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Bridging The Cultural-Linguistic Divide In The Standards-Based Classroom: Storytelling As A Reflective Form Of Academic Discourse, Ching-Ching Lin

Graduate School of Education Publications and Research

In this paper, I theorize how Bakhtin’s dialogism – a sociocultural approach that views learning not as an individual cognitive achievement, but as a social practice informed by the complexity of human interaction – reconciles academic discourse and storytelling in a compelling way. As a literacy approach, storytelling is widely considered as an effective way to bridge the gaps between meeting the demands of the Standards-based classroom and fulfilling the needs of English Language Learners. However, under the current paradigm of education theorizing, personal testimonies were often dismissed as an invalid form of academic knowledge.

Conceptualizing cultural discourse as dialogic …