Storytelling as Academic Discourse: Bridging the Cultural-Linguistic Divide in the Era of the Common Core

Bakhtin’s dialogism provides a sociocultural approach that views language
as a social practice informed by the complex interaction between discourse and meaning.
Drawing on this theoretical framework, I argue that a dialogized version of storytelling can
be helpful in creating a reflective form of academic discourse that bridges the gap between
the demands of the Standards-based classroom and the needs of English Language Learners.
While storytelling has widely been used as an effective ESL strategy, the current paradigm of
education theorizing often characterizes narrative narrowly as personal and decontextual-
ized, thereby dismissing storytelling as an inferior form of academic knowledge. Building
on Bakhtin's theory of meaning as dialogic interplay, I propose a notion of storytelling as a
generic template for academic discourse that has the potential to integrate a multiplicity of
genres and hence allows learners to negotiate between personal and public voices.

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