Dialogue, erasure and spontaneous comments during textual composition: What students' metalinguistic talk reveals about newly-literate writers’ understanding of revision

Abstract

Many young writers find revision a challenging process. The study reported here uses a multimodal system (the Ramos System) for data capture, in contrast to the more typical use of think-aloud or post-hoc recall, and sought to understand what newly-literate writers’ textual modifications (erasures) and oral comments reveal about their metalinguistic understanding of writing. Six classroom sequences of narrative writing composition were recorded, using both video and audio, capturing both the unfolding texts and the dyadic dialogue about these texts in this collaborative writing context. The analysis shows that, although these young writers’ metalinguistic thinking is dominated by graphic-spatial concerns, there is also evidence of emerging broader metalinguistic thinking across a range of categories. Nonetheless, comments related to composition or narrative meaning were rare. The paper argues for more pedagogic interventions which foreground the compositional aspect of writing narratives, alongside transcriptional fluency, and identifies lines for future research.