ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the importance of students’ opportunities to learn from different text types. The predominance of teacher-assembled texts in Destiny, Eliza, Lizbeth, Jamilet, and Valeria’s biology and English language arts classrooms created dominant patterns of text composition that was distinct from both disciplinary traditions and general academic writing. The text of the books that students read generally followed the accepted patterns of narrative literary works. The structure reinforced the necessary literary terms that the students would need to know to complete a text-based literary analysis project. Despite the diversity of the textual representation of notes in English language arts, there were common patterns across Mr. Carlos Gomez’s various iterations of notes. The focal students’ minimal interaction with texts written by distant authors and their diverse text structures, and thus their similarly restricted opportunities to learn ways in which these texts are read, could hinder their meaning-making practices.
