Student talk and teacher response during demonstration writing: discursive and epistemic positioning in a first-grade writing workshop

Although demonstration writing is typically treated as a teacher-led instructional practice, this study examines how first-grade students initiated spontaneous talk during writing mini-lessons and how teacher responses shaped authorship, participation, and epistemic positioning. Using discourse analysis framed by sociocultural theory, positioning theory and dialogic instructional stance, we analysed 62 student contributions – comments, suggestions and evaluations – across three demonstration-writing lessons in an author-inspired unit. We found that students used visual and textual features to make meaning and positioned themselves as legitimate knowers, contributors and co-authors with varying levels of epistemic risk. Teacher responses functioned as either uptake or gatekeeping moves, opening or constraining discursive space. Only uptake moves that accepted and incorporated student contributions repositioned students as co-authors. These findings reframe demonstration writing as an interactional site where discursive agency and authorship are continually negotiated. The findings offer implications for how teachers might recognise and respond to spontaneous student talk as consequential to meaning-making, participation and identity negotiation in the writing classroom.