Conference Agenda

Reader identity develops over time, beginning early, and can be a powerful motivator for students to read, learn, and participate (Frankel et al., 2019; Hall, 2010). By the secondary level, students have “established an identity and a history of themselves as readers,” meaning their interactions with texts are often “mediated not necessarily always by their cognitive reading abilities but by their interpretation of what it means to be a certain type of reader and how they understand themselves in relation to these norms” (Hall, 2016, p. 58).

This presentation, shows how Dialogical Self Theory (DST) offers insight into shifts in secondary students’ reader identities following explicit fluency instruction. Data from my thesis were collected in an 11th-grade classroom across one school year, spanning multiple units and texts. Students completed reflections, self-assessments, and reader identity surveys to document their I-positions before, during, and after instruction. Using DST, I coded reflections for I-positions, including I-as-strategic reader, I-as-confident reader, I-as-reader who lacks confidence, and I-as-person who enjoys reading aloud. The analysis centers on three focal students and the reader-identity shifts that occurred across the year. While quantitative measures suggest overall improvement, qualitative analysis through the DST lens reveals where identity shifts are positive, negative, mixed, or unstable across contexts. Attending to I-positions clarifies how fluency instruction influences not only performance but also how adolescents narrate themselves as readers, how they interpret feedback, and which positions become strengthened or constrained.

Ultimately, this presentation argues for the importance of fluency instruction at the secondary level and for using students’ reflective writing to better understand reader identity. Creating structured time for metacognition—especially around fluency—supports students in recognizing their own reader positions, making sense of what is being taught, and finding personal value in reading development.

Researchers and teachers who advocate dialogical teaching in secondary English language arts classrooms value dialogical strategies for their flexible support of comprehension and learning (Wilkinson & Son, 2011). While scholarship on dialogic pedagogy often highlights practices that privilege student talk, connect reading and writing to lived experience, and value multiple perspectives, research on learning stations—where students rotate through collaborative activities in small groups (Aydogmus & Senturk, 2019)—and their role in fostering dialogical learning remains limited. Although stations are sometimes used to break down material or prepare students for reading, it is less common for station activities to explicitly invite students into dialogue with their own experiences and I-positions. Intentionally structured learning stations supported students in interrogating their experiences and I-positions during a study of The Great Gatsby. Across stations, students completed guided reflections before answering essential questions, defining concepts grounded in their lives, and making predictions. This design created time for students to surface prior experiences and perspectives, then bring them into discussion and interpretation of the text. Using Dialogical Self Theory (DST), student responses revealed I-positions, including religious and political identities, shaped through friends or partners, roles within families, and even fictional I-positions adopted through Gatsby’s characters. Student reflections, instructor observational logs, and discussion transcripts show how this internal work shaped students’ dialogical engagement with peers and with the text. While the data were analyzed through multiple frameworks, the DST lens makes visible how intentional reflection helps students recognize, revise, and mobilize their positionings as resources for meaning-making. This presentation argues that centering student experiences requires more than allowing personal connections; it demands structured opportunities for students to examine and articulate their I-positions. When students are invited to draw on their unique perspectives, classroom dialogue deepens—student-to-student and student-to-text—supporting motivation, engagement, preparation for reading, and higher-level critical thinking.

Feedback in classrooms increasingly arrives through metrics, recommendation systems, and conversational AI—often with the intimacy of dialogue but the logic of optimization. Using Dialogical Self Theory (DST), we examine how these feedback regimes reshape writing identities by externalizing internal dialogue while intensifying Hermans’s (2025) “position uncertainty,” where multiplicity can tip into anxiety or closure. Across two first-year writing settings, we trace when algorithmic and multi-source feedback opens dialogic plurality and when it collapses into self-confirming loops.

Case 1 draws on data from a composition course in which students used social media and ChatGPT as structured sites for self-interrogation: testing values, rehearsing stances, and narrating themselves in relation to public discourse. Students moved among I-positions while projecting coherence onto feeds and chat interfaces. We conceptualize this projection as an “algorithmic self”: a phantom presence assembled from one’s traces, preferences, and past language that returns a curated “me.” We analyze moments when pseudo-dialogue makes internal multiplicity visible, as well as moments when algorithmic mirroring tightens multiplicity into reassurance, contradiction, or sameness.

Case 2 draws on a semester-long pedagogy of Dialogic Writing Reflections paired with multi-source reader response—peers, instructor, AI chatbots, online communities, and ecological/poetic exercises. Inquiry-based, affect-attentive responses supported shifts from the solitary, anxious “I” toward “We-positioning,” as students increasingly cited and internalized trusted voices as Promoter Positions—sustaining inner resources for risk-taking, revision, and persistence (Hermans, 2025).

These cases argue that AI is not merely a tool but an interlocutor in identity work, and that dialogic design determines whether it functions as a mirror or a bridge. We close with principles for keeping AI-assisted feedback dialogic: build friction and accountability, prompt metacognitive narration of I-positions, and cultivate promoter-rich “We” networks that reopen writing toward responsibility and becoming within bridges between self and society (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010).