In this study of students in a combined kindergarten-first grade class, the impact of students' ways of speaking on their classroom social identities was considered. The study focused on discourse in "first circle," a daily event in which teacher and students meet to start school by taking attendance, filling in a calendar, and planning the day's activities. Researchers videotaped and transcribed seven first circles at roughly comparable points across two successive school years. Videotape viewing sessions and interviews were subsequently held with the teacher. The teacher found several dimensions of social identity important, including: academic capability or advancement; maturity; talkativeness; independence; aggressiveness; ability to follow through; and leadership. Her responses to students seemed to depend on how she viewed them both as students and as circle participants. The study concluded that each student's social identity was the conjoint product of everyone's interaction in the classroom scene, rather than a construct between student and teacher. Identities were constructed through a social process in which students' discourse performances and ways of speaking, local exigencies of the speech situation, context-specific discourse rules, and the teacher's interpretative schemes were mutually interdependent. (Contains 51 references, 11 data tables, and 7 examples of dialogue.) (AC)