How High School Students Learn to Write Literary Arguments through Social Interactions: An Apprenticeship.

摘要

Although reading and responding to literature comprises a large portion of the English Language Arts curriculum, and argumentative writing is growing in focus in secondary schools, what literary argument is and how to teach it is not well addressed in the scholarly literature or practitioner materials. This dissertation aims to address this gap by exploring what literary argument is in a particular classroom, how the teacher teaches students to write literary arguments, and how students learn to write literary arguments over time. I frame this teaching and learning of literary argument as an apprenticeship, drawing on Rogoff's (1995) theory that learning is changing participation in the activities of a sociocultural community. Through methods of case study and interactional ethnography, I analyzed students' participation in literary argument at Rogoff's three analytic planes: the context and nature of the apprenticeship in literary argument, the interactional processes that guide students' participation, and individual students' appropriation of the interpretive, analytic, and argumentative moves that constitute literary argument in this learning community. Students were apprenticed into the ways of reading and writing about literature, which were comprised of interpretive, analytic, and argumentative moves, moves that were both constituted by the teacher and students through language-in-use while at the same time influenced by institutional and historical forces such as new critical theory and the Advanced Placement test. The students' participation in these moves was guided by the teacher's explicit instruction in the declarative knowledge of the discipline of literature as well as questions to prompt students to make particular moves, providing students with procedural knowledge for how to participate in the discipline. The three focal students appropriated these particular moves over time in their speaking and their writing but did so differently, showing agency in their own process of appropriation. This study offers apprenticeship as an instructional model for the teaching and learning of literary argument with implications for theory, pedagogy, and methodology in the teaching and learning of literary argument.