ABSTRACT
This classroom microethnography analyzes the language use and participation structures of a group of Spanish-dominant bilingual first-grade students, focusing on teachers and students' methods and strategies relative to communication and engagement in academic tasks. The students were observed and videotaped during two small-group language arts lessons, both structured around an instructional game: one group was led by a bilingual, bicultural Chicana teacher; the other by a monolingual English-speaking teacher. These two videotaped language arts lessons have been used to study how students and teachers interactionally cooperate in academic lesson engagement, and this process analyzed across moments of real time. The students in the two language arts lessons are first graders in one of two bilingual classrooms studied by Erickson, Carrasco, Guzman, and Cazden. In a first-grade bilingual classroom peer-tutoring situation, Carrasco showed how a Spanish-dominant bilingual student successfully penetrated a peer-tutoring dyad by rhythmically entering interaction using the topic of the tutoring scene.
