ABSTRACT
In the following interaction, Nathan, a ninth grade English student, and his teacher, Marita, have been discussing his paragraph. Background that will help you make sense of this excerpt includes the fact that Nathan and Marita are Black and Marita grew up in the same inner city neighborhood as Nathan. However, Marita earned a teaching degree and moved out of the inner city as a young adult and into a middle-class neighborhood. You will notice that this transcript contains some additional marks in the form of equals signs. These are the first of several notations that will appear in the transcripts that follow. They are meant to show how the talk is spoken. The equals signs, for example, indicate that one speaker speaks immediately after another, which could indicate eagerness to speak.
