Emergent Bilingual Students’ Small Group Read-Aloud Discussions

ABSTRACT Our qualitative case study aimed to identify how four second-grade emergent bilingual students and their teacher engaged with listening comprehension during interactive read-aloud discussions with more and less culturally relevant books, and how this intersected with the teacher’s use of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogical tenets. Data included cultural relevance ratings for each book discussed, and videos of nine 20-minute lessons (3 per book) and their transcriptions. A combination of a priori and emergent codes were used to code the transcripts. Constant comparative method was used to identify themes and sub-themes. Other data sources were used for triangulation. Major findings were that (1) teacher and student engagement differed across discussions with more vs. less culturally relevant books, and (2) how the teacher addressed the tenets of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy varied by tenet and discussion, but was not related to whether the book being discussed was culturally relevant or not. Implications include that teachers should use both more and less culturally relevant texts for interactive read-alouds, with the teacher attending to tenets of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy.