Documenting oral feedback discourse during formal formative reading assessment with an emergent bilingual student

ABSTRACT School-based social practices of oral feedback present challenges for all k-12 students. Ignoring these challenges during reading assessment contributes to a deficit view of emergent bilingual students, whose struggles to participate in formative feedback on reading performance may result from general unfamiliarity with school-based practices, rather than language proficiency. Drawing impetus from the New Literacy Studies and methodological principles from conversation analysis, the current study explores the discursive organization of oral feedback during formal formative reading assessment and its relationship to issues of knowledge construction and identity. Based upon a single-case analysis, this study demonstrates how one emergent bilingual student’s struggles to participate in oral feedback emerged not from language proficiency but from unfamiliarity with the social practices of sequential organization. Furthermore, it will be argued that the teacher’s attempts at feedback sequentially constructed her student’s emergent bilingual identity and prioritized knowledge constructed about him, over knowledge constructed by him.