Building sand castles and why Ralph and Keith are friends: The influences of stance, intertexuality, and interpretive authority on meaning construction

The purpose of this study was to explore the influences of stance, intertextuality, and interpretive authority as significant factors of the meaning construction process in a fourth grade classroom. The investigation examined how a group of learners and two teachers enacted various literacy events in two situational contexts, the language arts/literature discussions and the book talks. The theoretical constructs for this investigation were multi-disciplinary, with knowledge and perspectives grounded in socio-cultural literacy development, reader response theories, cognitive psychology, and applied linguistics.; A qualitative research design was used to observe seven fourth grade students and two teachers for four months; collecting data through field notes, audio-tapes, students' writing samples, school records, and informal and formal interviews. The teachers implemented authentic literature for their instructional program. The seven focal students represented a range of academic success and behaviors, reflective of the classroom.; To assist in data interpretation, I utilized an event analysis framework to code and categorize the utterances, intertextual links, and participation structures within each of the literacy events. I, then, selected representative literacy events to examine more closely. From the analysis of the data, I determined four emerging themes: location of meaning, source of ideology, relatedness of link, and discourse roles. These themes contributed to understanding the interrelationships among stance, intertextuality, and interpretive authority.; Findings from this study suggest important insights into the ways in which these learners and the teachers constructed and negotiated meaning of texts. The teachers' instructional stances played a critical role in the personal stances adopted by the learners and their opportunities to make public intertextual links. Adopting an aesthetic personal stance increased the variety and number of intertextual links shared by learners. Issues of interpretive authority also influenced the ways in which ideas were shared and negotiated. Those with higher social status were able to evaluate and challenge interpretations, while those students with less social power confirmed and accepted others' responses. The interrelationships of stance, intertextuality, and interpretive authority were bound together in diverse and complex ways, and were found to make significant contributions to students' understandings of text and meaning construction.