Connecting discourses: intertextuality in a primary school CSCL practice

This article investigates the multimodal discourses taking place in a primary school computer supported collaborative literacy environment, in which face-to-face talk in pairs is combined with computer-mediated communication. Following a socially mediated model of education, we have taken into account the collaborative process of the participants over time, the privileging processes, in relation to the discourse, afforded by the tasks and tools, and the classroom culture. We describe the contextualized nature of the interaction of children in a CSCL learning environment, by focusing on the intertextual connections that were made between different discourses. This paper highlights, in particular, the intertextual connections between written texts, face-to-face discourse and classroom culture.