Literary intertextuality in genre-based pedagogies: Building lexical cohesion in fifth-grade L2 writing

Abstract

Literary narrative is a highly privileged genre in subject English classrooms in school and university contexts. This article investigates how an explicit instructional focus on the language in this literary genre supported language minority students in developing advanced academic literacy. Through a systemic functional linguistics and ethnographic analytic framework, the study explores how an urban school teacher's genre-based pedagogy in literature, implemented with the support of a professional development initiative, afforded her 5th grade students with a meta linguistic awareness of how to use an expanded repertoire of linguistic choices in their genre writing. An SFL analysis of students’ texts over the course of five months reveals how the teacher's explicit focus on intertextuality encouraged her language minority students to borrow and play with lexical patterns, such as repetition, taxonomic categorization, and synonymy from children's literature, to build the genre sequences in their narratives and other academic writing. The concluding section of the paper discusses possible implications, including the importance of an explicit instructional focus on literature as an intertextual resource in teaching writing.