Discourse Style, Classroom Interaction and Differential Treatment

The implications of ability-tracking for educational inequality are well known and controversial. Few studies, however, have been successful in capturing the interplay between students' discourse style, teacher expectations in particular classroom tasks and achievement outcomes. In what follows I will discuss the apparent influence of tracking on the kind of reading instruction students receive in urban school systems. The discussion will focus on how the discriminatory treatment reported by various researchers is perpetuated in face-to-face classroom interaction. Two schools are reported upon in which differential treatment assumes different forms, but always entails, for one group, a denial of access to practice in comprehending texts. In ethnographic studies seeking to identify the ways in which the structure of public schooling contributes to the perpetuation of social inequality, one of the most provocative findings has been that larger patterns of stratification in terms of race and class are reproduced in the organization of school environments. Research conducted during the last decade has shown that teachers consistently differ in their treatment of students in inner-city versus suburban schools (Leacock, 1969), and further, that within the same school, social class plays an important role in the assignment of students to ability groups (Rist, 1971; and Rist, 1977, and citations therein). Additionally, detailed study of classroom reading groups has shown that much less time is devoted to the actual task of reading in low-ranked groups; that non-verbal interaction in these groups is tightly structured; and, most important, that the process of successful and unsuccessful learning is collaborative (McDermott, 1976). Because all learning results in part from social interaction, a major goal in the studies reported on was to see whether methods of conversational analysis could be profitably applied to the study of classroom interaction. One reason for the focus on conversation was that several recent studies of early language learning have shown that mothers' conversational strategies with children affects the rate of initial language acquisition; that is, social interaction influences the acquisition of basic linguistic