Co-authoring classroom texts: Shifting participant roles in writing activity

This article presents an analysis of ethnagraphic data from a first grade c lassroom within which the social context for. literacy learning allowed bot h the teacher and the students to come to know one another as interested an d engaged partners in literacy learning. using Goffman's concept of the par ticipation framework as a linguistic structure that organizes and is organi zed by talk? and interaction, this article describes the role of the partic ipation framework in mediating co-authorship in writing activity Specifical ly, analysis of classroom discourse illustrates how the teacher and student s shifted roles in the participation framework of writing activity among te acher; author, co-author; and overhearer to facilitate the co-construction of written texts. The purpose of this article is to show how one teacher ex plicitly modeled her own authorship processes and how students took up thos e processes in their own writing through shifts in participation roles.