ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights work by an intergenerational team of high school youth, teachers, and university-based researchers. The focus of the research was a literacy program called “Poetry Inside Out” (PIO). In PIO, students translate poems from around the world, from the poem’s original language into English. The youth researchers were four high school students in a mixed-grade English as a Second Language (ESL) class doing PIO. Over the course of the school year, the youth researchers met weekly with adult researchers to study the role of group talk in how students may develop understandings of the meaning of poems and of one another. Unique in this chapter are both the process and findings of the youth researchers, bringing their voices into our understanding of critical dialogue as a pedagogical practice and area of inquiry. The chapter highlights diverse perspectives on what constitutes, motivates, and sustains productive group talk, and how multilingual youth who are high-school aged can benefit from group talk, both from engaging with PIO in their class and from conducting research on talk. The benefits include youth coming to see their own and each other’s languages, knowledge, and stories as resources, gaining more control over language, and assuming an authorial and critical stance toward texts.
