English Language Learners\u27 writing in a first grade classroom

There is limited information regarding how English Language Learners (ELLs) write in school. In addition, many ELLs are in classrooms in which back to basics rhetoric and high-stakes testing push teachers to standardize curriculum and teach reading and writing in decontextualized ways. As a result, ELLs are frequently viewed as having educational, cultural and linguistic deficits and thus in need of remedial programs that teach literacy as a set of basic skills (Moll & Gonzalez, 1994). Research into elementary ELLs\u27 specific, contextualized experiences learning to write in school is essential for elucidating students\u27 writing processes, the influence of the linguistic and cultural resources on their writing, and the frameworks for creating writing and classroom spaces that support their development as writers. This dissertation used a qualitative case study approach to examine the relationship between invitations to write and the resources that students who spoke Spanish as a home language accessed as writers. Invitations to write came from the classroom teacher, and were designed to give students opportunities to interact with peers during writing and to allow children some degree of choice about what they wrote. Data sources included fieldnotes, audio-recordings, and writings and drawings students produced in their first grade classroom from January to June 2008. In researching the relationship between invitations to write and how students took up these invitations, I documented how children built on their prior knowledge and experience as writers amongst peers. Data showed that students drew on resources including multi-lingual talk, peer interaction, popular culture, familiar stories, and features of the classroom\u27s built environment. The findings from this study contribute to understandings of young ELLs\u27 socially situated meaning making as writers within elementary classrooms. They also challenge deficit views of ELLs by demonstrating that ELLs have rich prior knowledge and experiential resources that they can and do use for classroom-based writing