Unpacking the Social Construction of Thinking Practices in the Secondary English Classroom: A Languaging Perspective

ABSTRACT Teaching students how to think through complex tasks in a deliberate, reflective, and critical manner is an important goal of public schooling as well as literacy education. However, in classrooms, it is typically assumed that the meaning of thinking is established and the way it is taught and learned is straightforward and universally understood. This study challenges these assumptions and examines how thinking practices are socially constructed in classrooms. In particular, this study adopts a languaging perspective to examine how a teacher and students language to engage in thinking practices, and what affordances these languaging thinking practices provide for students to engage in ways of reading literature. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, I analyzed a classroom interaction in an eighth‐grade English language arts classroom. Findings indicate that class thinking practices are socially constructed by a series of languaging actions, including the teacher's modeling of ways of thinking, holding students accountable for the ways of thinking, student articulating, and teacher acknowledging. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that languaging thinking practices facilitate students' engagement with literary texts, utilize their languaging and tacit knowledge, and cultivate a sense of connection to the subject matter as well as the genre of poetry. The article ends with a discussion of the affordances of examining languaging thinking practices in classrooms.