Intertextuality : fostering connections in the kindergarten classroom

As a practising classroom teacher with an academic interest in literacy acquisition, I was aware of the complex nature of literacy and the controversial debates around the teaching and learning of literacy. Having frequently witnessed and been intrigued by the idiosyncratic intricacies of literacy learning in my teaching and parenting, I was drawn towards theorists and educators who recognise literacy as a complex social practice. As classroom teacher and researcher, I set out with the broad aim of exploring sociocultural factors influencing the literacy development of students in the class I was teaching at the time. Using a qualitative research paradigm, data collection began at the beginning of the school year and proceeded until the end of the final term. Data collection techniques included participant observation, field notes, video and audio recordings, questionnaires, structured and unstructured interviews and artefact collection. Initial analysis examined the data to identify factors that appeared to influence literacy development. As analysis proceeded, I became aware of intertextual incidents in the data. Intertextuality was first defined by Kristeva (1967) and describes the process of interpreting one text by means of a previously composed text. The presence of intertextual events in this study and the implications they have for literacy teaching and learning, precipitated the eventual focus for the study, namely, intertextuality. An exploration of the theory of intertextuality, its significance to literacy, analysis of intertextuality in this classroom data and the implications for literacy teaching in the kindergarten classroom became the central focus of the study. The study involved transcribing the intertextual incidents from the data and categorising them across three domains. The research has led to significant theoretical progress in understanding intertextuality and amongst other things has suggested a framework for describing intertextual incidents The final stage of the study also involved drawing together four themes from the literature on intertextuality with transcript examples from the kindergarten study. This conclusive paper indicates the application of independent critical ability in synthesising the new data with the complex body of literature surrounding intertextuality