Projects
These research projects are or have been undertaken at the School of Education as part of the Centre for Research in Language and Literacies. The full project archive is available here.
Teaching narrative writing with digital resources and apps
1 August 2022 - 1 July 2024
PI/s in Exeter: Dr Clare Dowdall
CI/s in Exeter: Dr Judith Kleine-Staarman
Research partners: Assan Ali
Funding awarded: £ 8,497
Sponsor(s): British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant
About the research
This British Academy-funded research project has investigated the potential for digital resources and apps to promote children’s engagement and enjoyment in school-based narrative writing, within a targeted unit of work, where the outcome is a written narrative that aligns with National Curriculum expectations for competence in transcription and composition.
Current national school data indicates that there are significant gaps between girls’ and boys’ attainment in writing, and marked under-attainment for those labelled ‘disadvantaged’. Recent National Literacy Trust Surveys record the lowest ever levels of writing enjoyment amongst all learners, but particularly amongst boys with low socio-economic status.
Using three research approaches: a teacher survey, a participatory teacher workshop, and the construction of two ‘telling case’ studies, involving a Year 3 class and a Year 5-6 class setting, this research has specifically investigated how digital resources and apps can support the narrative writing process, and promote enjoyment and engagement amongst pupils in Key Stage Two.
Based on the research, recommendations for the development of a set of principles to guide writing pedagogy involving digital resources and apps have been made.
Metatalk for Writing
1 January 2020 - 31 December 2022
PI/s in Exeter: Dr Ruth Newman
Research partners: Jan Lane - Graduate Research Assistant
Funding awarded: £ 304,778
Sponsor(s): Economic and Social Research Council
Project webpage(s)
About the research
This 3 year study will investigate the impact of high quality classroom talk on children’s writing. A particularly demanding activity, writing involves making deliberate choices according to audience, purpose, and rhetorical effect. Although research suggests that metalinguistic understanding (knowledge about language) underlies writing competency, because it helps writers to control and craft their writing, very little is known about how it is developed. This study will build on research (Myhill and Newman 2016) which suggests that metatalk (talk about writing) may be important for the development of metalinguistic understanding. While there is extensive evidence that high quality classroom talk supports learning, very little research has examined the impact of talk on writing specifically. In an educational context of persistent underachievement in writing (NCW, 2003; Dugdale & Clark, 2008; BIS, 2016), this study aims to make an important theoretical contribution which impacts teacher practice and educational outcomes, specifically student attainment in writing.
Writing the Future
1 June 2019 - 1 June 2022
PI/s in Exeter: Dr Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh, Professor Debra Myhill
Research partners: Co-Investigator: Dr Abdelhamid Ahmed , University of Qatar, Qatar
Funding awarded: £ 128,790
Sponsor(s): Qatar National Research Fund
About the research
This three-year project is a cross-linguistic and a cross-gender comparison of metadiscourse and voice employed by Qatari L1 Arabic university students writing argumentative texts in English and Arabic in a university in Qatar. Metadiscourse and voice, as rhetorical devices, refer to how the writers express themselves and their voice in their written arguments to signal their stance and orientation to the content of writing and engage with their readers.
Summary of key findings
This study is unique in bringing together a corpus study of written argument texts with interviews with the student writers of those texts to explore their metalinguistic understanding of the writing choices they make. In terms of the research questions, the corpus analysis has highlighted strong significant differences in the use of metadiscourse by these writers in their Arabic and English arguments. In particular, they use more metadiscourse in English and make more use of interactive, rather than interactional metadiscourse. There is also a significant relationship between judgments of voice strength and the use of metadiscourse. At the same time, there are no meaningful differences in the use of metadiscourse by gender; and no clear correlational relationship between metadiscourse use and writing quality.
The interviews reveal that students are not familiar with the concept of metadiscourse or its terminology, and, in general, when they discuss the use of metadiscourse features in their own texts they do not see the metadiscoursal function, but link it to other aspects of argument, such as objectivity and formality. There was, however, some sense of metalinguistic understanding that reader pronouns were inclusive of the reader. It is important to note that these students did not lack metalinguistic understanding per se: they did demonstrate high levels of metalinguistic understanding of the expectations of the argument genre in their educational context.
Metadiscourse, in drawing on Halliday’s theorisations of metafunctions, is by its very nature focused on the function of the metadiscourse. The description of the identification of metadiscourse for the corpus study brings this into sharp relief, explicitly having to determine whether the presence of a particular form is performing a metadiscoursal function, or whether it is propositional. The students’ metalinguistic understanding of written argument was often very form-focused - referring to what should or should not be in an argument text, and particularly the ways these texts should be structured. It may be that the insights on actual usage of metadiscourse from the corpus analysis and the writers’ metalinguistic understanding elicited in the interviews point to the potentiality of embedding metadiscourse more meaningfully within the teaching of argument writing. This might support writers in better understanding how to build an effective reader-writer relationship, and to be more metalinguistically aware of the precise ways in which interactive and interactional metadiscourse serves to engage and interact with the reader, and to show writer positionality.