Angel, your dissertation sounds very interesting. I hope you'll sahre
what you learn as you go along.
I would like to recommend a book I'm not sure many people know about.
Though it makes not claim to be research, it's one of the best documentary
sources I know on dominant langauge development among native populations
in the U.S. and I believe it meets your criteria. It's called _Writing to
Create Ourselves_ by Terry Allen and came out in 82, from the Uiversity of
Oklahoma press--Allen was a writer, not an academic.
For years it was the only thing around that I could find on ESL teaching
that was compatible with what writers say about how writing is done and
about how they learned to write well. It's been out a while, and it
documented work done still earlier, so Allen did not have the benefit of
recent consciousness raising, but she documents teachers' successes
helping them use their own stories, their own culture to help students,
many of whom were second language learners, gain mastery of and confidence
with written English conventions.
Allen fell into teaching, if I remember correctly, and was so successful
that the BIA (which did a whole LOT lot of stupid things, but this
apparently wasn't one of them) put her in charge of teaching other
teachers how to teach writing to native kids.
You might also take a look at my book, _At the Point of Need: Teaching
Basic and ESL Writers_, which traces the emerging collaborative analyses
--on how to help writers who struggle with written English succeed in
academic writing, in personal writing, and in any writing they might in
the future choose to do. The findings are those of five successive teams
of teacher researchers who studied writing development across five years.
The book came out from Heinemann in 1991, and it meets your criteria as
well. Unfortunately though we had data on learners at all age levels and
in a very wide range of settings, for the purposes of this particular
book, we (the 40 teacher-researchers and I) were forced to limit this book
to a single context, but our findings were repeatedly field-tested
(qualitative) in a wide range of sites.
Oh, by the way, much of this work documents small-group interactions which
we quoted extensively so that socially mediated development can be seen.
I'd love your responses to both if you get to them.
Marie