| This qualitative study of an ethnically diverse urban third grade classroom asks how children used their peer structured talk and interactions during reading activities to negotiate peer identities and relationships. The study addresses the broad issue of how official literacy practices and children's unofficial social worlds are interwoven, drawing upon and mutually transforming one another. Theories of language socialization (Ochs, 1996), interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman, 1981), and interpretive approaches to child socialization (Gaskins, Miller, & Corsaro, 1992) frame the study; methods from ethnography of communication and ethnography (Erickson, 1992; Walcott, 1994, 1995) are used to create an analytic framework. Children's talk and interaction are analyzed as agentive social work during two reading activities that involved peer structured discussion of text: guided reading and self-selected reading. Data collected over a five month period include field notes, audio taped interviews with teacher and children, and video taped data. The findings suggest that reading activities provided opportunities to both maintain and to rework salient social categories of gender and popularity. The analysis of four children's talk during one guided reading activity shows how a less popular boy was able to reshape the official literacy activity so that it more closely resembled a unofficial peer interaction that had taken place earlier. He used the literacy activity to rework his social alignment to the girls at his table, and to ease gender and popularity divides. The analysis of self-selected reading activities shows that partner reading during self-selected reading was a girl gendered activity. Boys and girls could partner read together, but this was not easy to organize. There were, however, socially meaningful alternatives to partner reading during self-selected reading. Boys and less popular girls used talk during self-selected reading time outside of partner reads to affiliate with peers and to reshape the constraints of gender and popularity divides. The study suggests that peer structured reading talks may be a particularly rich arena in which children can work and rework constructions of peer identity, and that more research is needed to understand how to support children's efforts to use peer reading in this way. |
