How to really ‘fix the flow’ in writing instruction

Many teachers have been there before.

Years ago, as a newly-graduated primary school teacher, I was teaching a Year 5/6 class, when a student named Sally (pseudonym) handed me a draft report written for our science class. As I read through one of her paragraphs, my internal teacher radar went off. I could sense that this paragraph was poorly written. But when I opened my mouth to offer feedback, no useful guidance came out. I realised at that moment that I lacked the personal knowledge about language (aka the metalinguistic understanding) to know exactly which aspects of language were problematic in the text.

Faced with this problem, I offered her a classic, vague cop-out:

“Sorry, Sally. This paragraph doesn’t read very well. You’ve got time. Can you go back to your seat and have a go at fixing the flow?”

I’ll never forget the expression on Sally’s face as she sat back down. She stared at her page in confusion. And reflecting on this both then and now, she had every right to feel confused. I’d told her that her paragraph was dodgy, but I hadn’t given her the tools of language to understand why this was the case, or the strategies that would help her to fix it.

The interaction with Sally really unsettled me as a new teacher. I imagined how terrible it would be for a similarly positioned new medical doctor to offer a vague response after hearing that their patient was suffering from abdominal pain: “Yeah, your stomach does seem to be in a spot of bother. You’ve got time. Can you go back to your house and rest for a bit until it’s better?” Not good.

Developing my own metalinguistic understanding

As someone who’s always wanted to be a halfway decent teacher of English, this experience fuelled a desire to properly learn my stuff when it came to student writing development. In hindsight, the subsequent years I spent completing a whole PhD about this possibly took my mission a bit far, but I really never wanted to find myself in that situation again.

There are several theories of language that could help bridge my considerable metalinguistic knowledge gap, but being in Australia, it made sense to turn to Michael Halliday’s Systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This theory underpins much of the Australian Curriculum: English (as explained in Exley, 2016), so learning about it helped me understand several previously perplexing content descriptions. While I’m no longer working with Year 5/6 students directly, I now have the responsibility and privilege of training preservice teachers so they (hopefully) never find themselves in the same position with Sallys of their own!

However, providing teachers with a linguistic toolkit like SFL is only half the battle. We also need to understand what happens in a student’s mind as they actually use those tools. To understand the need to develop preservice teachers’ metalinguistic understandings before they finish their degrees, and why writing is so cognitively draining for novices, I’ve found it useful to learn about a framework from cognitive scientist John Vervaeke. Vervaeke is the Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. With his colleagues, he introduced two helpful concepts for the argument I’m forming here, known as relevance realisation and the salience landscape. These concepts may sound a bit lofty and academic, but they do a great job at explaining the value of explicit instruction and also what went wrong for me as a new teacher.

The cognitive process influencing our writing choices

To make sense of these terms, consider how the human brain processes the world around us. At any given moment, like right now, your brain is flooded with millions of data points: the stray dust particles in the air, the cellular biology of your hand, the history of the room you are sitting in, the pixels on the screen you are reading right now, and many more. In cognitive science, trying to navigate this infinite sea of possibilities is called a combinatorial explosion. If your brain tried to process all of it, the system would crash.

So, why don’t our minds constantly crash?

According to Vervaeke and colleagues (2012), our minds survive the information onslaught by running a background filter called relevance realisation. This is the unconscious, dynamic process our brains use to sift through the surrounding chaos and shrink reality down into a manageable size, selecting only what matters to meeting our immediate goals. We unconsciously choose to notice what’s relevant to our goals, while filtering out the rest as irrelevant noise.

The immediate, conscious result of this filtering is your salience landscape (i.e., your actual, lived experience of reality). When your background filter works properly, the things relevant to your goal visually and mentally glow with importance (they pop out at you), while the background noise fades away. In short: relevance realisation is the unconscious information filter; the salience landscape is the more manageable picture you’re left with.

Importantly, relevance realisation is a blank process until it is calibrated by constraints, tools, and background knowledge. Without explicit knowledge, a person’s filter has no criteria to judge what is important. This is where metalinguistic understanding comes in!

Relevance realisation and school writing

Still with me? Great. Let’s relate this to writing in a school context.

When a student sits down in front of a blank page, they experience their own combinatorial explosion of infinite possible choices. Inside their minds they experience a chaotic flood of thoughts, episodic memories, background knowledge, and vocabulary choices. To make language choices that express meaning clearly, their internal filter has to tune out the noise so that the exact words they need glow in their salience landscape, ready to be written down.

The issue for novice writers is that their internal filters haven’t been trained yet. Because they lack an explicit, metalinguistic understanding of how language works, their brains can’t determine which structural or grammatical tools are actually relevant for meeting their immediate writing goal.

As a result, nothing glows as a suitable choice in their minds (let alone on the page!). The vast choices they could make in verb groups, noun groups, adverbials, conjunctions, text stages, and so on all blend together as undifferentiated options for the novice writer. Their salience landscape is like a featureless map where no single path stands out, leaving them unsure what to write.

The importance of building teachers’ metalinguistic understanding

This reality facing every novice writer is why teachers’ need to have their own developed metalinguistic understanding. When teachers are equipped with a robust linguistic framework from the word level to the whole text level, they can explicitly show students how to make choices that suit various writing purposes.

For example, if a student constructs weak noun groups in a science report (like Sally had), the teacher can draw on their metalinguistic understanding (which has calibrated their cognitive filter) to instantly diagnose the issue:

“Ah, I see that Sally has built noun groups using everyday, conversational language here, like the stuff. For this science report, her writing will be more effective if she uses precise, technical noun groups that pack relevant information into the text, like the hot chemical solution.”

But having the metalinguistic knowledge to identify a writing problem like this is only one part of the solution. Armed with this understanding, teachers must then use explicit instruction to build that same metalinguistic knowledge in their students, effectively training their internal relevance realisation filters so they know exactly which language choices matter in this context.

Building students’ metalinguistic understanding with explicit teaching

It is unreasonable to expect primary school students to intuitively discover how different written genres work on their own. Because their internal cognitive filters haven’t been trained to sift through infinite linguistic choices that might be relevant in the writing context, leaving them to experiment or fix the flow inevitably results in frustration for them and you (though it might admittedly drive you to complete a PhD 😅).

Navigating the specialised written registers of schooling requires calibrated relevance realisation. Without explicit knowledge of the language features that matter in a specific genre, students will struggle to see the path to successful writing.

A better approach is for teachers to deliver targeted, explicit instruction that highlights how texts are built at the word, sentence, paragraph, and whole text levels in the context of a specific writing task. Following the well-established Teaching learning cycle (Derewianka & Jones, 2022; Humphrey & Feez, 2016; Rothery, 1996), here is one example of how a teacher can gradually release responsibility for making these writing choices to students:

The Teaching learning cycle in action

Step 1: Deconstruction and explicit modelling:

The teacher works with the students to explicitly name and isolate a language feature based on their immediate needs. For example, using an effective mentor paragraph from a science report on the board, the teacher demonstrates how a scientist constructs noun groups.

They isolate the head noun (the technical scientific object), the pre-modifiers that come before the head noun in the noun group (such as articles, factual describers, and classifiers defining the object), and the post-modifiers that come after the head noun (such as prepositional phrases or embedded clauses providing extra detail). The deconstruction helps the students to visualise what successful writing looks like in this specific genre.

Step 2: Joint construction of a new text:

Next, the teacher displays a partially written science report paragraph featuring intentional gaps where the noun groups should be. This is actually one of several strategies from the work of Debra Myhill that I outlined in a previous post. Together, the class practices building noun groups that match the features highlighted in Step 1.

As the teacher scribes their suggestions on the board, they provide real-time feedback. Instead of a vague “let’s fix the flow,” the teacher can ask:

“Look at this noun group we’ve started building. It lacks a pre-modifier that would tell us what the liquid is like or classify what type of liquid it is. What descriptive words could be add here to pack more information into the sentence?”

The joint construction lets the students practise making the valued language choices with their peers and the support of their teacher. Importantly, this happens before they are asked to do so independently.

Step 3: Independent (or guided) writing:

The students are now ready to build their own noun groups. Those who are able can complete a matching independent gap-filling task, while students needing additional support engage in the same task as part of a guided writing session with the teacher or an aide.

This isn’t about rigid, formulaic writing where every child copies the same correct response. Because language offers infinite choices, explicitly teaching the linguistic patterns that characterise different genres is what actually equips students to run their own relevance realisation filters. Once they understand the distinct expectations of a specific genre, their internal filter knows what to look for, allowing the right choices to glow on their salience landscape.

When students learn how specific language choices create distinct effects on the reader, they can choose to follow the expected conventions or deliberately subvert reader expectations when this makes sense. Such decision making is a requirement of the Australian Curriculum: English in late primary school, preparing students for the increased writing demands of secondary school (for example, see AC9E6LE03, AC9E9LA03, AC9E9LE06).

Following this, students share and justify their unique noun group choices. Peers and the teacher can then offer targeted, specific feedback, relevant to the new learning. For a student like Sally, such feedback would offer much more useful guidance than a vague suggestion like fix the flow.

Writing education in schools today

Zooming out to look at writing instruction across Australia today, I can see many teachers following one of two opposing approaches. Unfortunately, neither approach is likely to set students up to handle the writing demands of secondary school. This is especially problematic for most boys, who we know struggle far more than girls in the transition between primary and secondary school.

Pitfall 1: Unstructured, choose-your-own-adventure style writing instruction

On one side, we still find unstructured writing experiences in many classrooms where students are simply asked to write reflectively or creatively with very little guidance at all. This approach, which was widespread in the days of whole language teaching, might be slightly more defensible when students come from highly literate backgrounds (i.e., those who already know what sounds right when writing because they have been saturated in books and rich conversations at home). Their relevance realisation filters have already been (informally) trained by their environment. But this unstructured approach is problematic for equity. It does nothing for students who haven’t grown up with the same cultural advantages and need explicit guidance to write in contextually appropriate ways.

Pitfall 2: Rigid, nuts-and-bolts style grammar instruction

On the other side, we can see the increasing uptake of bottom-up, nuts and bolts style writing programs. These approaches are far more structured, but they tend to heavily emphasise decontextualised grammar/syntax tasks, isolated sentence-combining exercises, and rigid paragraph formulas. We build up to the paragraph level, but don’t really get beyond this at all or until secondary school when it’s too late.

While it’s obviously important that students can construct coherent sentences and paragraphs, the problem with this kind of approach is the failure to recognise that sentences and paragraphs are never neutral; they are always deeply influenced by the writing purpose and the genre. A grammatically correct sentence in a science report can be entirely wrong for a critical response or a poem.

When we separate language choices from rhetorical purpose (even when we do so in highly structured ways), students don’t develop their capacity for relevance realisation. By learning to build small parts of texts in a vacuum, they ultimately struggle to transfer these isolated skills when asked to dynamically choose language features that suit different genres and audiences.

To be truly effective, writing instruction needs to explicitly teach students how grammatical and structural choices shift depending on the context. There needs to be a clear link between language choices and writing purpose. This is what will develop in them a profound tool for learning in every discipline and communicating what they’ve learnt to others.

How to really fix the flow

Reflecting back on that day in my Year 5/6 classroom, I now understand that Sally was simply a novice writer caught in a combinatorial explosion of infinite language choices. She didn’t need to go back to her seat and guess at how to make her text flow better. What she really needed was explicit guidance about how a science report is written with particular language choices. This teaching would allow appropriate choices to glow on her salience landscape, resulting in less confusion and a more successful text.

As educators, we owe it to the thousands of Sallys sitting in classrooms across the country to build our own metalinguistic toolkits. There are many ways to do this – one simple option is to browse through the online short courses for writing instruction on the PETAA website. Only when we master these tools can we confidently teach the important genres of schooling and diagnose precisely how students can improve their writing. At that point, we can stop asking them to create their own solution for fixing the flow, and instead give them the explicit tools to command written language for their own purposes.

References

Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2022). Teaching language in context (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Exley, B. (2016). Secret squirrel stuff in the Australian Curriculum English: The genesis of the ‘new’ grammar. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 39, 74–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651908

Humphrey, S., & Feez, S. (2016). Direct instruction fit for purpose: Applying a metalinguistic toolkit to enhance creative writing in the early secondary years. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 39(3), 207-219.

Myhill, D., Watson, A., & Newman, R. (2020). Thinking differently about grammar and metalinguistic understanding in writing. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/jtl3.870

Rothery, J. (1996). Making changes: Developing an educational linguistics. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in Society (pp. 86–123). Longman.

Improve writing and writing instruction with metalinguistic understanding

Recently, I completed a PETAA short course delivered by Professor Deb Myhill of the University of Exeter named Going Meta: Enabling Rich Talk about Writing. Of all the approaches to writing I’ve come across, Myhill’s is likely the only one that attempts to integrate ideas from the three theoretical perspectives on writing. Since it doesn’t leave out a critical piece of the writing puzzle, I think that makes it quite special and potentially game-changing.

In this post, I’ve drawn on my learning through the course to outline key terms relevant to Myhill’s approach, discuss its benefits, and explain how you can use it to improve your students’ writing skills.

Key perspectives on writing

Every primary and secondary school teacher wants to help their students become strong writers. There are many specific approaches out there for achieving this, but did you know most are underpinned by one or two of three main theoretical perspectives on writing: cognitive, linguistic, and/or sociocultural?

Briefly, cognitive approaches focus on helping children develop cognitive, metacognitive, and self-regulated learning strategies for managing the processes of writing, such as planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. They are about the thinking processes you engage in while writing.

Linguistic approaches focus mainly on helping children learn to use language features and structures of written texts. They are about your growing mastery of language for writing.

Sociocultural approaches focus on influences of culture and social contexts on what written forms are valued. They are about how you learn to write through collaboration, co-construction, and shared values.

Specific approaches to the teaching of writing tend to draw on ideas from one or more of these perspectives. As an example, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) can be defined as a sociocognitive approach, since it develops children’s use of cognitive processes and strategies to write different genres for different social purposes. It’s important for teachers to know which perspective underpins their approaches to writing instruction since this will impact what aspects of writing are taught, how they are taught, and what skills and understandings they will help students develop.

Metalinguistic understanding

Deb Myhill’s approach to writing instruction is based largely on helping students develop metalinguistic understanding. Myhill described metalinguistic understanding as a subcategory of metacognition. While metacognition is about reflecting on your own thinking and learning processes, metalinguistic understanding is about reflecting on how writers use language to achieve social purposes (Myhill et al., 2020). Students with strong metalinguistic understanding are able to identify and reason about how words, sentences, and paragraphs make meaning in texts (Cremlin & Myhill, 2012). It enables students to both comprehend and produce written texts (Gombert, 1992).

(Meta)talking the talk

Classroom conversations that foster metalinguistic understanding (i.e., how is language working in this text) is known as metatalk. Through metatalk, a teacher can draw students’ attention to a writer’s authorial intention and the language and structural choices they make to achieve the intention (Myhill, 2021). Teachers can use metatalk as a pedagogical device to check students’ metalinguistic understandings before, during, and/or after a teaching episode.

Also, even if students don’t know the technical grammar terms, they can still talk about different aspects of texts and show metalinguistic understanding with everyday language. That said, across the years of schooling, students should be more capable of learning a specific language (or a metalanguage) for referring to given linguistic features, such as noun phrases, verbs, adverbs, and so on. As per the Australian Curriculum: English, Australian teachers are expected to help students learn about these and many other linguistic features from Year 1.

Benefits of developing students’ metalinguistic understandings

According to Myhill, students with strong metalinguistic understanding can look critically at writing and make more informed, intentional writing choices. It reveals the rich possibilities of language and gives writers agency as they create texts (Cremin & Myhill, 2012). It also makes learning visible and encourages students to play, explore, and experiment when making writing choices (Myhill, 2021).

Like many of the important things in literacy, metalinguistic understanding needs to be taught explicitly.

Four ways to build students’ metalinguistic understandings

1. Create opportunities underpinned by teacher knowledge

First, teachers need to create opportunities for investigations into the choices made in texts written by experienced authors, the teachers themselves, and the students. This requires time and for teachers to have a sufficient knowledge about language and structural features of texts. If the teacher can’t articulate what writing choices make a text do its work, they will struggle to build their students’ metalinguistic understandings of it.

2. Use Myhill and colleagues’ LEAD Principles

Deb Myhill and her colleagues at the University of Exeter developed the LEAD Principles to support teachers to scaffold thinking about grammar as being meaningfully linked to writing (Myhill et al., 2020). The LEAD acronym stands for Links, Examples, Authentic Texts, and Discussion.

Links: Teachers make links between a grammatical feature being introduced (e.g., adjectives) and how it works in a focus written genre (e.g., narratives).

Examples: Teachers explain the grammar with examples rather than long explanations.

Authentic texts: By using metatalk to explore the features of authentic model texts, teachers make connections between writers and the broader writing community.

Discussion: Teachers can promote metalinguistic understandings by engaging children in discussions about grammar and the work it does in written texts.

3. Use specific strategies

While the LEAD Principles are relatively broad and flexible, in Myhill’s short course (Myhill, 2021) she suggested the following ten specific strategies for fostering stronger metatalk and metalinguistic understandings in classrooms:

Strategy 1. Fill the Gap: Select an extract of text, probably a paragraph, which allows for students to see the language choice within its surrounding context, and delete the particular language choice you are going to explore. Invite students to discuss what might go in the gap, then reveal what the author chose, and discuss why the author may have made that choice.

Strategy 2. Let’s Compare!: One very effective way to help students see how different language choices can create different effects is to explore two different versions: this can be at the level of a word, a phrase or a sentence (possibly even two paragraphs?)

Strategy 3. Sort it out: Giving students words, or sequences of words, printed on cards to undertake a card sort activity is helpful because the physical manipulation of the cards to create different possibilities also generates a lot of focused metalinguistic talk about the options. It works particularly well to explore the syntactic structure of a sentence.

Strategy 4. Playing with possibilities: Invite students to generate a list of possibilities for a particular purpose eg a list of noun phrases to describe a character; or a list of sentences to describe an image of an event. Then invite them to choose two of their possibilities which create different effects, and to explain to the class what the effect is and what language choice is shaping this.

Strategy 5. Thinking Questions: Crucial to the quality of the peer metalinguistic talk is how the talking activity is set up. Pay particular attention to the questions you give students to steer the activity into focused, purposeful discussion, but without constraining it with limiting or closed questions.

Strategy 6. Collaborative Composition: Give students a short writing composition task to write together, perhaps just one paragraph. There should be a clear goal for this writing which will guide the talk which will occur during the writing.  One real benefit of collaborative writing is that peers have to articulate their choices and reasons for those choices.

Strategy 7. Collaborative Revision: This is similar to the collaborative composition but more focused on deliberate decision-making through revision.  It works particularly well when students are asked to rewrite together a short piece of text which involves an explicit change eg rewriting this character description to infer that he is gentle, not aggressive.

Strategy 8. Questioning the Writer: In pairs, students read a text, or section of text, looking at how the writer has crafted a particular aspect of the text eg how an argument has been signposted; how formality or informality have been used; how a narrative opens. The students create a list of questions for the author about the language choices that they can see in this extract which link to the particular aspect under focus. These questions can then be used for subsequent group, and/or whole class discussion.

Strategy 9. Text-marking: There are lots of different possibilities for asking students to read a text and mark the text in some way which highlights the language choices made. It could be highlighting all the prepositional phrases which evoke a setting; underlining any verbs which convey a sense of emotion; highlighting formal language in blue and informal language in red. As with the card sort and collaborative writing, it is the peer talk which occurs around this activity which is valuable.

Strategy 10. The Author Talks: After a period where students have been composing their own texts, create time for students to explain their own authorial choices to peers. This works best when there is a focused question to consider and when students are asked to choose one example to discuss eg ‘Choose one noun phrase where you are particularly pleased with how strong a visual image it evokes’. The peer talk is much less effective if student are asked to talk about their writing more generally.

4. Engage in metalinguistic modelling

The final way to build metalinguistic understanding should appeal to any fans of explicit instruction. Essentially, when the teacher models their own thinking while writing, this can assist students to understand what linguistic choices are available and how to make stronger linguistic decisions.

Such modelling could be focused on what the teacher is writing while they write or it may involve them thinking aloud about connections between linguistic choices and the effect in a written text (Myhill, 2021). From Myhill’s studies into metalinguistic modelling, she and her colleagues found that teachers need to be clear and focused about what they are modelling. If they are unfocused or try to cover too many aspects of writing, the intended skills will not transfer to students’ writing.

Also, when teachers focus too much on ‘what’ features should be in a written text, students may never even think about ‘why’ these choices make sense for that type of writing. Unfortunately, this prescriptive focus on including a select set of language features without a clear focus on meaning or purpose is promoted in several popular approaches to writing instruction.

Some key takeaways from the course

Three key theoretical perspectives on writing include linguistic, sociocultural, and cognitive.
While metacognitive understanding is about how writers engage in different thinking processes while writing, metalinguistic understanding is about how language works in different written genres.
Developing students’ metalinguistic understandings helps them make more informed, intentional writing choices and to play and experiment with language.
Metalanguage is language for talking about language. Even without metalanguage, children can show metalinguistic understanding of writing choices using everyday language.
Teachers can use several strategies to promote metalinguistic understandings in classroom conversations. There are also general principles for this represented by the LEAD acronym.
Metalinguistic modelling is text-focused and aims to help students think about writing choices, particularly links between grammar and its rhetorical effects.
Key to discussions about metalinguistic understandings is identifying linguistic/structural/literary choices in texts and explaining their effect(s) on audiences.
There does not seem to be a widespread approach to teaching writing that integrates the sociocultural, linguistic, and cognitive perspectives, but Myhill’s approach seems to go closest.
Developing metalinguistic understanding connects language choices with writing purposes and effects (Myhill, 2021). Without it, the teaching of grammar is likely to be disconnected from writing and, therefore, a poor way to build writing skills (e.g., Andrews, 2010; Andrews et al., 2006).

So, what’s missing from this approach?

After finishing Myhill’s course, I was still left pondering many questions that could be the basis of further research in classrooms with teachers and their students. For example:

What counts as strong metalinguistic understandings of different genres in early, middle, and upper primary school? Without this knowledge, it’s hard for teachers to know what to focus on in their classrooms.
Does this approach follow any kind of developmental pattern, or is it all just randomly generated depending on what teachers teach at a given point? If a teacher chooses to focus on the features of one set of model texts over others, could that change everything their students learn about that kind of writing?
If this is the case, how can there be any consistency in this approach, particularly when aiming to support struggling writers, those in minority groups, or those in low SES areas?

Want to learn more?

If you would like to foster your students’ metalinguistic understandings and help them become more independent writers, it would pay for you to ‘know your stuff’ when it comes to the grammatical, structural, and literary/rhetorical aspects of different written genres. In fact, I would only recommend teachers complete this short course if they already possess an adequate knowledge of language, since it assumes you know your prepositional phrases from your conjunctions and your narrative text structures from your persuasive text structures.

Since I felt Myhill’s course might be most beneficial for teachers more knowledgeable about linguistic features, I asked Associate Professor Pauline Jones (PETAA’s President) and Robyn Topp (PETAA’s Manager of Professional Learning) if they had any introductory offerings to support teachers new to text features. While the following courses are currently not open for registration, they should be again in 2022:

Rod Campbell has an online course named Teaching Knowledge for the Art and Craft of Writing that provides an introduction to English language and sentence grammar, and advanced sentence grammar and cohesion.
Jennifer Asha has a course titled Teaching Grammar with Rich Literature, in which she covers basic skills in functional grammar and how to teach it in the context of quality texts and dialogic pedagogy.
Jo Rossbridge and Kathy Rushton offered a face-to-face course named Grammar and Teaching from April – June 2021. This popular course is likely to be converted into a self-paced, online course in 2022.
PETAA will also soon be launching an open access Early Career Teachers’ Portal with quite a bit of grammar and writing content for new (and old) teachers to upskill in this area.

As a parting comment, the metalinguistic understanding course involved participants planning, writing, and revising a short character description (roughly a paragraph in length) over the five modules. It was such a joy to engage in my own creative writing like this. I believe all teachers of writing should be writers themselves, honing and experimenting with their own writing choices over time just like they expect of their students. Sharing your own writing with a class may feel a bit daunting, but it provides considerable motivation and encouragement for students to write and share their own ideas and understandings with others. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?

References

Andrews, R. (2010). Teaching sentence-level grammar for writing: The evidence so far. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 90-108). Routledge.
Andrews, R., Torgerson, C., Beverton, S., Freeman, A., Locke, T., Low, G., Robinson, A., & Zhu, D. (2006). The effect of grammar teaching on writing development. British Educational Research Journal, 32(1), 39-55.
Cremin, T., & Myhill, D. (2012). Writing voices: Creating communities of writers. Routledge.
Gombert, J. E. (1992). Metalinguistic development. University of Chicago Press.
Myhill, D. (2021). Going meta: Enabling rich talk about writing. Primary English Teaching Association of Australia – PETAA College. https://www.petaa.edu.au/iCore/Events/Event_display.aspx?EventKey=DM181021&WebsiteKey=23011635-8260-4fec-aa27-927df5da6e68
Myhill, D., Watson, A., & Newman, R. (2020). Thinking differently about grammar and metalinguistic understanding in writing. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/jtl3.870