| This dissertation reports on a yearlong microethnographic study that investigated the social construction of intertextuality and poetics in young children's classroom writing practices over time. The participants were nineteen five- to six-year-old kindergarteners from six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Indian, Venezuelan, Finnish, Russian, Iraqi, and Mexican), as well as their teacher, who attended an elementary school in the Midwestern United States.;The study adopted a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis of the naturally occurring classroom activities and also analyzed interviews with the teacher, teacher-student interactions, the students' artifacts, and the researchers' fields notes and research journals.;Examination of the young children's social construction of intertextuality as a learning heuristic and of poetics in their writing practices yielded two main sets of findings. First, the young children's writing was found to involve a set of complex intertextual practices. The jointly constructed intertextualities were found to be more complex than the processes of proposing, recognizing, acknowledging, and constituting social significance or consequences found in previous research on the social construction of intertextuality. Rather, the present research found that the social construction of intertextuality involved highly fluid processes with some reoccurring, suspended, and omitted phases. Students' intertextuality construction was found to be multi-layered and intertwined with each other. The children's continuous construction of organizational, thematic, and orientational intertextualities became powerful heuristics of their various kinds of learning. Second, a shared poetics was found to be constructed through the ELLs' learning, experimenting, and experiences with poetic language uses and devices. The results showed that the shared poetics constituted part of their classroom culture and the poetics construction processes successfully engaged the children's imagination and creativity in their writing practices. The findings underscore the potentials of engaging young children in intertextuality and poetics construction as well as the importance of play, pleasure, poetics, and aesthetics as part of children's classroom literacy learning practices. |
