ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I present a fine-grained analysis of a videotaped lesson segment of a Form 2 (Grade 8) English reading lesson in a school located in a working-class residential area in Hong Kong. The excerpt was taken from a larger corpus of similar lesson data videotaped in the class over 3 consecutive weeks. The analysis shows how these limited English-speaking Cantonese school children subverted an English reading lesson that had a focus on practicing skills of factual information extraction from texts, and negotiated their own preferred comic-style narratives by artfully making use of the response slots of the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) discourse format used in the lesson. The analysis shows the students’ playful and artful verbal practices despite the alienating school reading curriculum that seems to serve to produce an uncritical labor. The implications for teaching are discussed.
