Guiding Three Middle School Students in Learning Written Academic Discourse

In this article we describe a 2-year collaborative writing project involving 3 middle school students and several adults in which the adults helped the students learn a written discourse that was new to them-academic discourse-as they wrote a chapter for an edited book. The book-written for a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher audience-describes an alternative program (Book Club) for reading instruction that the students had participated in during fourth and fifth grades. The chapter the students wrote provided their perspectives about the program. Using field notes, audiotapes, and videotapes of collaborative writing meetings and interviews with students, copies of students' and adults' written work, and a chapter draft with comments from the editors, we examined the nature of oral and written discourse constructed among students and between students and adults. Results indicated that much of the conversation of the primary adult who worked with the students was directed at eliciting students' ide...