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Like many researchers and teachers today, we have shared the excitement over changing perspectives about literacy instruction. We have read chapters and articles that suggest the importance of more and different kinds of language interactions between teacher and students and among students as they talk about the texts that they read and those that they create (Roser & Martinez, 1995; Short & Pierce, 1990). Scholars (e.g., Eeds & Wells, 1989; Raphael & Goatley, 1994; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992) have suggested changing the nature of teacher leadership in classroom literature and other content area discussions. For example, some scholars (Freedman, 1993; Villaume, Worden, Williams, Hopkins, & Rosenblatt, 1994) have suggested that teachers facilitate or participate in rather than dominate talk about text. Others argue for what Wiencek and O'Flahavan (1994) refer to as "decentralized structures" (p. 488), in which teachers drastically reduce their role or remove themselves entirely from the students' discussions.
In the work within the Book Club Project (see McMahon, 1994; Raphael, Goatley, McMahon, & Woodman, 1995; Raphael & McMahon, 1994), we have had the opportunity to study teacher-student interactions during talk about text, as well as the interactions among children within their student-led discussions known as book clubs. We observed three important aspects of book clubs. First, like others (e.g., Gilles, 1994), we found that initial discussions among students were not as highly developed as the talk about text we had encountered in many chapters and articles. Second, we noted that teachers' talk within whole-class settings appeared to play a crucial role in students' developing the language of talk about text, whether the language was about literary elements, authors' craft, response to literature, or understanding and clarification. Third, multiple opportunities for students to engage in talk about text appeared to be critical. Such talk occurs in the public settings of whole-class and small-group discussions, as well as in more private settings where students engage in internal dialogues as they write in their reading logs or respond to literature as they read alone.
The reading we have engaged in and the research observations and analysis we have done are the basis for this paper. In this paper, we examine the critical and formative role of teachers in orchestrating students' talk about text. We first...