Preface

This study of ‘Sharing Time’ in a first‐grade classroom was part of a larger effort to address the problem of differential access to learning opportunities in ethnically and socioeconomically diverse classrooms. The work was written at a time when many teachers implicitly or explicitly subscribed to the ‘cultural deprivation’ theory for explaining school failure among ethnic and linguistic minority students. It was not uncommon to hear teachers talk about children who came from ‘nonverbal’ homes where ‘the TV is always on but no one ever talks to the children’, or about children who don't speak standard English, use double negatives, and thus don't reason logically. Challenges to this view were developing from work in linguistics by Labov (on the logic of non‐standard English) and from the tradition of ethnography of speaking by Hymes, Heath, Erickson, Cazden, Philips, and others. This study drew on this work but was centrally informed by work in interactional sociolinguistics, pioneered by John Gumperz and Jenny Cook‐Gumperz, which emphasized the systematic resources speakers from diverse cultural groups used to signal intent and interpretation of intent in managing conversational inference in face‐to‐face encounters. Taken together, all of this work has come to be looked at as supporting a cultural or linguistic ‘mismatch’ or ‘difference’ hypothesis – emphasizing difference rather than deficiency in linguistic and sociocultural tools for interaction, and the ways these differences influence access to instruction and evaluation of competence in academic settings.