Text and the mediation of text
The purpose of this study was to explore the nature and process of text construction in a reading lesson. More specifically, the focus was to analyze the structure and content of a basal text narrative, the nature of teacher-student interaction with the text during reading, and the discussion of the text following reading. Twenty sixth-grade students and their teacher participated in a 2-day lesson which focused on the story. The story itself was analyzed in terms of the global text structures which revealed an introduction and four episodes and the narrator's voice which suggested a distancing between the narrator and the reader in the text. A second level of analysis on the teacher's mediation of the text during and following the reading of the story reflected (a) teacher monitoring of student word identification, (b) teacher links to life experiences, (c) teacher and student interpretations of text, and (d) intertextual references. The questions suggested by the basal authors were also analyzed to determined the text features that were signalled. The study raises several issues regarding the text construction process in instructional settings.