Rock-a-byes and spells, recipes and stories: an examination of reading instruction in the initial school years.

Harris, Pauline ; Trezise, Jillian

Why a focus upon intertextuality in early grade classrooms?

Teacher mediation between children and written texts during lessons such as shared book experience is an established practice in the initial school years. This mediation means that children do not work directly with the written text, but rather with the spoken interactions about those texts. Mediation is not only text driven but also framed by a teacher's pedagogic goals, beliefs and assumptions about children as literacy learners. Mediation is made complex, however, by the presence of competing intertextual agendas and reference frames which teachers and children bring to the situation.

Consider, for example, the following extract from a Kindergarten reading lesson focussing on Meg's Eggs (Nicoll & Pienkowski, 1975), a picture book narrative about a witch, documented in our classroom observational research of reading instruction in the initial school years (Harris, Winser & Trezise, 1994).

T: Listen to this: `Lizards and newts, three loud hoots, green

frogs' legs, three big eggs.' What does that sound like? Cathy: Like a rock-a-bye. T: It doesn't sound like something that would put me to sleep. Edward: It's a spell. T: Good boy. What's a spell?

A focus on intertextuality in the analysis of encounters like this leads us to ask, `What are the intertextual agendas creating divergence between the teacher and Cathy?' From the teacher's perspective, she is enacting pedagogic goals to develop children's understanding of procedural genres -- specifically, recipes. The spell texts embedded in the narrative serve as a springboard to doing this.

Cathy's frame of reference, on the other hand, may be understood in light of her home experiences which she revealed in a follow-up interview to this lesson. The focus of this interview was Cathy's textual experiences at home. Cathy talked about the rhyming books she read and listened to. She drew upon these resources when she said, `Like a rock-a-bye', likening the rhyming spell text in Meg's Eggs to nursery rhymes. Cathy talked about listening to rhymes at bedtime, which seemed to further shape her association between the teacher's question, `What does that sound like?' and lullaby rhymes.

In the absence of a shared history of texts, children and teacher often do not understand each other's intertextual intentions. This is made more difficult by competing and divergent frames of reference, especially when they come into play at the same instance, as in the case above. How teachers and children negotiate this web of intertextuality is of interest in this article, in terms of impact upon participation as literacy learners at school.

Conceptual framework

Psychoanalytical perspective of intertextuality

After Kristeva (1984), `intertextuality' is used to signify the multiple ways in which a literary text echoes or is linked to other texts. A text may be linked to other texts by open or covert citations and allusions, or by the use of the formal features and content of an earlier text, or simply by the participation in a common stock of literary and linguistic conventions.

From this perspective, language is seen to be personal and idiosyncratic (Kristeva, 1989: p. 265). Part of this is the phenomenon of condensation, that is, the use of extremely brief and meagre utterances such as `like a rock-a-bye', and `duckville' below, derived from an earlier Year 1 study.

Lenny reads at his table, assisted by an adult aide. He turns to a page in his book showing a family tree, with familial labels. He reads each label. When he comes to `nephew', he turns to the adult assisting and asks,

L: What does this word say? P: `Nephew'. L: Duckville. P: It says `nephew'. L: Duckville. P: It says `nephew'. [pointing to the word `nephew']. See, what sound does it

start with? L: /n/. P: Uh-huh, /n/ for `nephew'. L: Yeah, and that's like Huey, Dewey and Louie, and they live at Duckville

with Donald Duck and I watch them on television.

Lenny did not necessarily seek a response to his cryptic `Duckville' which alluded to a broad body of `Donald Duck' texts. However, the adult, unfamiliar with these texts, and in the classroom role of assisting a young reader, framed Lenny's response as an aural miscue and so emphasised the phonological features of the word `nephew'. In this, we see divergent frames of reference.

Condensed signs, like `Duckville' and like a `rock-a-bye', provide insight into the position of the speaker. This position in each case contrasted with the goals of the teacher. Each of these condensed utterances represents a point of connection to broader meanings; their brevity stands in contrast with the range and wealth of the meanings they each represent. For example, Cathy's cryptic `like a rock-a-bye' simultaneously represents thoughts about rhyming, rhyming texts generally, a specific rhyming text, and encountering such texts at bed-time, which make up her frame of reference at this particular instance. Frame of reference is an important consideration in relation to teacher mediation of texts.

Teacher mediation between texts and readers

Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) documented intertextuality in teacher-mediated talk about books in early grade classrooms, in terms of connections made among written texts in classrooms, and the social processes whereby they are made. Using examples here from our previous extract on Meg's Eggs, these processes are: proposing an intertextual link (e.g. `What does that sound like?'); identifying the link (e.g. `Like a rock-a-bye'); recognising (or not recognising) the link (e.g. `That doesn't sound like something that would put me to sleep'); and acknowledging and validating the link (e.g. `Good boy. What's a spell?'). Through these processes, the teacher grants (as with Edward) or withholds (as with Cathy) significance not only in regard to the relationships but to the children who provide them. Thus the Bloome and Egan-Robertson study locates reading instruction in the broader sociocultural context of schooling and to issues of equity and access -- who and how is validated, who and how is not.

However, the concept of intertextuality in their study is confined to written texts. This article draws upon a broader conceptualisation, with a view of lesson as intertext, and a concern with reasons behind the authorisation of exchanges. According to Halliday and Hasan.

... part of the environment for any text is a set of previous texts, texts that are taken for granted as shared among those taking part ... Every lesson is built on the assumption of earlier lessons in which topics have been explored, concepts agreed upon and defined, but beyond this there is a great deal of unspoken cross-reference of which everyone is largely unaware.

The greater power of the teacher in the classroom situation increases the complexity of the intertextual venture for the child. As well as dealing with competing interpretations within a text (spoken, visual or written), the child at school is also required to interpret and negotiate the interpersonal struggle for control of the framing focus. MacLachlan and Reid (1994: p. 109) argue that `different framing factors are always operative in any text or cultural activity and ... bring power into play'. The teacher's greater power in the classroom is relatively obvious: it is the teacher who will determine who can speak, in relation to what, when and to whom, and who has the right to speak for others.

Analysis of teacher-mediated talk about Meg's Eggs

Drawing on this conceptual framework of intertextuality, we will now examine a sequence of lessons during which a Kindergarten teacher mediates between a written narrative text, Meg's Eggs, and the children in order to develop children's competences with procedural texts.

This sequence is drawn from our longitudinal classroom observational study of children in their first three years of school (Harris, Winser & Trezise, 1994). The sequence was documented through fieldnotes and audiotaping, and tapes were transcribed. This particular sequence has been selected because it reveals some intertextual complexities of reading lessons. Difficulties encountered in these interactions are not described in order to reflect on teacher or child competence, but in order to understand their source and identify ways of re-thinking them.

The focal text as an intertext

After Kristeva (1984), Meg's Eggs is linked to other texts in multiple ways. It is part of the `Meg and Mog' series which chronicles the comical misadventures of a witch called Meg, and her companions Mog the cat and Owl.

The story's presentation of witches intertextually echoes comics and supernatural tales such as the traditional fairytale wherein the witch is a threatening figure. While the text uses the iconic black cauldron, broomstick, and silhouettes against moonlit skies, it offsets these by its comic-style presentation (e.g. speech bubbles and noise, effects), slapstick images, and contrast of black with flat, vivid colours. The witch is constructed not as ugly and vile but as plain and incompetent, a character whose spells invariably go wrong.

A complex set of relationships is found within the text, between the main narrative verbal text, visual imagery, captions, speech bubbles, and noise effects. Adding to all this is the embedding of spell texts within the main narrative (such as the example at the beginning of this article). It is the spell text which the teacher uses as a springboard to talking about procedural texts in her mediation between Meg's Eggs and the children.

The lesson as an intertext

Constituting a spoken text, the series of lessons about Meg's Eggs can be seen to be based upon assumptions about the children's familiarity with recipes, the visibility of these texts and their generic structures in the home, and adults' participation in specific cooking activities at home.

The teacher introduced the Meg's Eggs narrative with a whole class discussion of the book's front cover. She then moved to a specific focus on the title, seeking other `-eg' words. Children promptly volunteered these, indicating the familiarity of this procedure in view of previous lessons along similar lines, and making the teacher's agenda at this point very accessible to the children.

The teacher then read the text to the class. The following day, the teacher selected the `lizards and newts' spell to read to the class, as shown at the beginning of this article. The teacher's question about this spell, `What does that sound like?', appears open-ended; however, there was one desired response compatible with the teacher's intertextual agenda of linking the spell to procedural texts. Rejecting Cathy's `Like a rock-a-bye' response, and taking up Edward's response, `It's a spell', the teacher moved to the next step in her agenda.

T: Good boy. What is a spell? Sarah: It's magic. T: What kind of people have spells? Matt: Witches and wizards. T: Yes, good boy. Witches and wizards make spells.

[reading and showing the illustration] `Lizards and newts,

three loud hoots, green frogs' legs, three big eggs.' What

does she make her spell in?

Edward: Cauldron.

Drawing on their intertextual knowledge about supernatural tales and how the question/answer sequences in lessons proceed, the children appeared to take up the teacher's agenda at this point. The teacher then moved another step by proposing a link between Meg's spells and recipes.

T: What did Meg put into the pot? What do we call things we

put into a pot to cook? Lachlan: Ingredients.

T: Those things are called ingredients. Let's write it on the

board. [teacher points to the book] These are the ingredients

for Meg's spell. When the ingredients are written down,

what is it called? Mummy might have a book full of these

at home. It starts with the sound /r/. C: Recipe.

Introduction of `ingredients' to this interaction sequence marked the first explicit point of departure from narrative to recipe as procedural text. The importance of this was signalled through the teacher's reiteration and scribing of the response on the board, and pointing to the ingredients in the focal text.

The following day, talk continued about Meg's Eggs and recipes.

T: We talked about witches' spells being similar to something

your mum uses when she cooks. What did we say it was

similar to? C: Recipes? T: Good boy. A witch's spell and a recipe are almost the same

except Mum uses a recipe and cooks in a ...? C: Oven. T: In a oven or a pot, and witches use spells and they cook in

a...? C: Pot, pot, cauldron!

Cauldron. Very good./ Okay, well, I might do ... I'll do the

spelling [scribing on board], /s/pell. C: /S/pell. T: OK. A spell is what a witch uses and a witch uses a

cauldron. [scribes `cauldron' on boardl C: /c/ /old/-. T You can't really sound out cauldron. It's a tricky word. It's

one of those words you just have to know. All right, and

Mum uses a recipe ... [scribes `recipe' on boardl C: /R/ee/see/pee/y/.

Here, the teacher is drawing an analogy between witches, spells and cauldrons on one hand, and mothers, recipes and ovens on the other hand. This analogy carries implicit values about gender roles and activities, issuing from broader gender discourses. The children do not explicitly take up this analogy, as they instead focus on phonological features of these words as they are scribed on the board (as they were accustomed to do in many previous lessons). Thus, the meanings suggested by the analogy remained' unquestioned.

The teacher then proposed and validated links to an earlier activity, in order to recount the steps involved in making jelly.

T: OK. All right, yesterday we made some jelly...What did we have to do first. Who can remember the first thing we did? Darren?

D: We put the jelly crystals...

T: In a...?

D: In a jar, in a bowl.

T: Good boy. We put the jelly crystals...did we put them in a bowl?

C: No, poured.

T: Good, we poured the jelly crystals in a bowl. Then what did we do? What was the second step we made? The second step? Jamie?

Jamie: Boiling water, we tipped it into the jelly, jelly crystals.

Darren: We poured...

T: That's right, we poured the boiling water into the...

Darren: Jelly crystals.

T: Or into the bowl. Very good. Then what did we do? Renee?

Renee: Stirred it up.

T: We mixed the jelly crystals and the water. And the jelly crystals ...?

C: Vanished.

C: Dissolved.

T: They vanished, OK, they dissolved. Very good. They disappeared, they dissolved. What happened next? Marianne?

Mary: We put the bowl to set.

Gary: The mixture.

T: Good girl. It was a good word that Gary came up with, wasn't it, 'cause that's exactly what happened.

In this section, talk focussed on participants like 'bowl', 'jelly crystals', 'mixture' and ingredients', and processes like 'dissolved' and 'poured', which made up a lexicon relating to procedural steps -- a lexicon removed from that of the narrative text used to initiate these lessons.

Talk continued about cooking lasagne at home with the teacher focussing on 'ingredients' and 'methods' as labels. Implicitly this may be understood in terms of her intertextual agenda embracing the structure of procedural texts; this agenda, however, had not yet been made explicit for the children:

T: After that in my cookbook, I've got all the ingredients out, they're on the bench ... What does it tell me next? It told me what I needed to make the lasagne. What does it tell me next? Lachlan?

Lachlan: Um, how to cook it?

T: Right, how to put it all together. How to make it or how to cook it. So it tells me how. Does anyone know what that part of the recipe is called?

C: How to cook.

T: It's got a special name and it starts with /m/./M/e/th /...

C : /M/e/th/ , /m/th/ , mix.

T: No, it might tell me to mix something but that's not what it is. I'll write it up and we'll see if you can sound it out.

C: /M/eth/...

T: Hands up if you know what it is. Lisa?

Lisa: Metho?

T: Not metho but method. The method, how to put all the ingredients together to cook my food. To cook the lasagne that I'm going to make.

The children appeared to be working with the teacher to approximate her agenda, and to some degree revealed some tentative understandings of thy processes involved. This may have been facilitated by the growing distance between this talk and the narrative used as the springboard.

However, once the teacher brought Meg's Eggs back into focus, tension between at least two competing frames emerged. While the teacher operated within a framework of procedural genre, the children's responses reflected their narrative frames, linking spell to story. The use of these different genres framed what the teacher and children said, producing divergence and ambiguity. The teacher's questions and comments below could be construed as focussing on either the structure of the spell (as recipe), or on the content of the narrative: while the teacher intended the former, the children took up the latter, creating tension.

T: All right, do you think the spell would be the same?

C: No.

T: So if some, let's have a look, let's have a look at what Meg did. OK, well, when Meg put all her ingredients together, [reading Meg's Eggs text], lizards and newts, three loud hoots, green frogs' legs, three big eggs'. What's this part of the spell? Cathy?

Cathy: The ingredients.

T: Good girl. That's the ingredients, that's what Meg used and she made her spell. Tony, are you listening? And then [reading caption in illustration next to three cracking eggs], 'Plink plonk plunk'. What's happening there?

Cathy: Three...

T: No, what's happening? Edward? Edward: Eggs are coming out of the...

T: But what's happened? What's happened? All the ingredients have what? What have they done?

C: She's got big ones!

T: That's right, she's got huge ones because all the ingredients have mixed together to make something...

C: Big!

T: To make something new and it wa big eggs. So what's happened is all the ingredients have been put together and the method showed us how to put them all to their and something new comes out of it. So a spell does work the same way.

Having identified and validated the link between spell and recipe, the teacher introduced another intertextual link, between recipes and the classroom text Monster Meals. Children's spontaneous responses to the ingredients in these meals (e.g. 'Oh cool, yeah!', 'Oooooh, yuck!') revealed their engagement with the novel content Of this text. The teacher's questions, however, focussed on the text in terms of its generic stages.

T: What's all this, what has this story told us so far? It's told us what's gone into the meal, but what's that? They are the...

C: Ingredients.

T: Ingredients. [reading] In go the car doors'...

C: Yum!

This interaction was followed by a whole class construction of a spell. The teacher scribed children's ingredients, then moved to the next stage of the procedural text:

T: OK, we've got our ingredients. We've got how much we need, now what do I need to write?

C: Recipe.

T: What do I need next in my spell? Gary? Gary: Um, ingredients.

T: No, we've got the ingredients, what do I need to write in next? Michelle?

Michelle: How to make it.

T: I need to put how to make it. Where am I going to put all my ingredients? Where am I going to put them all? Lisa?

Lisa: In a cauldron.

T: In a cauldron. So I need to tell the person [writing]'put' ...all the ingredients into a cauldron and stir...Well, what does it become now? It's not ingredients anymore.

C: A spell.

T: No, it's become a spell...When you put something into a bowl and you mix it together it becomes a...?

C: Method. [Note this child's link to the previous talk about methods above]

T: You're not thinking...When I put the ingredients into a bowl and I mix the ingredients up it becomes a mix ...?

C: Mixture.

T: Now you're thinking. Before you were just picking words out of the air. [writing] Put all the ingredients into a cauldron and stir the mixture.'

It seemed the intertextual complexities of the lesson frustrated both teacher and children. Children were trying to use their intertextual resources, such as words encountered in previous lessons, to address the teacher's questions. Given the collision of intertextual frames of reference, anticipating and identifying appropriate links became increasingly difficult.

When narratives were brought back into focus, children's responses shifted to their content, and there was a semblance of harmony between the teacher's and children's frames of reference. This again can be seen in the next phase of this sequence, when the children were asked to write a spell as a procedural text.

T: You are going to make up a spell.

C: Wow!

T: You have to pretend you are a witch or a wizard...You can make a spell for whatever it is you would like. And remember the ingredients can be anything you like. Have four different ingredients.

C: Ohhhhhh!

Children's responses again show their enthusiastic engagement with content. There remained an underlying discrepancy, however, between the teacher's and children's intertextual frames of reference. Subsequent difficulties may be understood not in terms of teacher or child competence but rather in terms of the intertextual minefield teachers and children find themselves navigating when they engage in talk about texts.

Intertextuality in the classroom -- minefield or goldmine?

This sequence of lessons, which make up a continuous intertext, reveal different kinds of intertextual links. These are: intratextual links (e.g. between spells and the narrative in which they are embedded); links between texts (e.g. Meg's Eggs and other texts in the series); links between texts and genres (e.g. between recipes and procedural genres); and links between genres (e.g. between narrative and procedural genres).

This sequence also drew upon: previous lessons about graphological and phonological features of written language; previous activities such as jelly making and cooking pancakes; recipe texts; discourses about gender-based roles and activities; and classroom management, interaction and evaluation discourses (e.g. tacitly shared formats for contributing and answering questions).

The significance of a teacher's intertextual agenda lies in its instigation of social processes whereby that agenda is enacted (after Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). These processes, as we saw, are present in the running commentary a teacher provides; the questions she poses, and the reiteration, interpretation, written recording and evaluation of children's responses. In these processes the teacher gave or withheld recognition and validation of children's contributions according to how they approximated her agenda. Children's responses were thereby given different degrees of significance.

Children's access to intertextual possibilities in the Meg's Eggs lessons were constrained by the teacher's intertextual agenda. By focussing, for example, upon links with recipes in cookbooks, links with children's experiences with rhymes and witch narratives were excluded. Children were seen to use their intertextual resources to meet the teacher's intertextual agenda, but not always with success.

Part of the difficulty in accessing the teacher's agenda was its implicitness. In using a narrative text as a bridge to procedural texts, the teacher's agenda was not obvious, nor was it made explicit. This would suggest the need for unambiguous signals of what is framing the lesson at hand, and clear identification of congruence and difference between text types.

In considering focal texts as intertexts, other texts and discourses they have the potential to evoke needs to come into account. In using a particular text type as a bridge to another (e.g. narrative to procedural texts), how the juxtaposition of the two texts may produce friction needs to be anticipated. Ambiguity is increased when the label 'story' is used in imprecise ways to refer to texts and children's writing generally.

Children's efforts to approximate the teacher's agenda was at times disrupted by the spontaneous mobilisation of condensed signs, such as 'like a rock-a-bye', which signalled other intertextual frames coming into play. These are difficult to anticipate, by their very nature, but even so it would be appropriate to clarify rather than dismiss such utterances.

The intertextual complexities of reading lessons are many and varied, and in constant motion, shifting in and out of focus. They may provide a source of insight for learners as connections are used and made visible, but they may also lead to frustration when intertextual frames pass unrecognised or else collide, and acknowledgement and validation are withheld. There clearly is a strong need for greater understanding of the intertextual complexities that shape and mobilise what is said and done in the name of reading instruction in the early school years.

REFERENCES

Bloome, D. & Egan-Robertson, A. (1993). The social construction of intertextuality in classroom reading and writing lessons. Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 4. pp. 105-33.

Halliday, M. & Hasan R. (1985). Language, Context and Text: Aspects Of language in a social semiotic perspective. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press. pp. 47-8.

Harris, P. (1992). Young children's perceptions of reading encounters in the early childhood classroom. In P. de Lacey, A. Barlow and S. Walker (eds.), Young Children Learning: Perspectives on early childhood education. Sydney: UWS Reprographic Services.

Harris, P., Winser, W. & Trezise, J. (1994). The contribution of intertextual features of reading instruction to success and failure in reading in the initial school years. Australian Research Grant Submission, Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW.

Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press.

Nicoll, H. & Pienkowski, J. (1975). Meg's Eggs. Harmondsworth, UK: Puffin Books.