Articulating education with primary students

[Extract] Interviews with students and teachers about literacy learning and teaching formed an important part of the data collection and analysis for the TRANSLIT research project. In this chapter, we draw on interviews about literacy learning with three students at different transition points across the primary school. In their participation with teachers and their fellow students in lessons and other school activities, students display their practical interpretations of what is going on in their education. But they are not usually called on to do the specialised work of articulating these interpretations in the interactional setting of a research interview. In this chapter, we use Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine that specialised work in a selection of interviews about learning literacy with primary students at three typical ‘transitional’ points in primary school education, Kindergarten (the first year of formal schooling in New South Wales, Australia), Year 2 (the transition point into primary grades) and Year 6 (the last year of primary school before entering secondary school).

We document how these students drew on estimates of the recognisability and noteworthiness of their observations to accomplish the interview, including the goal of presenting themselves as ‘adequate interviewees’. Two aspects of these interviews are highlighted: how fastidious is the moment-tomoment coordination that both parties displayed in sequencing the elements of the interview; and how students made apparent their interpretations of what they encounter in their literacy learning at school. Their perspectives revealed three distinct ‘takes’ on reading and writing for school: as a set of institutional procedures, as distinct domains within the curriculum, and as skills and knowledge put to work in different ways within different discipline areas. Implications for research are drawn out in relation to the meanings attributed to nature and conduct of interviews with young literacy learners at different points in time.