Documenting oral feedback discourse during formal formative reading assessment with an emergent bilingual student

ABSTRACT

School-based social practices of oral feedback present challenges for all k-12 students. Ignoring these challenges during reading assessment contributes to a deficit view of emergent bilingual students, whose struggles to participate in formative feedback on reading performance may result from general unfamiliarity with school-based practices, rather than language proficiency. Drawing impetus from the New Literacy Studies and methodological principles from conversation analysis, the current study explores the discursive organization of oral feedback during formal formative reading assessment and its relationship to issues of knowledge construction and identity. Based upon a single-case analysis, this study demonstrates how one emergent bilingual student’s struggles to participate in oral feedback emerged not from language proficiency but from unfamiliarity with the social practices of sequential organization. Furthermore, it will be argued that the teacher’s attempts at feedback sequentially constructed her student’s emergent bilingual identity and prioritized knowledge constructed about him, over knowledge constructed by him.

KEYWORDS:

• Formative assessment
• reading assessment
• New Literacy Studies
• conversation analysis
• emergent bilingual

Acknowledgements

Among supporters too numerous now to list, the author would like to acknowledge the tireless guidance of Dr. Takashi Ito as well as that of the anonymous reviewers whose sustained critique was critical to the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. It bears mention that these propositions are not technically incorrect and may be, at worst, misinterpreted. As discussed previously, the list of possible responses for the second test prompt (see Table 1) encourages the test administrator to expect the student to produce a contrasting description of the sisters’ personalities. Furthermore, both the story’s climax, during which the sisters’ deception is revealed, as well as its resolution, when their teacher exclaims that their personalities ‘stayed the same’ (see 4.1.1), take for granted that the reader will orient to this contrast. Although Takuto’s expanded answer is treated as incorrect by Samantha, he may in fact be drawing skilfully upon the textual evidence provided by the teacher-character’s exclamation. That is, Takuto may be proposing not that the sisters’ personalities are similar, but rather that their personalities are similar in that they remain unchanged despite changes to the sisters’ outward appearances and, thus, remain distinct from one another’s. Along this line of analysis, Takuto’s utterance at line 13 may be appreciated as a self-correction which allows him to align more closely with the textual evidence provided by Twin Sisters, perhaps having been occasioned when his initial utterance (lines 10–11) did not receive an acknowledgement from Samantha (line 12). Certainly, Samantha does not orient to the distinction drawn by Takuto between ‘are the same’ and ‘stay the same.’ This does not, however, compromise the analysability of Takuto’s utterance at line 18 as a correction of Samantha’s formulation (line 15) of his expanded answer (line 13). Although this line of analysis cannot be pursued further at present, it bears consideration as potential evidence that the feedback event may have been precipitated by Samantha’s misinterpretation of Takuto’s counterintuitively articulated, but nonetheless correct, display of reading comprehension.