ABSTRACT
Laura's perceptions of Jay's abilities as a writer were shaped by his classroom performance, in contexts where he was most often required to write alone and often as a form of assessment. The process of co-authoring with struggling writers and co-constructing writing strategies with them in the process is akin to the apprenticeship model of learning described by Lave and Wenger. The author's approach was informed by socio-cultural theory, most particularly Bakhtins notions of social languages and speech genres. Semiotic tools mediated this dialectical relationship, and, although this was thought to include both physical and psychological tools, language was by far the most studied form of mediation. Reciprocal teaching was developed to support the engagement of low-achieving readers with four cognitive tasks Palincsar and Brown identified as important to student's comprehension of text: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting.
