On the Ecology of Classroom Instruction:

Abstract

Drawing from research on emergent literacy and activity theory, this chapter explains an ecological perspective on classroom instruction and literacy development distinguished by the reciprocal and epistemological roles of teachers, students, and peers as these roles are shaped through their interactions. The resulting activity networks involve both oral and written discourse, providing a research window on the potential interactions of classroom discourse and writing. This chapter explores such interrelationships with quantitative data from 54 ninth-grade English classes and 48 ninth-grade Social Studies classes. The main finding is that classroom discourse contributes to student writing performance to the extent that writing and talk each extend the scope of one another. Evidence from observations and questionnaires revealed many superficial similarities between the two subject matters. Students wrote about as frequently in English and Social Studies, and classroom discourse pattems in both subjects tended heavily towards lecture, recitation, and seatwork. Beyond these similarities, the research uncovered striking differences in the two contexts as they affected student writing. Though frequent writing activities enhanced writing performance in English, they had the opposite effect in Social Studies. Further probing of writing activities and assignments revealed that writing served different purposes in the different subject areas. With an emphasis on rhetoric and form, English classes displayed more attention to writing as writing. In Social Studies, by contrast, writing was used to teach students methods of close reading. Such differences show that the curricular landscapes of English and Social Studies affected writing performance very differently, producing two different environments for literacy development.