Writing talk: developing metalinguistic understanding through dialogic teaching

Abstract

Research in the teaching of writing has long highlighted the importance of metacognition in writing because writing as a process needs to be self-monitored (Kellogg 1984), it requires high-level metacognitive rhetorical planning (Hayes and Flower 1980) and because it can make covert process visible (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1982). But metalinguistic understanding, a subset of metacognition, referring specifically to thinking about language and language use, has been given scarce attention in terms of how teachers develop students’ metalinguistic understanding for writing. At the same time, recent research is demonstrating the learning power of dialogic talk and dialogic teaching across the curriculum. This chapter will offer a theoretical discussion of how dialogic teaching can open up a ‘dialogic space’ (Wegerif 2013; Myhill and Newman 2016) for the exploration of language choices in writing which develops writers’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing.