Huili Hong

Exploring the role of intertextuality in promoting young ELL children’s poetry writing and learning: a discourse analytic approach

Abstract This article probes into the social and discursive construction of intertextualities in young ELL children’s poetry writing process. It aims to explore the role of intertextuality in promoting young ELL children’s writing and academic learning through analysing naturally occurring classroom discourses. The research participants were 19 kindergarteners from six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and their teacher. Primary data sources included participant observation, video recording, interviews and students’ artefacts over time. Microethnographic discourse analysis is conducted to examine the teacher–student moment-to-moment classroom interactive discourses in the chosen key literacy event of writing a poem about their stapler. Data analysis showed that the ELL children’s poem writing event was a robust learning process promoted by the teacher–student dynamic social and discursive construction of different intertextualities across different times and contexts. Based on the complex learning and intertextualities constructed in their writing process, the researcher advocates intertextuality as a powerful heuristic to transform the children’s experiences into meaningful learning and actions.

Writing as defamiliarization processes: An alternative approach to understanding aesthetic experience in young children’s poetry writing

This article provides a unique lens for understanding young children’s poetry writing. It focuses on defamiliarization as a cultural tool and practice to engage students’ imagination, playfulness, creativity and aesthetic experience into their poetry writing and to experience the world differently and aesthetically. The research aims of this article are (a) to examine how familiar things were defamiliarized in children’s poetry writing process and poems and (b) to explore what and how aesthetic experiences could result from the defamiliarization process. More specifically, three key literacy events were selected from different writing units during one academic year. Ethnographic discourse analysis was adopted to examine the teacher–student interactive conversations in poetry writing when they defamiliarized their familiar things, places and situation. The data analysis showed that the defamiliarization process made an important contribution to the young writers’ development of language, literacy and their sense of self as a writer. The results exemplified defamiliarization processes as a way to promote the teaching and learning of writing for aesthetic experience beyond linguistic text production. Furthermore, the article provides critical indicators that link children’s writing and multilayered aesthetic experience, and it highlights the critical role of an adult/teacher in channelling children’s affinity with play, imagination, creativity and aesthetic experience into their poetry writing.