What Counts as Literacy Curriculum?

This book examines the ways in which one prekindergarten classroom teacher integrated a newly adopted literacy curriculum into her classroom practice for the first time. The research focused on analyzing the variation in text selection by the teacher and on patterns of teacher and student discourse based on the different kinds of text that were read aloud to the students. This study considers how students learn appropriate ways of being readers as they interact in a social and cultural classroom environment. Through contrastive and discourse analysis, the ways in which the teacher and students constructed patterns of interaction that accomplished very different kinds of story time events in the classroom were revealed. These variations in story time events afforded the students different opportunities for learning to be literate. This research contributes to the field of research on how students are socialized into being readers through patterned interaction across time.