ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one tenth grade classroom conversation in order to gain insights about what and how curriculum is constituted in the secondary English language arts classroom. Microethnographic discourse analysis focuses attention on how people act and react to each other. The chapter looks at a conversation between a teacher, pseudonym Mr. Davis, and his tenth grade students based on five themes: "curricular conversation", academic literacies/literary text as a prop for analyzing the world, intertextual constructions, doing school, and explicit text-based argument. The first theme is derived from Arthur Noble Applebee's discussion of curriculum. The second from Lea and Street's theorizing of academic literacies. The third from noticing from the larger corpus of data the teacher's recurrent intertextual referencing of the literary texts, the fourth from conversational chains in the classroom lesson and in the larger corpus of data about the institutional nature of classroom education, and the fifth from recent discussions of literary argumentations.
