ABSTRACT
Children are apprenticed into reading practices in their classrooms, immersed in particular forms of talk and particular kinds of texts. They bring to these engagements a wide range of individual differences, and the significance of these differences for their participation in reading practices is determined in large part by classroom context. In this chapter, we focus on the ways in which classroom talk and individual differences are linked to students’ reading and to their development, particularly in the context of the texts they read. For example, in some classrooms, talk and activities focus on certain individual differences and project them onto a linear scale of competence through language like, “That’s what good readers do,” or “You’re a really good writer,” and through language invoking “levels” of competence. The question underlying such classroom discourse is, “Who is capable and who is not?” and children construct literate identities and relationships from those made available within that discursive structure. On the other hand, some classroom contexts foreground individual differences in perspective and experience, rather than differences in skill, because they make dialogic interaction possible and frame the differences as expanding the resources available for meaning making. The underlying question is, “How can we understand this more deeply?” Classrooms focused on making sense create relationally different literate communities and invite different literate identities than those focused on finding out who is most and least capable. In other words, individual differences become meaningful in the context in which they find themselves.
