Framed within interactional sociolinguistics and microethnographic discourse analysis,
the ways that members of a sixth-grade classroom co-constructed a cultural model that
opened opportunities for interacting with literature texts in ways that supported the
acquisition of complex academic knowledge were investigated. The data for this study
were collected from twenty-six classroom observations and fifteen interviews during two
cycles of instruction over the course of the 2008-2009 school year. The study examined
how a culture was created in and through dialogue, how literacy practices enacted within
instructional discussions were shaped and reshaped by members’ actions and reactions,
and how students were given opportunities to take up and adapt literacy practices over the
time and space of an academic year. The study was oriented to generating grounded
theoretical constructs about the nature of dialogic instruction in classrooms. These
include 1) that language patterns for deepening complex knowledge about texts evolve
over time in a culture that provides multiple opportunities for uptake and adaptation in
and through dialogic interactions, 2) content and knowledge are not fixed but are shaped
by participants as they act and react to each other and to literature texts, and 3) that
ii
teachers serve as mediators, enacting literacy practices that are taken up and adapted in
multiple spaces and contexts over time. I view these grounded theoretical constructs as
contributing to the current discussion about how learning opportunities are constructed by
teachers who provide cultural models for interacting with texts at a deep level and who
then orchestrate a classroom culture that values how the cultural model is taken up and
adapted over time