Students’ metalinguistic repertoires about writerly choices in the context of L1 writing education
Submitted by:
Kristine Kabel
Abstract:
Several studies focused on students’ writing and way of talking about own (or others) writing in L1 contexts to explore for example metalinguistic activity, understanding, and reflection (e.g., Watson & Newman, 2017), or students’ text movability (e.g., Liberg et al., 2011). In the research project Writing Education: The more specific relations between students’ writing and metalinguistic repertoires (2022-2025), we seek to complement the existing research base by exploring Year 5 and 8 students’ ways of forming voices linguistically in different genres and L1 writing situations, and of their repertoire for talking about own writerly choices when interviewed about their school writing. In this paper, we will present results from our analysis of interview data, with a focus on which writerly choices the students highlight, with what metalanguage and how they argue for their writerly choices. Furthermore, we analyze their engagement with other voices, both explicitly and implicitly through uptake from observed teaching units.
The theoretical point of departure is the notion of grammar as choice (Halliday, 1978) and a more profound integration of the student perspective than seen in existing linguistic frameworks utilized in approaches to students’ metalinguistic repertoires in the L1 writing classroom. Hereby, we take inspiration in sociolinguistic approaches to interactional dimensions when understanding students’ writerly choices in a school context, and in essence to the multidimensional situatedness of writing. The aim is to deepen our knowledge about aspects important for supporting all students’ development of repertoires for communicating through texts.
The data used in this paper were collected spring 2023 and consist of 26 text interviews with entirely 26 focus students (interviewed twice about two different school writing genres, in pairs) from four different Danish L1 classes, two Year 5 (age 11) and two Year 8 (age 14) classes. Furthermore, in order do contextualize students’ metalinguistic repertoires and understand it as in dialogue with classroom practices, data consist of classroom observations in the form of field notes, sound recordings and photos from two teaching units, in which the students wrote a fictional narrative and an argumentative piece, respectively.
In the presentation, we will exemplify and discuss our results and theoretical base, in dialogue with existing and future research, and in the light of transforming conditions for developing discursive voices and making writerly choices due to digital technology.
References:
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning (Reprint ed.). Edward Arnold.
Liberg, C., af Geijerstam, Å., & Folkeryd, J. (2011). Scientific Literacy and Students’ Movability in Science Texts. In, Linder, C., Östman, L., Roberts, D.A., Wickman, P., Ericksen, G., & MacKinnon, A. (Eds.). Exploring the landscape of scientific literacy. Routledge.
Watson, A. M. & Newman, R. M. C. (2017) Talking grammatically: L1 adolescent metalinguistic reflection on writing, Language Awareness, 26:4, 381-398, DOI: 10.1080/09658416.2017.1410554