What counts as reading in the early years' classroom?

In this paper, the nature of learning to participate in reading lessons in one classroom during the first year of school is examined. The joint research approaches of ethnography and ethnomethodology are used to investigate how interactions are negotiated between teacher and child during lessons and why individuals negotiate the way they do. Data comprise audiotapes of a series of reading lessons given to both groups and individual children and interviews with the teacher and parents on the child's progress during the year. The lessons are examined using the method of multi‐layering. This provides a structure within which an analysis of the discourse as it evolves throughout the lesson can be combined with information from the child's cultural and linguistic background. Examination of the data reveals a pattern in which the teacher implicitly expects children to work within certain rules which correspond to her interpretation of reading whilst explicitly modelling the opposite. Children who are able to work within these rules receive different tutoring from those who are not. It is argued that the teacher's behaviour must be explained within the wider socio‐historical context in which the British early years' teacher plays a particular social and institutional role.