About the project

Research from within the Centre for Research in Writing suggests that developing metalinguistic understanding may require high quality metatalk which focuses on language choices in relation to their purpose or effect (Myhill et al 2016; Myhill & Newman 2016). Building on this research, this study will investigate how metatalk can enhance metalinguistic thinking which has an impact on students' writing. It will investigate the nature of teachers' interactions: how they enable high quality whole class metatalk to occur, and how they scaffold metatalk between students working in pairs or groups. It will examine how metatalk, in these different instructional contexts, can inform students' thinking about their writing and shape their writing choices. it will examine the close relationship between high-quality metatalk and open dialogic discourse roles while exploring the particular complexity of metatalk for writing. Crucially, it will examine and determine the impact of metatalk on students' writing.

The study will span 3 years and comprise a 4-phase research design of Exploration, Development, Intervention, and Impact and Engagement. The study will involve working closely with 6 English teachers from 6 different secondary schools in the South West of England. Each teacher will work with three different Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) classes: one class for exploration in phase 1, one class for development in phase 2, and one class for intervention in phase 3. In phases 1, 2 and 3, sub-samples of 4 students (with a gender balance and spread of attainment) will be selected for focused qualitative data collection. The sub-sample students in each class will be paired during lessons for episodes of student peer-to-peer metatalk. The study will generate an inter-related, multimodal dataset of audio-video and textual data to provide the first comprehensive analysis of metatalk in the context of writing.

The study’s key objectives are therefore:

to generate new theoretical knowledge about metatalk in first language writing
to determine the impact of high quality metatalk on students’ writing
to develop scaffolding strategies and materials to support metatalk about writing in the secondary English classroom
to develop analytical coding frameworks for use in future metatalk research