellen asks the children to draw things that start with P, like pumpkins and puppies. When no one does this, she modifies the activity to only drawing pumpkins on the P. Kritika (L1: Nepali) draws a line, Georgia (L1: English) just colors. Ellen says, “Look how Michael is doing pumpkins. Kritika, pumpkins!” She looks at me and sighs, “Looks like Miss Ellen has to make a sample!” She turns back Georgia, who is still coloring. “C’mon Georgia, you understand me. Pumpkins!” (Field notes, 22 October 2012)

For the children in the class, letters instead decidedly belonged to people. For instance, one day as I was pouring water for students, Miss Lucia asked me to label the water pitcher. As I wrote ‘WATER’, I said each letter out loud. Walt (L1: English) and Maiya (L1: Nepali) chimed in:

Me: Double u:::::

Walt: W is my name!

Me: (smiling) A::: - T:::

Maiya: T is my dad name!

Me: E:::

Walt: E like Eddie! (another classmate)

Me: and R!

(25 February 2013)

For these students, letters were only as important as the person they were attached to. Letters and names were so closely linked that the EBs in the class referred to letters as ‘names’:

Prakesh: My name’s P!

(2 April 2013)

Kritika: It’s Rashmi’s name R!

(6 May 2013)

Maiya: (pointing at M on the letter puzzle) This is my name. And Deleesha’s name is D. See D!

(6 February 2013)

The practice of calling letters ‘names’ was not something that teachers were aware of, however. For instance, in the following interaction, the teacher asked Kritika what she had drawn. The conversation went well until Kritika tried to explain that she wrote the letter, B, referring to it as ‘my name B’ rather than ‘my letter B’.

Kritika and several other children, including Kelsey, an English speaker, are at the art table. Kritika has made several large dots and circles on the paper, along with a large, backwards “B.” Miss Lucia, who had been working to prepare lunch nearby, sits down and asks what the students are working on.

Kritika: (Hands picture to Lucia and starts to walk away)

Lucia: Kritika, what is it?

Kritika: It’s ball (points) and it’s my name (points)

Lucia: It’s balls?

Kritika: (nods, points)

Lucia: Ball. Ok. (writes “ball” on Kritika’s picture) Ok, what else?

Kritika: It’s my name, B (pronounced: “beh”).

Lucia: Huh? Say that again.

Kritika: It’s my name B (“beh”) (points quickly).

Lucia: (looks) Big?

Kritika: Be:::::::ee (long “ee” sound). A-B!

Lucia: AB?

Kelsey: (has been listening, tries to help) She says, “A-B.”

Kritika: A (tune of ABC song, as if starting to sing, then stops and just says) A. AB. (leans toward Lucia, louder) B! B!!!

Lucia: B for ball?

Kritika: (writes a pretend B on the table with her finger) B. (crosses arms, turns away)

Lucia: B. For ball? (1.0.) (with concern) Kritika, you’re doing so good.

(2 April 2013)

Despite Kritika’s repetition and persistence, Lucia could not understand, because she did not share the norm with the students that letters, just like names, belonged to people and could thus be referred to as ‘names’.

Letters belong to everyone

In addition to belonging to people, letters were a common, shared artefact in a classroom where Nepali-, Turkish-, and English-speaking students shared neither a language nor many cultural references. Letter names were something that everyone knew and thus held a special place as one of the only common conversations topics for students. In addition to conversations like the one above around the spelling of ‘water’, students used the alphabet as a conversation in and of itself. For instance, one winter day on the playground, Georgia (L1: English) stood at one end of the talking tubes, a buried pipe that emerged at both ends of the playground and allowed sound to travel between two people speaking in normal voices. Georgia shouted ‘Hey!’ into the pipe. Padma (L1: Nepali), walking past the other end, yelled back, ‘Hey, B! Hey, B, C, D!’ Georgia, giggling, yelled, ‘EFG!’ Padma called, ‘H!’ They alternated through the alphabet. At Z, Georgia yelled, ‘Bye!’ and Padma yelled ‘Bye bye!’ back, and they parted ways. In a sense, to borrow the terminology of speech act theory (Austin, 1975), students were using the form of the alphabet, but attaching a different illocutionary force, or intent, to it. Rather than being a component of language, or a building block in the chain of letter→ sound→ word→ meaning, the letters themselves were doing communicative labour. From the perspective of activity theory then, letter knowledge was not a goal in and of itself, but a tool for mediating communication and for indexing insider status as part of a community of alphabet knowers.

Letters in writing

The use of letters as a communicative tool was not limited to speech. In the following example, Kritika was at the art table, this time writing out the alphabet and singing each letter as she went. Kelsey noticed and began to watch.

Kritika:	(writing, singing) A-B-C-D
Kelsey:	(watching as Kritika writes. When Kritika gets to “i,” interrupts her) The “i” needs a little circle. (Leans over and adds it) See? A little circle at the top.
Kritika:	(watches, then sings the song again, tapping each letter as she goes)
Kelsey:	(then takes a turn, singing, tapping each of Kritika’s letters) (6 January 2013)

In this example, the written letters on the page became the pivot around which conversation (made up of talk about letter form and of singing) took place.

Students also used the letters as tools for engaging with me when I was in the room.

One day, I was sitting at the writing centre taking notes about the action in the room. Sreya (age 3; L1, Nepali), who was new to the class in January, was working next to me, but not talking to me. Sometimes she looked over at me as she erased. She erased a lot. On her first paper, she erased everything that she wrote and threw the paper to the floor. She started on a new paper. This time after she wrote the first thing, which looked like an A, she poked me and pointed to it. So, I said, ‘A’. As she continued writing, I said, ‘A,a’. She looked up and smiled in between A’s. She then made four straight lines on the page and looked up. I said, ‘I, I, I, I’. She wrote another A next to those and I said, ‘A’. Then she stopped. ‘B?’ she asked and passed me the paper. I wrote a B. ‘Big B!’ she said. I obliged her. Then she took the paper back and made a B. She paused and looked up. ‘B’, I said. She smiled and drew another B, then circled it in a large loop and lines. She handed me the paper. ‘For me?’ I asked, pointing to myself. She nodded and left (6 February 2013).

In our multimodal conversation, Sreya's turns were mostly in writing and mine were mostly speaking, although we switched roles briefly in the middle for the Bs. Just as in the interaction between Kelsey and Kritika, the paper, pencil, and letters served as tools to carry our interaction, rather than as practice for a future aim. Throughout all of these interactions, the activity system therefore might be written as is shown in Figure 4.

In this activity system, letters and writing were socially embedded and tied to people and interactions. Knowing all the letters was a status symbol, but the letters that counted most were the ones that carried social meaning. The system was oriented towards the present, to creating social alignment, and to having an enjoyable interaction.

Joint composing

To this point, I have shown that children’s ways of using the alphabet facilitated interaction with speakers of English for the EBs in the class, which research has shown is not always easy for newcomers to the language (Tabors, 1987). Yet, these examples do not provide evidence in and of themselves that these interactions in turn facilitated language growth. Lantolf and Thorne (2007) wrote that in a sociocultural view of L2 learning, single snapshots cannot provide evidence of growth, as they do not show change over time:

Evidence must have a historical, or genetic, perspective. This is not necessarily an argument for the exclusive use of long-term longitudinal studies that cover extensive time spans. While development may surely occur over the course of months, years, or even the entire lifetime of an individual or group, it may also occur over relatively short periods of time. (Lantolf and Thorne, 2007: 207)

In the remainder of this paper, therefore, I turn to three examples of joint writing, in the sense of composing beyond letters, which took place across time. I present a genetic analysis – tracing one vocabulary word, ‘dragon’, across three interactions in a week, and another word, ‘ladder’, within one interaction – to show how oral language can develop over time in the context of shared writing.

In the first example, which took place on 11 February 2013 at the table in the dress-up area, Joy, an English speaker, was writing in my spare fieldnote notebook as I wrote field notes in another. She narrated a story about a kitty cat and a puppy as she drew. Then, she stopped and asked me to draw the next image.

1	Joy:	Can you draw a dinosaur?
2	Me:	I can try. What kind of dinosaur? Like the long kind with the
3		big tail?
4	Joy:	The kind that say, “Raaaaarrrr!”
5	Me:	The scary kind? The kind with
6		the teeth?
7	Joy:	Yeah the big teeth.
8	Pooja:	(Pooja notices what we are doing.)
9	Me:	(I draw) Like a head like that?
10	Pooja:	(watches.)
11	Joy:	And his foot. He has BI:::::G foot!
12		(Joys adds legs/feet)
13	Me:	Maybe he has some spikes on his
14		back. (draws)
15	Joy:	He needs to be mad to them. The dragon is mad to them.
16		Make them. You have to make them in the castle and the
17		monsters are scary to them.
18	Me:	You do that part. I don’t know how to do that part.
19	Joy:	You have to do like thi::::s. And the dragon’s spitting and
20		you draw her eyes and you have to draw like that, so the
21		dragon can bite them.
22		Then the dragon say, “Raaaaaarrr!”
23	Me:	(laughing)
24	Joy:	He say, “Rar.” He’s mad at you. What should we do next?
25		(5.0) Mmmm. A horse! Write!
26	Me:	I don’t know how to do a horse.
27	Joy:	(to Pooja) Wanna do it?
28	Pooja:	I don’t know how to make (then quickly)
29		Ok I make!
30	Joy:	You make it, you write it down. Write it down.
31	Pooja:	(draws)
32	Joy:	(watching Pooja draw) And his tail! (2.0)
33		That’s a grea:::t horse. (1.0) Make his body
34		like this.
35		Make it like that, ok Pooja? (5.0) Good job,
36		Pooja!
37	Joy:	(to me) Do another dragon with mean eyes
38		and fire!
39	Me:	(draws)
40	Pooja:	(adds flowers)

In this interaction, Pooja joined us in line 6, missing the beginning of the conversation where Joy asked me to draw the dinosaur. Pooja listened and watched closely. In line 10, Joy began to refer to my dinosaur (which admittedly did not really look like a dinosaur) as a dragon. She then used the word ‘dragon’ four more times in our interaction. Pooja became actively involved in the interaction in line 22 when Joy asked her to draw a horse. Pooja initially declined, and then, changing her mind, agreed. At the end, she also added flowers to the second dragon. While Pooja never used the word ‘dragon’ herself, she heard it five times in reference to the two drawings.

Three weeks later, on 4 March 2013, I was again taking field notes at the table in the dress-up area during free play time. Sreya, another Nepali-speaking student, asked to use my extra notebook. This excerpt provides the first record of Pooja using the words ‘dragon’, and later, ‘ladder’.

1	Sreya:	(moves her chair next to me to use my extra notebook,
2		writes the letters of her name)
3	Pooja:	(moves toward the dress-up area, but stops when she see
4		what we are doing, then runs over) I wanna make it!
5	Me:	You wanna have a turn?
6	Pooja:	(nods) Can you make a dr- a dragon? Can you make a castle?
7	Me:	You make the dragon; I’ll make the castle.
8	Pooja:	Ok, how do I make?
9	Me:	You need a body, and teeth, and eyes…
10	Pooja:	(draws) Little dragon! Now you make
11		castle, ok? Make a BIIIIG castle and make
12		a princess!
13	Me:	Ok. How do you make a castle?
14	Pooja:	Make it BIIIIIIG. Triangle:::s
15	Me:	(draws) Like that?
16	Pooja:	Yeah!
17	Kelsey:	(walks by, sees us writing) Can I play with
18		that pen?
19	Me:	Um, in a few minutes.
20	Kelsey:	(waits, plays with toy cash register across the
21		table from us)
22	Me:	(draws three princesses, as per the request in
23		line 10)
24	Pooja:	(directs me) LONG hair!
25	Kelsey:	(watching patiently, finally suggests) Don’t you want to
26		make a ladder? Don’t you want to make a
27		ladder so they can climb?
28	Pooja:	I don’t know. How to make.
29	Kelsey:	(to me) I can make a ladder for
30		her! (to Pooja) I’ll make
31		a ladder for you.
32	Pooja:	Ok!
33	Kelsey:	(draws a ladder to the door
34		of the castle)
35	Pooja:	(comes to see) It’s long!
36	Kelsey:	There you go! (hands back notebook) Now the princess can
37		climb up!
38	Pooja:	(takes notebook back to her seat)
39	Kelsey:	(to me) I- I did something! See what I drawded for her.
40	Me:	Oh! A ladde::::r!
41	Pooja:	(begins drawing) I’m making it right here (1.0) a lad-der.
42	Kelsey:	(impatient, looking at Sreya who still has the second
43		notebook)
44		Can I write yet? Can I write yet?
45		Can I write yet?
46	Me:	I don’t have one to give you right now.
47		(looks at picture)
48		Oh the ladder keeps going up and up and
49		up over the castle!
50	Kelsey:	No, it’s THROUGH the castle.
51	Me:	It goes inside and then through the roof? You can go up up
52		up up.
53	Pooja:	And go over here.
54	Kelsey:	And she can go over here and here and then everywhere!
55	Pooja:	Yeah! (smiling)
56	Kelsey:	Hang on. I’m going to make it two more ladders (holds up
57		fingers) two more ladders.
58	Pooja:	(hands her pen)
59	Kelsey:	(goes back to seat, draws two more ladders,
60		scratches one out)
61	Pooja:	(watches)
62	Kelsey:	Here ya go! (hands notebook back to Pooja)
63	Pooja:	Thank you.
64	Kelsey:	Look what I did! I put a lot of ladders! This is how many
65		ladders now (holds up fingers)
66	Me:	Whoa! 1-2-3-4 ladders!
67	Kelsey:	No three.
68	Me:	Oh I see!
69	Pooja:	Let’s make more princess!
70	Kelsey:	I wanna be a princess!
71	Pooja:	Ok!
		[Final picture at right]

In this example, in line 6, Pooja asked me about drawing a dragon. While I cannot be sure that she had never used this word before, this is the first time she was recorded using it. Additionally, the dragon that she drew shared some features with the dragon that she watched me draw with Joy a few Mondays before – spikey back, long tail – suggesting intertextual connections across time between not only our words but our written compositions. Later, in line 21, Kelsey, who had been listening and waiting for an entrée into using the notebooks, asked, perhaps with an ulterior motive, if Pooja wanted to draw a ladder. Pooja, who had never been recorded using the word ‘ladder’, first answered in line 23, without using the word itself: ‘I don’t know. How to make’. Because a ladder is relatively simple to draw compared to a dragon, castle, horse, or princess, her answer suggests not that she did not know how to draw a ladder, but that she did not have a referent for the word itself. Thus, Pooja, to Kelsey’s delight, allowed Kelsey to draw a ladder for her, and in the process, Pooja heard Kelsey use the word twice more (line 24) and heard me use it once (line 31), for a total of five times. When Pooja got the paper back, she used the word ‘ladder’ (line 32) herself, if somewhat haltingly, and then drew one herself. Throughout the rest of the interaction, she heard the new word five more times from both Kelsey and me.

This interaction illustrates how word learning might take place through joint composing activities, across a time span of a few weeks, in the case of ‘dragon’, or across a few minutes, in the case of ‘ladder’. In the case of the word ‘dragon’, the same video continued and revealed Pooja moving into the role of language expert. Soon after she and Kelsey finished their composition, Pooja was called for her turn at the bathroom. While she was gone, Kritika came over and picked up the notebook. As she began flipping through, looking for a clean page, Pooja returned from the bathroom.

71	Kritika:	(finds the drawing from February 11]) Whoa, look at dis dinosaur!)
72		(Looks again and scrunches up her forehead and says in Nepali
73		Yu ke ho? Yu ke ho Pooja? [What is it? What is it, Pooja?]
74	Pooja:	Dragon!
75	Kritika:	(quietly to self) Dra::::gon. Dragon.

Later, after lunch, Kritika turned to me and pointed to the notebook where I was taking notes. ‘Dragon!’ she commanded. I drew one for her (Field notes, 4 March 2013).

In this brief, final example, Pooja moved from the role of language learner to language teacher, as she introduced Kritika to the word, ‘dragon’. Kritika then practiced the word to herself before using it with me later in the day.

Together, these three examples illustrate how word learning can occur via joint composing events, on the timescale of a single interaction, of a day, or of several weeks. To return to Lantolf’s types of mediation in L2 learning – mediation by others in social interaction, mediation by the self through private speech, and mediation through artefacts or tools – these examples show all three. The first type of mediation, other-mediated learning, occurred when Pooja imitated (not mimicked!) Joy and Kelsey’s uses of ‘dragon’ and ‘ladder’ and when Kritika then imitated Pooja’s use of ‘dragon’. To think back to the idea of the ZPD, ‘ladder’ and ‘dragon’ were words that Pooja and Kritika were ready to use, first with the help of a peer, then on their own, then, in Pooja’s case, to help a peer. Kritika demonstrated the second type of mediation, self-mediation through private speech, when she rehearsed the word ‘dragon’ to herself, as a tool for thinking, before later using it in interaction. Finally, Pooja and Kritika’s learning was artefact mediated, the third type of mediation, as the drawings created both the impetus for using the words and the image to which the words referred, enabling Pooja and Kritika to connect word and object.

In these examples, therefore, student activity looked like this.

For the students, writing and composing were not tied to one time and place, nor were they individual activities. They could happen anywhere, they could connect and refer across time and space, and they could be carried out together in joint authorship, often with one student speaking and another writing.

Discussion

Literacy and oracy supporting each other

Ellen, the students’ teacher, first told me in our autumn interview about her concern that students of different language backgrounds were not interacting:

I don’t really see them talk to each other. They’ll sit and play blocks and stuff, but I still do see most of the American children with each other and the Nepali children kind of play together. I was happy the other day we were outside and they started doing “Ring Around the Rosie” and everybody in the class joined in the circle. I don’t really see that yet. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. I think they kind of stick with each other. (Ellen, Interview, 16 November 2012)

Yet, students’ literate interactions were able to bridge this divide. While students who participated in joint interactions around writing and letters did not suddenly become best friends, for the duration of the interaction, they were aligned in joint activity and talk around a shared project. This allowed all of the students³ involved to see each other as enjoyable and worthwhile interlocutors, even if their talk only involved the letters of the alphabet.

The written interactions also supported oral language in another way: by allowing EBs to participate in the complex and imaginative language of pretend play, in a new language, without having to do so in completely context-reduced ways. While the Nepali speakers engaged from the very start of the year in complex imaginary play – where an empty bowl was filled with pretend rice and pickled vegetables for the baby, who was at pretend school, having been dropped off by a make-believe dad, who had then taken his make-believe car to his imaginary work – this play took place entirely in Nepali. This kind of play depended heavily on references to things that were not present in the students’ immediate context, and on literate kinds of narration, neither of which were yet possible in English for the EBs. A majority of the early English use by the EBs in this classroom was necessarily much more context dependent – where objects of play could be referred to as ‘this’ or the word ‘more’ could accompany a finger point to accomplish a request – as students did not yet have the English vocabulary or syntax to move far from concrete objects. By composing on paper, however, these same students created, in a sense, their own context – one of letters, ladders, and dragons – that allowed the students to move beyond the objects in the room.

For the EBs then, using oral language in their zones of proximal development was mediated and supported both by their peer (or researcher) interlocutors and by their jointly composed texts. Without Kelsey, Pooja would have had neither the need nor the input to learn the word, ‘ladder’, but without Kelsey’s drawing, Pooja would not have been able to know what the word referred to at all. Similarly, Kritika needed both the drawing of the dragon and Pooja’s oral response to learn what the picture on the page was called. For teachers, then, it is still important to know that oral language predicts literacy outcomes and supports literacy development, yet, we should take care not to imply that oracy must therefore precede literacy, or that meaningful literacy work can only take place after students reach some ideal level of proficiency in spoken English. This work suggests that, by mediating social interaction, literacy can support oracy as well.

Conditions of possibility or the participant–observer’s paradox

I would be remiss to conclude without discussing the conditions that enabled these joint composing sessions to take place. In a twist that ethnographers know well, the field notebooks that were meant to unobtrusively document what I observed instead became key artefacts in literate classroom life. Because my notebook and pen were the only writing tools officially permitted to travel the room, they were objects of intense interest. Often, students would find me in the block area or library, where writing was normally not permitted, and borrow my pen and paper. Thus, by winter, my field notebooks were being filled with student writing and I had less and less time to take notes. My solution was to bring more notebooks and pens. I carried two or three each day, so I could still take notes while the students could continue to fill up pages and pages with their writing. This was not an insignificant routine: Looking back over the writing samples in this paper, all but Sreya’s are written on pages from my notebooks, and, overall, 90% of student writing artefacts and ALL of students’ joint writing artefacts that I collected over the year come from these notebooks.

I see three reasons for this. First, these notebooks broke the time/space rules of official classroom literacy. They could go where no other writing material could go, like the dress-up area, where, unlike the two-person, side-by-side writing carrel, students could be across from each other or near me or moving around. This afforded interaction in a way that the physical space of the writing carrel could not. Second, these notebooks were scarce resources and in high demand: Not only were they adult tools (ball-point pens! and narrow-ruled lines!), there were only two or three of them. This meant that to use these notebooks and pens, students either had to wait or had to join in ongoing writing activity, thereby participating in interaction. And often, as in the Kelsey and Pooja example, even waiting nearby meant eventually being sucked in to joint activity. Finally, the notebooks were books, not just single sheets of paper, and thus the old writing remained in them unless someone tore it out. This allowed the intertextual referencing that brought Kritika to ask Pooja about dragons and then to later request a dragon herself.

Implications

For thinking about literacy, oracy, and interaction in classrooms

In the classroom in this study, student writing activity constituted mainly what Goffman (1961) called a ‘contained underlife’, in which subversion does not constitute disruption of official activity. The teachers, under pressure to conform to the ideological and material demands of Head Start and the district, were not able, or perhaps willing, to ‘see’ this student activity. Yet, as Larson and Gatto (2004) describe, it is possible for teachers to alter structures and create a ‘disruptive underlife’ at the classroom level, while still complying in the eyes of the programme/district. Taking the student perspective from this study into account, creating a disruptive classroom underlife might involve beginning to teach writing with what is most meaningful and purposeful for students. Learning the alphabet could begin with K for ‘Kritika’, E for ‘Emily’, and M for ‘Mom’, rather than the order given by the curriculum.

A disruptive underlife might also mean that writing materials could be permitted to ‘travel’ into the dress-up area and block corner and that the divisions between teacher writing tools and kid writing tools (and between art and writing materials) be broken down. These ideas are not new: Literacy researchers have long argued that reading and writing materials need to be embedded in children’s play spaces, and literacy teaching needs to be relevant to them. Yet, as Roskos and Christie (2001) pointed out, having writing materials throughout the classroom should not only be about supporting literacy development, but also about supporting interaction and play. For EBs who are just beginning to speak the classroom language, having the option to use written media to communicate could be particularly helpful in these social, playful endeavours. And for all students, integrating literacy materials into play spaces can open up what Wohlwend (2011) described as multiple ‘nexus’ of combined literacy, play, and design practices. Interestingly, this study might also justify creating a strategic scarcity of highly desirable writing resources as ways to encourage joint use of these materials.

For thinking about activity theory

This study’s findings about the reciprocal and fluid relationship between writing and talk also raise questions for activity theory. The activity system model used throughout this paper was created as a way to represent the complexity of human action and interaction. It has enabled researchers to show how changes within the elements of the model – objects, tools, norms – change the very nature of an interaction, resulting in what can often be a very different activity. (For an excellent example of the utility of this approach in literacy research, see Frankel, 2013). This approach is what allowed me to show how ‘writing’ in the teacher-led activity system was a very different activity from ‘writing’ in peer interaction.

Yet, by viewing changes within the elements of an activity system – subjects, objects, tools, outcomes – as resulting in a different activity system altogether, we imply that within a single activity system, the elements must be static, lest the whole activity change. And in activity system models, generally portrayed on paper, the elements do often appear to be static. This was not a problem in the teacher-led activity system in this classroom, where the appearance of stability corresponded to an actual stability across the year in all of the elements of the system. Yet, within the student activity system, the elements were more fluid in some important ways. In particular, within a single interaction, joint compositions were both an outcome of student interaction around writing, as well as a tool for maintaining the interaction and for supporting oral language. Conversely, interaction was a not just an outcome, but a tool for writing and word learning. As these three elements – compositions, interactions, oral language – moved between being outcomes and tools, the activity itself did not change. More than that: It was sustained by this fluidity. This paper therefore suggests that activity theory may be in need of a more dynamic approach to modelling interaction.

Why has this issue not (to my knowledge at least) been raised? Perhaps when activity theory has been used to study classrooms, models have reflected activity at the classroom level, and thus at the teacher-led level, which tends to have well-defined parameters, roles, tools, and goals (just as it did in this paper). Static models may therefore have been able to capture teacher-led activity well precisely because teacher-led activity is relatively stable, or when it does change, it changes over time, and can thus be shown by simply creating a new model. Perhaps it is only in students’ unofficial activity that aims and tools and outcomes become fluid and that the model fails to account for this dynamism. To think back to the work of Dyson and of Sterponi, for instance, the same flexibility is present: Students used social interaction to mediate reading and writing, and reading and writing became simultaneous tools for mediating social interaction. While for teachers, reading and writing may remain the object and intended outcome of literacy activity, for students, the tools, objects, and outcomes of literate practice are more fluid.

Conclusion

This paper has introduced the idea that while play, interaction, and talk can indeed support literacy, the reverse is also true: Literacy can support play, interaction, and talk. In this preschool classroom, where a large proportion of students were just learning to speak English – and where they did not often participate in interactions with English-speaking students that might facilitate that learning – literacy facilitated social interaction across language backgrounds. Students used the alphabet, letter writing, and joint composing as tools to initiate and sustain social engagement. The result, in addition to the pleasure of play and mutual action, was that these engagements provided chances to use English, exposing EBs to new words and structures, and allowing the acquisition of new vocabulary. The findings in this paper suggest a reevaluation of the oracy–literacy relationship for young EBs, a re-envisioning of the literacy–play relationship in preschool classrooms, and a reconceptualization of the mediating relationship between tools, objects, and outcomes in activity theory.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A big thank you to Kate Frankel for our transformative conversation about activity theory last summer (and to Charlotte Frankel for playing quietly during that conversation). I am also grateful to Rick Donato and Lindsey Moses for reading and providing comments on drafts of the paper, and to Amanda Godley for inviting me to talk these ideas over in her graduate seminar when I was still collecting data. All of the shortcomings are, of course, mine alone.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF).

Notes

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