APPROPRIATING OTHERS WORDS - TRACES OF LITERATURE AND PEER CULTURE INA 3RD-GRADERS WRITING

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of appropriation is a potentially powerful wa y to conceptualize discourse development in children. Typically, studi es of discourse development have emphasized structural aspects of text . However, children appropriate not only forms, but also words, themes , purposes, and styles. From a developmental point of view, the concep t of appropriation raises at least three questions: What is it that ch ildren appropriate? Where do they get their material? And what do they do with that material? In an attempt to make sense of appropriation a s a developmental construct, we examine one third-grader's writing: Su zanne's book, The missing piece. We find that Suzanne appropriated mat erial from two major sources: (a) adult-authored text - Margaret Sidne y's novel, Five little Peppers and how they grew - and (b) the meaning s and values of a stratified local peer culture. We conclude by discus sing the significance of this work for future research on children's d iscourse development.