Traces scholarly constructions of basic writers' identities. Asks what those students who are labeled basic writers are accomplishing in their speech and writing. Offers a speculative model for analyzing basic writing student discourse. Uses that model to examine the language used in a basic writing classroom. Reviews the implications of such work…

The popular model of collaborative learning views classrooms as contexts where nonmembers of "valued" communities become members by mastering accepted knowledge, discourse forms, and methods. Although attractive to educators, this model allows only for changes in individual students, not in "valued" communities. Further, its…

In research on classroom discourses, case studies have been used to describe the dynamics of effective and ineffective instruction. In other research, quantitative studies have identified global features of such discourse. The research reported here combined the advantages of both methods, investigating how generally effective classroom discourse…

Despite substantial research on children's literacy performance outside school, relatively few studies have examined the classroom context of writing development, and even fewer have considered the relationship between general classroom discourse and writing. This paper presents an ecological framework for studying the relation between classroom…

The language of a literate classroom is profoundly impacted by that which is included, excluded, ignorantly condoned, and perpetually presented with distortions. The article analyzes seven comprehensive frameworks: (1) diverse voices; (2) identities of the language users; (3) present and absent curriculum; (4) cognitive structures influencing…