Transitions in literacy and classroom interaction across the school years

Examining the nature, timing and consequences of transitions in literacy education draws attention to those points that appear to present opportunities and challenges to long- or mid-term coherence and cumulativeness in the work of teachers and students. In this chapter the nature of transition and the different kinds of transitions students experience in their day-to-day literacy learning activity and as they progress year-by-year through the grades from primary to secondary school are discussed.
In this chapter, close analyses of lesson exchanges frame the discussion of how teachers and students negotiate transitions across the years of schooling. Lesson segments from three grade levels – Years 1/2 (an early stage of primary school), 5/6 (the last years of primary school before secondary education) and Year 11 (an upper senior secondary year level) – illustrate contrasts in how literacy pedagogy both shapes and is shaped by interaction patterns experienced in classroom lessons. We apply Conversation Analysis (CA) to see if certain orders of activity within lessons overtly connect to transitions, discontinuities and/or to the successful negotiation of literacy pathways across grade levels.

Copyright © Pauline Jones, Erika Matruglio, Christine Edwards-Groves and Bloomsbury, 2022