Children’s discussions about texts: integrating and evaluating practices

This paper examines how primary school students discuss deeper comprehension and evaluation of text, while involved in dialogic reading in the context of inquiry learning. It takes a conversation analytic perspective on reading for understanding and critical reading. Analysis of the conversational details of peer talk, revealed how students collaboratively construct deeper meaning of text and take a more critical stance toward the text by means of integrating and evaluating actions. We found that how students understand and interpret the text, is reflected in different types of integrating practices they use: comparing text components with previous knowledge, giving additional information, applying information from the text to the present interactional situation. Evaluating practices, on the other hand, are also based on integrating actions, but they display an explicit critical stance to the text as well