Teachers’ and students’ meta-reflections on writing choices: An Australian case study

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International Journal of Educational Research xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

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International Journal of Educational Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures

Teachers’ and students’ meta-reflections on writing choices: An Australian case study Kristina Lovea,* , Carmel Sandifordb a b

Australian Catholic University, 250 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy, Victoria 3065, Australia Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history: Received 14 April 2016 Accepted 10 June 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Grammatics Narrative writing Metatalk Hallidayan linguistics Recontextualization

A B S T R A C T

This paper reports on one component of an Australian Research Council funded project which supported teachers to build a deep knowledge about language and the associated pedagogies that impacted on students’ writing outcomes. Using case study data related to primary teachers’ and students’ understandings of a functional grammar and Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of knowledge recontextualization, we explore the processes whereby student writers internalise new learning about the grammatics (Halliday, 2002) of narrative, drawing on the interpersonal resources scaffolded by their linguisticallyinformed teachers. We further examine the affordances and struggles manifest in their metatalk as young writers deliberately consider choices related to the interpersonal aspects of narrative writing, revealing their move from common-sense to more scientific understandings of webs of meaning. ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction If we accept the view that children’s writing is a deeply social practice, we must also accept the crucial role of the ‘expert other’ in the process of writing development. In supporting students to become particular types of writers, teachers draw on social practices and knowledge bases that are variously ‘privileged’ (Bernstein, 2000) in various fields of education. Knowledge about language (KAL) has been identified as a crucial element in teachers’ knowledge bases (Carter, 1990), though what this knowledge encompasses varies considerably across the research literature (see Myhill & Watson, 2014 for an overview). If KAL is considered in relation to sentence level grammar, meta-analyses of syntactically focused research suggests that there is no evidence indicating that teaching of grammar is beneficial to student writing (eg Andrews et al., 2006). Yet the pedagogy underpinning these studies was based on the prescriptive teaching of isolated grammatical rules, unconnected to the appreciation or composition of texts. More recent research based on pedagogies that connect syntactic knowledge to writerly choice (e.g. Myhill, Jones & Watson, 2012) has yielded clearer evidence of a direct relationship between teacher KAL and improvement in student writing. Extensive research within a social semiotic framework which draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (e.g. Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008) has further identified the strategic patterns of grammatical choices that characterise successful student writing across the years of schooling. The learnings from these and other social semiotic studies have been applied successfully in a range of teaching contexts,

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Love), [email protected] (C. Sandiford). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.06.001 0883-0355/ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: K. Love, C. Sandiford, Teachers’ and students’ meta-reflections on writing choices: An Australian case study, International Journal of Educational Research (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.06.001

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including the teaching of direct speech to Grade 2 students (French, 2012), the teaching of verb types and ‘participant roles’ in the analysis of a highly gendered Picture Book (Williams, 2008) and in the teaching of mood types to English as Additional Language and Dialect (EALD) students in the US (Schleppegrell, 2013). These studies powerfully demonstrate the value of an elaborated and functionally-oriented KAL to student appreciation and composition of texts in English and Language Arts curricula. Yet, many teachers across the Anglophone world still appear to have a limited linguistic knowledge base (e.g. Harper & Rennie, 2009 in Australia; Hudson & Walmsley, 2005 in the UK; Koln & Hancock, 2005 in the US). It appears that what is at stake is “Linguistic Subject Knowledge” (LSK) (Myhill et al., 2012, p. 142) as the capacity to identify and apply word classes and syntactic features but also “the ability to explain grammatical concepts clearly and know when to draw attention to them”. As further noted by Myhill et al. (2012), teachers’ personal LSK also includes the capacity to apply this to support student writing in meaningful and sustainable ways, through what Myhill et al. (2012) term Linguistic Pedagogic Subject Knowledge (LPSK). If teachers are powerful mediators (in a Vygotskyan sense) of what is possible in student learning, and teacher LSK is measurably linked to student writing outcomes (Myhill et al., 2012), a number of key questions arise: (a) what teacher LSK has best traction for supporting student writing; (b) how might such LSK be manifest in students’ writerly choices and (c) what insights can be gained into student learning about linguistic resources for writing from their metatalk? It is thus important to explore how student talk about writing, or metatalk, reflects students’ deepening understandings of their writerly choices and, presumably, their internalisation of their teachers’ language-informed writing pedagogies. This paper seeks to contribute to the body of research that explores the relationship between teacher LSK and student capacity to produce and reflect on their narrative writing. It focuses on one component of a three year Australian Research Council funded project (Anonymous) which sought to develop teachers’ and students’ understandings of the deep grammatics of narrative, persuasion and text response. The term grammatics refers to any grammatically informed metalanguage used to work with and on language, “with grammar in mind” (Halliday, 2002). In this paper, we draw on the concept of recontextualization as used by educational sociologist, Basil Bernstein (2000), to describe the discursive and transmission practices used by some of the “pedagogic agencies” in this research project and the process whereby “selective acquisition of knowledge” occurs as new LSK is progressively mediated. The paper explores three levels of pedagogic recontextualization: that mediated by the researchers as they supported teachers to develop their linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge in a professional learning intervention; that mediated by the teachers as they recontextualize this knowledge in their classroom teaching; and that operationalized by the students as they make writerly choices from explicitly taught language systems, and reflect on these choices. In order to track the iterative processes of semiotic mediation in useful depth, we adopt a case study approach, focusing on two experienced primary school teachers and their students as they voice, in interviews, their accomplishments and struggles at each point of recontextualization. A case study method is implemented here to provide descriptive, rich detail (Merriam, 2014) which presents insights into teachers’ LSK, potentially contributing to knowledge accumulation within the field (Flyvbjerg, 2011). We can do no more than briefly sketch in the first two levels of recontextualization (see [49_TD$IF]Love, Sandiford, Macken-Horarik, & Unsworth, 2014 (for more detail)) before focusing on student interview data. It is through the metatalk generated in the interviews that students reveal their understandings of their teachers’ understandings of a rhetorically-oriented grammar in the production of their own narrative texts, indicating something of their capacity to think “with grammar in mind” (Halliday, 2002). 2. Recontextualization 1: LSK and its reproduction in teacher learning The first stage of recontextualization occurred at the intersection of the academy and school education, as educational linguists of an SFL orientation (Halliday 1994) designed and delivered a series of workshops for English/Literacy teachers from four stages of schooling—middle and upper primary and junior and middle secondary, across two states of Australia (Victoria and NSW). Workshop content was designed to enhance and extend teachers’ LSK, in particular the functional grammar that underpinned the new Australian Curriculum for English (AC:E), itself a recontextualization of Hallidayan SFL. The AC:E is designed and managed through the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Review Authority (ACARA[50_TD$IF]), 2016, the governing institution responsible for translating specialist intellectual knowledge from the field of production (University Linguistics Faculties) into policy. Operating in the Official Recontextualizing Field (ORF) (Bernstein, 2000), its agents select, appropriate and legitimate particular types of LSK through the national curricula documentation, assessment criteria, and advice to teachers. As researchers and language educators in university departments of education, we operated within the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field (PRF) (Bernstein, 2000), mediating specialist knowledge about the language underpinning the AC:E to teachers. We thus acted as brokers to make “new knowledge (and new combinations of knowledge) accessible to classroom teachers” (Chen & Derewianka, 2009; p.228). The functionally-oriented systems of language underpinning the AC: E is one such set of new knowledge for Australian teachers and will be briefly explained below. 2.1. Linguistic subject knowledge (LSK): theoretical underpinnings Halliday’s social semiotic model of language (Halliday, 1994) is entirely consistent with Vygotsky’s (1986) view of learning as fundamentally socially mediated and offers a highly elaborated model of “deliberate structuring of webs of

Please cite this article in press as: K. Love, C. Sandiford, Teachers’ and students’ meta-reflections on writing choices: An Australian case study, International Journal of Educational Research (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.06.001

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meaning” (see Introductory paper, this volume). Developed in university linguistics faculties (the field of knowledge production in Bernstein’s terms), Hallidayan linguistics outlines a view of language as a resource that simultaneously reflects and actively creates social reality. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) argues that all ranking clauses (and indeed texts) make three major kinds of meaning simultaneously—experiential (one aspect of the ideational metafunction), interpersonal and textual. In our workshops with teachers on the grammatics of narrative, we used the metaphor of ‘lenses on meaning’ in clauses (the micro view) and in texts (macro view). An experiential lens throws representation into relief and this relates to ‘possible worlds’ in narratives (what it is about). An interpersonal lens highlights evaluative meanings (how we are engaged intersubjectively). A textual lens highlights features of narrative composition like texture, balance and organization (how parts of the text cohere). The theory of metafunctions is powerful in the field of knowledge reproduction, because it offers a differentiated account of meaning for school English and is echoed in the Australian national curriculum organizers. The metafunctions underpin the organisational design of the Language strand for the AC:E, with its sub-strands of ‘Language for Building Experience’, ‘Language for Relationships’ and ‘Language for Organizing text’ respectively. Australian teachers’ LSK is currently being significantly stretched as they meet the requirements of this new curriculum (Jones & Chen, 2012; [51_TD$IF]Love, Macken-Horarik, & Horarik, 2015), where the Language strand is intended to look outwards towards both the Literatures and Literacies strands. The knowledge base required by the AC:E must account for different levels of language knowledge (at the levels of word, sentence, phase and text), must be attentive to form, function and meaning and must include a capacity to integrate grammar into the study and composition of texts. Such a rich characterization of LSK takes Australian teachers and students far beyond knowledge of traditional grammatical terminology, which in its prescriptive form, has been identified above as inadequate to the task of supporting student writing.[52_TD$IF]Anonymous 2.2. The teacher professional learning program Our role as researchers was to mediate the recontextualization of this knowledge into a viable working knowledge about language in the school context as a key field of knowledge reproduction. Guided by Halliday’s theory of metafunctions, and shunting between word, sentence and text levels of knowledge, we worked with teachers as they applied their understanding of how certain language choices enabled either the expression and development of ideas, interaction with audiences, or the comprehension and creation of coherent texts. We report here on a small section of the project, that to do with the grammatics of narrative. Workshops here were structured in 3  6 h blocks, interspersed over a teaching semester so that teachers could apply their learnings in their curriculum planning and teaching between each of the three sessions (see Anonymous, 2015 for further details). Our metafunctional focus was on the interpersonal, highlighting those grammatical resources which build relationships between reader and writer, and between characters in narratives. Such interpersonal resources, which are fundamental to the construction of well-formed narratives, are documented in the AC:E curriculum organizer, Language for Interaction. However, in a recent national survey, a significant number of Australian teachers reported struggling with identifying these resources or describing their patternings and purposes in narrative texts (Anonymous). Our teacher workshops thus focused on those linguistic systems which contribute most powerfully to the evaluation of human experience (Martin & Rose, 2008), operating as these do at word, sentence and text level. At text level, we focused on Genre and Phase choices (Martin & Rose, 2008); at sentence level, we focused on Verb Type, Person choice and Dialogue as these gave access to characters’ internal Table 1 Interpersonal resources related to key aspects of narrative (adapted from Macken-Horarik et al., 2015, p. 149). Interpersonal resources for narrative Level

System(s)

Text level Genre: Phases Sentence level

Verb type Person

Word level

Dialogue Appraisal (Attitude and Graduation)

Prompts re Narrative purpose

Relationship to narrative meaning

What stretches of the text are focused on action and which on reaction? How are these patterned and why? What types of verb represent inner and outer worlds, when and in relation to which narrative persona? Which personal pronouns are used and how do these relate to who tells the story? How do characters address one another? What do you notice about evaluative language? Consider words or phrases full of Affect (emotion), Judgement (positive or negative esteem or social sanction) and Appreciation (aesthetic delight or revulsion)? Are choices overt—directly inscribed descriptions (horrible, ugly, beautiful, kind, cruel) or are they more covert—working indirectly through connotation? How strongly are these feelings or judgements expressed? Do you notice patterns of positive or negative choices for different characters and worlds? How do these patterns shape your response to characters and their worlds?

Focalization (who sees?): Is it externally or internally focalized—from a point of view external or internal to consciousness? Narration: Who tells the story—a narrator or character? Is this person internal/external to events in the story? First/third person? Dialogue or voicing: (who speaks?): How do characters address one another? Do they use endearments, intimate language or formal language or the language of antagonists? Does the dialogue carry the action forward? Does it reveal character? How does it do this?

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worlds and narrative focalization; at word level, we focused on lexical choices from systems of Attitude (Martin & White, 2005) as characters are evaluated and relationships construed with readers, and Graduation as these attitudes are weakened or strengthened (note that terms referring to these systems are capitalised in SFL conventions). Crucially, these grammatical resources were always explored in relation to narrative texts of the sort that teachers were working with and were accompanied by probe questions designed to make explicit the connections between grammatical systems and narrative techniques. Table 1 shows how we related our interpersonal lens to questions of grammatical choice and narrative technique. Note that the boundaries between the levels, systems and narrative purposes are broken to indicate the fluid and iterative, rather than categorical relationship between these sets of grammatical resources and their narrative purposes. This contextualised view of grammar, which linked patterns of word, sentence, phase and the texts level interpersonal choices in narrative, provided a platform for teachers to build their LSK. As such, the project input represented a strongly framed (Bernstein, 2000) instructional discourse for teacher learning and enabled us to make visible the ways in which “knowledge systems become part of consciousness” (Bernstein, 2000; p. 17) for project teachers and, in turn, for their student learning and student reflection on learning. Workshops also provided the platform on which teachers could develop pedagogies for teaching the grammatics of narrative, while building their personal LSK. Teachers’ practice involves not only declarative knowledge, or knowledge about language, but knowledge of, that is, knowledge “activated when a need for it is encountered in action” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; p.105). This procedural knowledge, when applied to language, is referred to by Myhill et al. (2012) as Linguistic Pedagogic Subject Knowledge (LPSK). In a Vygotskian sense, it is through their teachers’ confidence in LPSK that students can appropriate relevant features of a linguistic toolkit, in their writing and in their metalinguistic reflection on this writing. We introduced the toolkit summarised in Table 1, drawing on novels that teachers were familiar with, one of which was “Fantastic Mr. Fox” by Roald Dahl. Our workshop pedagogy itself was further framed (Bernstein, 2000) as cycles of identification, description and explanation of how grammatical choices contributed interpersonally to the effectiveness of these narratives, as outlined in Table 2. In further recontextualizing the functional grammar of the AC:E from the ORF, our teacher workshops operated with a highly visible model of writing pedagogy, one known as the Curriculum Cycle (Derewianka & Jones, 2012), which is explicit about how language functions to support student writing. The Curriculum Cycle moves through iterative cycles of Building Knowledge of the field, Modelling the Genre and its language features, Joint Construction (of the content and language features of the target text) and Independent Construction. In all but the Independent construction phase, dialogic deconstruction and co-construction of texts and the linguistic resources that shape them is crucial. Our assumption was that through such visible, dialogic pedagogies around the functional language system underpinning the AC:E, project teachers would build confidence in their personal LSK, and, simultaneously, develop a principled LPSK that would give their students access to a robust metalanguage supported by a highly visible, but nonetheless deeply dialogic pedagogy. 2.3. Methodology: accessing teacher learning and reflections on their learning Two forms of qualitative data were used to access teacher learning about LSK and LPSK: semi-structured interviews and teachers’ reports to the workshop groups about their curricular implementations of new LSK. Semi-structured interviews were conducted between one or two of the researchers and individual project teachers at points before and after the teacher workshops in order to track how teachers had recontextualized the functionally informed LSK, had translated this into curricula and had used this to diagnose their students’ writing. In total, post-workshop interviews were conducted with 26 teachers, representing the range of teaching levels from Years 3–10 in two states of Australia. Teachers had given their students a timed written task in response to a narrative prompt and were asked to bring a selection of two student samples of differing standards to the interview, where they commented on features of student writing, implications for their writing pedagogy and, and in the second interview, overall learnings from the Grammatics project on narrative. The interviews were conducted as conversations, where the voices of the teachers (as recontextualizers) interacted with those of the researcher (as noticer, rather than authority) to open up important dialogic spaces and explore what was ‘internally persuasive’ (Bakhtin, 1981; p. 346) to teachers. As outlined in the opening paper (this volume), internally persuasive discourse is one where the ideas and concepts are explored within the dialogue, where answers are not preordained, where questions are genuinely information seeking, and answers give rise to new questions (Matusov, 2015).

Table 2 Steps in the teacher workshop pedagogy (Macken-Horarik et al., 2015, p. 150). Step 1 Identification Step 2 Description Step 3 Explanation

Identification of a unit of form and meaning—knowing what you are looking at in a clause or sentence (e.g. Is it a verb group, a noun group, an adverbial or prepositional phrase?). Description of the function of the unit in a clause or sentence (e.g. The verb group tells us about a character’s feeling, actions or speech; the noun group introduces the character). Explanation of the patterns of choice in a text (e.g. In this narrative, there is a back and forth movement between action and reaction of the protagonist. This helps us to identify with him, to see things through his eyes).

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The second source of data informing our understanding of teachers’ appropriation of the functionally oriented LSK workshop content was teachers’ reports to the workshop group on their curricular implementations. As outlined earlier, workshops were spaced to allow opportunities for teachers to translate input into meaningful age-appropriate curricula for their students. In the project work on the grammatics of narrative, teachers shared their recontextualizations more or less formally, using Powerpoint slides, handouts and samples of annotated student work. The interviews were transcribed and coded separately in the first instance and then collaboratively (Smagorinsky, 2008), the coding informed by SFL theory (see also Macken-Horarik et al., 2015). For this paper, we focussed on statements and comments which suggested teachers’ appropriation of the interpersonal grammatics of narrative, as introduced through the workshops and summarised in Table 1. This analysis provided insights into the teachers’ uptake of the workshop input, as they revealed what aspects of LSK had most salience for them personally, what aspects had salience in the development of their LPSK as they recontextualised new grammatical knowledge in their curriculum practice, and what they prioritized in their evaluative practices (Bernstein, 2000) as they diagnosed their students’ writing. 3. Recontextualization 2: knowledge reproduction in teacher pedagogy (LPSK) In order to give voice to the teachers as they internalised new learnings about the grammatics of narrative and its application, we now focus on metareflections of two primary school teachers, Anna, a Grade 6 teacher and Karen, a Grade 3/4 teacher. We have selected them as our case study focus on the basis of their experience, commitment to the project over its three years and because they are crucially poised as recontextualizing agents within their schools’ literacy teams. As well as their interview comments, we draw on samples of their planning documentation and reports back to the workshop groups, which provide both corroboration and elaboration on their interview comments. Later in the paper, we draw on interview comments from Anna’s and Karen’s students, whose voices reveal the extent to which they have internalised aspects of the interpersonal grammatics of narrative they have taught. We start by focusing on Anna, offering a portrait of one upper primary school teacher’s pedagogic recontexualization of her understandings of the interpersonal grammatics of narrative in her curriculum and assessment design. We can trace something of this process of selective appropriation and recontextualization discursively through Anna’s interview comments, curriculum materials and reports back to the workshop group which illustrate reflective thinking of her language-informed teaching and her students’ writing. Anna’s evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of her students’ writing provides insight into her uptake of the instructional resources, both in terms of her personal development of knowledge about language (LSK, or declarative knowledge) and in terms of its application to her pedagogy (LPSK, or procedural knowledge). For Anna, as for other project teachers, the interpersonal resources summarised in Table 1 provided a viable and accessible entry point to engage with the grammar. Anna, like most teachers, could recontextualize these aspects of LSK into

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]

Fig. 1. Anna’s modelling of selected grammatics of narrative.

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LSPK, helping students to establish “characters that we care about” in their own writing. In her teaching of her Grade 6 students, Anna drew on model texts and analyses covered in the teacher workshops, in particular those identified in “Fantastic Mr Fox”, as Roald Dahl selected different verb types to give readers access to the characters’ inner, as well as outer worlds. Fig. 1 is a representation of these concepts as used by Anna in her teaching, drawing as she does on a resource developed and shared by another teacher in the group. This figure illustrates Anna’s understanding that different verb types (action/doing, saying, sensing and relating verbs) contribute to realizing different aspects of the narrative world under construction. It highlights how grammatical resources contribute to the way that experience in the narrative world is focalized, potentially helping students identify who is seeing the events in the model narrative, whether this be from a point of view external or internal to consciousness. Reflecting on how she applied these concepts in supporting students’ own writing, Anna elaborates on which grammatical resources will enable her students “ . . . to take their readers into the consciousness of their characters. My students were able to understand that in addition to the action that takes place in their plots, (it was important also) to include an inner world where their readers gain insight into the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists. This drives their narratives forward and enables readers to connect more with the characters. I have exposed students to a range of model written texts and movie clips to show them how this can be done through the use of sensing and behavioural verbs, and the inclusion of dialogue” (Anna, workshop report). Anna adapted a number of strategies used in the deconstruction of Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” as covered in the teacher workshops, recontextualizing these in age-appropriate ways for her 11 year old students. In particular, she got them to identify, describe and explain the grammatical resources that position readers to sympathise with Mr Fox as he prepared to raid the chicken farm, and to position readers negatively towards farmers Bunce, Boggis and Bean, as they lay in wait for him. Firstly, drawing on her knowledge of phasal structure, she helped her students see how action verbs are consciously used in Action phases to construct Mr. Fox’s outer movements and to advance the plot in suspenseful ways (eg “Mr Fox crept up the dark tunnel to the mouth of his hole. He poked his long handsome face out into the night air and sniffed once”), while sensing, behavioural, saying and relational verbs are used in Reaction phases to give sympathetic insight into Mr. Fox’s motives (eg “Every evening . . . Mr. Fox would say to Mrs Fox, ‘Well my darling, what shall it be this time? . . . And when Mrs. Fox had told him what she wanted, Mr. Fox would creep down into the valley . . . ’). Such resources, particularly the use of ‘saying’ verbs which project the voices of Mr and Mrs Fox, further highlight the interior worlds of the protagonists in ways that engage young readers’ empathy and identification with the foxes. This shunting between the sentence and phase levels of the model text was designed to help students identify how narrative events are focalised at different stages, from a point of view which is either external or internal to consciousness. This strategy potentially provides students with rich

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Fig. 2. Anna’s report to the project group of her Joint Deconstruction of The Hitchhiker.

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resources to deliberately use in their own writing as they give their readers selected access to their character’ actions, behaviours, perceptions, feelings and verbalisations. Secondly, Anna was able to draw on knowledge of Appraisal systems to reveal how readers’ sympathies are further aligned positively with some characters and negatively with others. Teacher workshop input had focused on the system of Attitude, where lexical choices carried Affect or Judgement. In her work with Fantastic Mr Fox (see extract above), Anna drew her students’ attention to how positive judgement of the foxes is explicitly carried through positive terms of address (eg “my darling”), contrasting markedly with those used by and about the Farmers as “baddies: (eg ‘nasty men’, “enormously fat”). Anna further extends this work on Appraisal through the joint deconstruction of a more complex narrative, Roald Dahl’s “The Hitchhiker”, demonstrating how she has recontextualized her knowledge in her report back to the project group (see Fig. 2 below). Please note that it is not essential to read the extract from “The Hitchhiker”, but rather to focus on the patterning of grammatical resources. What is salient in the highlighting of key grammatical resources (in the right column of Fig. 2) is the clustering of negative adjectives in one paragraph (the one typed out in the left column), as one protagonist was described. This strategy allows students, as part of the joint deconstruction stage, to move from identifying grammatical resources to describing how they are patterned to explaining how the evaluative language shapes the responses of the reader to a protagonist. Such identification, description and explanation of these interpersonal resources provided a grammatically-informed scaffolding for her students’ writing and reflection on their own narratives. In writing their own version of a Hitchhiker type narrative, Anna’s students systematically explored whether they wanted a positive or negative evaluation of their protagonists and how to vary the strength of these appraisals. This is where the system of Graduation was drawn on. Fig. 3 below is Anna’s representation to the Project group of how she went about teaching the system of Graduation “ . . . so that they can adjust the force behind the action or feelings presented in their own written texts”. As Anna indicated in her post-workshop interview, Graduation as a system of interpersonal choices proved powerful, since “Like most teachers, we had previously used lots of word banks to encourage students to use a range of vocabulary” and the project workshops had “given us a theoretical language and deeper understanding of the purpose behind using word choice to create meaning”. Anna further talked about “using comparatives, exclamatives and intensifiers” to turn the evaluation of characters up or down. Evident throughout Anna’s curriculum materials is a clear expectation that the joint deconstruction of these salient linguistic resources in model texts would open up possibilities for students’ own writing. Knowledge of these resources helps students determine when and how to focalize the narrative experience as one of external action or one which gives readers access to the interior world of a character. Suck knowledge also helps with Narration, helping students identify the person who is making the evaluations and telling the story, whether this be a narrator or character. A further system introduced by Anna (but not covered here due to constraints of space) was the system of Person, which realizes the identity of the narrator

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Fig. 3. Anna’s report to the project group of her teaching of ‘Graduation’.

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as either internal to events in the story (e.g. using First person) or external to the events (e.g. Third person). The resources of Person, Appraisal (in particular Attitude and Graduation), verb type and narrative phasal structure, provide a strong multistratal grammatical foundation for developing the literary capacity to create a strong narrator’s voice. The value of these explicitly taught linguistic resources to literary understanding is demonstrated in Anna’s postworkshop interview. Here, she highlights the importance of her students not simply knowing how to identify and describe these resources, but being able to explain how patterns of evaluative resources contribute to more nuanced processes of narration and focalisation across narrative texts: “So from looking at the original text they were able to see from whose point of view we were seeing The Hitchhiker and they made the conclusion that Roald Dahl wanted us to feel uncomfortable . . . feel negative towards the hitchhiker. They could see how parts of that would change, how the language features would change towards the end of the story because there is a more positive relationship built up through the dialogue that eventuates within that story”. (Anna, post-workshop interview) Throughout the linguistically informed deconstruction of the model text, “The Hitchhiker”, Anna’s students are engaged in an intensely dialogic process, where each grammatical choice is discussed as a class for its impact on individual student readers. Likewise, in jointly constructing their own narratives, Anna deliberately opens up spaces for pairs and groups to discuss their choice of evaluative nouns, verbs and adjectives, the extent to which the volume is turned up or down on these and the interpersonal impact of these choices. Though clearly shaped by their teacher’s awareness of grammatical systems as sets of purposeful choices, student conversations around these issues were central to their appropriation of these resources, as will be seen further in Section 5 below. Anna comments below on what her students are able to accomplish as a result of this visible pedagogy, focusing here on dialogue as another system of interpersonal meaning which contributes to the literary dimension of ‘voicing’. Anna had introduced dialogue in her teaching in conjunction with Appraisal, showing her students how to pump up the positive or negative evaluations carried in various forms of the verb ‘to say’. “Using the Roald Dahl text ‘The Hitchhiker’ we have taught students how to use dialogue to propel their stories forward. We have encouraged students to use dialogue to show readers more about the personality traits of their characters through their actions, reactions and internal thoughts. They were able to use dialogue to include inner and outer worlds. Our students used The Hitchhiker as the main model text to deconstruct how dialogue was used and what the dialogue was able to tell readers about the external world of action in the plot, as well as the internal character feelings which assisted their understanding of the characterisation in the text” (Anna, workshop report). Overall, it appears that a number of grammatical resources for building interpersonal stance had singular traction in Anna’ teaching of narrative: systems of phase (action phases which focalize the narrative experience as one of external action, or reaction phases which give readers access to the interior world of a character); systems of Appraisal (which supports narration, helping students to identify evaluations which align them with characters and events (or not), whether this be a narrator or character and with what strength; systems of Person (which realizes the identity of the narrator as either internal to events in the story); and systems of dialogue (which voice the diversity in the nature of the characters, the relationships between characters, and carry the action forward). Importantly, Anna was able to draw on these linguistic resources multi-stratally, working across the word, sentence and text levels to develop student ability to narrate, focalize and voice in ways that could potentially enhance their writing. Such a knowledge base, as summarised in Table 1, sequenced in cycles of identification, description and explanation and framed within a highly visible pedagogic model (the Curriculum Cycle) provided a powerful resource for other teachers in the project. One of these was Karen who, like Anna, used “Fantastic Mr. Fox” as a model text, deconstructing extracts to show her younger students (nine year olds, compared with Anna’s eleven year olds) how interpersonal grammatical resources were used by an experienced narrator to align readers’ sympathies with the Fox family. Both teachers, as part of their busy practice and unable to retrain as linguists, could develop a meaning-oriented LSK and recontextualize this in their pedagogy in ways that suited the different needs of their students. We do not have the space to describe Karen’s recontextualization of the workshop input, but her post-workshop interview reflections indicate aspects of this linguistically-informed pedagogy as she worked with her students to identify, describe and explain the interpersonal effect of particular grammatical choices. “(In Fantastic Mr Fox) . . . we discussed the negative language and they got red pencils and underlined all the negative words and then we sat down and went through one by one, and the words reek and stink (were noted) . . . . But, they . . . had really good conversations about (these words) because some were saying it could be positive and so there was this conversation about can the word ‘reek’ ever be positive? So they're trying to come up with sentences that they thought could the word ‘reek’ be positive. (We) looked at words like the adjectives and adverbs. We had a big conversation the other day about using the word walked and, how many different ways could we say walked and then we looked at positive and negative language. So, all the ways you could say walked if you wanted to reader to feel positively and all the reasons you could say walked if you wanted your reader to feel that was trouble brewing or someone was angry or something like that.” (Karen, post-workshop interview). What is striking in Karen’s comments, as with Anna’s, was the highly dialogic way in which student metalinguistic knowledge was scaffolded. Karen’s use of terms such as ‘really good’ or ‘big’ conversations indicates her concern, voiced by

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other project teachers, to ensure that new linguistic knowledge, like other new knowledge, is salient, cognitively accessible within students’ ZPDs (Vygotsky, 1986) and connected to their everyday experiences. 4. Student appropriation of explicitly taught metalanguage Maintaining our focus on Anna and Karen as illustrative case studies, we now turn the spotlight on their students as they appropriate selected grammatical resources. Such appropriation is evident through their metatalk about their own writing, where they verbalise their reasoning about their more or less deliberate writerly decisions. By focusing on student interview data, the analysis seeks to capture student capacity to think ‘with grammar in mind’ (Halliday, 2002) as they apply their understandings of their teachers’ understandings of a rhetorically-oriented grammar in the production of their narrative writing. 4.1. Methodology: accessing student learning and reflections on their learning Students were interviewed in pairs or threes following the teacher workshops, using broad questions around their writerly choices. Students were selected on the basis of teacher recommendations, ensuring a representation of varying ability groupings. To assist them to feel prepared for and comfortable to take part in the semi-structured interview, students were given a copy of the questions prior to the interview. They were asked to bring along their response to the second narrative prompt that their teachers had given them and to talk about parts of the text that they were particularly pleased with. Where necessary, the interviewer, who was one of the researchers, and an experienced primary school teacher, drew students’ attention in a positive way to salient aspects of their writing (as is evident in the transcripts below). As with teacher interviews, student interviews were transcribed and coded by each of the authors separately then jointly to identify evidence in their talk of any uptake of interpersonal grammatics as may have been taught by their teachers, in their own writing. In order to track the appropriation by students of their teachers’ recontextualized knowledge, we focus on the post-workshop interviews with Anna’s and Karen’s students for the remainder of this paper. 4.2. Cindy, Brent and Paulo: three of Anna’s grade six students We first focus on an interview with three of Anna’s students (selected to represent a range of writing abilities) and one of the authors (see below). Cindy, Brent and Paulo are eleven year old Grade Six students whose metatalk reveals certain understandings of linguistic resources they have appropriated for their narrative writing. Cindy and Brent were identified as capable writers by their teacher. Paolo had arrived in Australia six months earlier from South America, and while quite confident and literate in his first language, was quite new to the demands of academic English. For these students, Graduation is clearly understood as a system of resources for modulating (‘turning up or down’) the tension at particular stages of a narrative. As is evident in the section below, they are capable of selecting “thinking or feeling” verbs and of distinguishing between outer and inner world as “more like action, more like what’s happening”, “not thoughts and feelings”. They are aware that the two worlds – inner and outer – are both essential to a narrative and interdependent; and that an action/reaction pattern enables the reader to appreciate what is happening in the character's world and the character’s reaction or response. Cindy: She’s been teaching us about Graduation, like volume up or down Researcher: Can you tell me Cindy, why might you use Graduation in a narrative? How does that help a narrative? Cindy: So you know if it’s a loud scene or a quiet scene, or fast or slow. Brent: It’s about the tension, the tension when like how you don’t start with full action in the story. Like you start with just a bit of action, then it goes a bit down, it goes up to the tension and to the climax . . . . Researcher: Cindy has just told me something about Graduation and how Graduation might help, what else have you been learning about? Paulo: That sometimes it’s good to tell what the characters are actually thinking, so like inner world and outer world. Researcher: ok so how does that help in a narrative, Paulo? Paulo: So people kind of understand what’s going on, and what the person is actually trying to do. Researcher: Do you use certain kinds of words to help build an inner world? Paulo: Something like ‘I thought ‘or ‘like ‘ Researcher: Ok great. Anything else? What about outer world? How do you build outer world? What’s that about? Brent: Outer world is more like action, like if the character . . . so like a fight scene . . . it would be an outer world, so it’s more like what’s happening, not thoughts and feelings. Researcher: Ok. So why in a narrative might you need some inner world and outer world? Brent: You need inner world ‘cause otherwise you don’t know what the character is thinking and then they won’t understand what’s happening. And you need outer world because then you’re just thinking and it doesn’t make sense. There’s no action, they’re just thinking about something but they’re not doing, there’s not anything actually happening.

In recognizing the importance of resources that take readers into the consciousness of characters, Brent and his peers are coming to terms with the writerly strategy of internal focalisation, while still appreciating the importance of external ‘happenings’ to narration. A further illustration of the students’ understanding of their writerly choices at work is evident in one of the tasks Anna asked them to complete, which was to annotate particular features of their written narratives. Brent,

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[(Fig._4)TD$IG]

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Fig. 4. Sample of Brent’s self-annotated narrative.

for example, highlights his use of ‘asked nervously’ and using a key, colour codes this as an example of Graduation where the adverb realises ‘said plus feeling’. He also highlights Graduation realised through intensification of core vocabulary in his action verb choices of leapt and slammed, annotated by an arrow indicating ‘turning up the volume’. He separately codes sensing verbs (noticed, realized) and marks phases of his text which build ‘inner’ or ‘outer worlds’ (Fig. 4). Brent’s metatalk and annotation of his written narrative reveal his capacity to identify the form of language, describe its function, and explain how patterns, such as action-reaction sequences and use of graduation are realised within the narrative. While seemingly simple, these mediated understandings are cognitively complex achievements for eleven year old Brent, as he makes his teachers’ words his own, “populating it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (Bakhtin, 1981[53_TD$IF]). Brent, Cindy and Paulo demonstrate in their talk a declarative metalinguistic knowledge which draws both on their own everyday language and on an explicit grammatical metalinguistic understanding, which we have been able to trace back to their teacher’s pedagogy. They have also demonstrated their procedural knowledge as they deliberately draw on systems of grammatical knowledge in the process of writing. It would appear from these student meta-reflections that their teacher’s recontextualization of a functionally oriented LSK has opened up richer writerly resources for them, linking grammatical knowledge with the deliberate creation of distinctive forms of narration, focalisation and (though dealt with less here) dialogue. Project teacher teachers varied in their uptake and application of a meaning-oriented LSK in their writing pedagogy, given their different launching places (in terms of LSK), their philosophical orientation to LSK and the context of their teaching (see Anonymous for more detail on the variation in teacher orientation). However, students of most other teachers, including Karen, illustrated in their interview comments how they appropriated aspects of their teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge. 4.3. Andrew, John and Kane: three of Karen’s [54_TD$IF]grade four students As outlined above, Karen, like Anna, used “Fantastic Mr. Fox” as a model text to identify, describe and explain the ways in which key interpersonal grammatical choices realized Mr Fox’s inner reflections as well as outer experiences (focalisation), worked through action/reaction phases to enhance narration. Karen also recontextualized workshop input on the use of dialogue, particularly on how Mr Fox’s use of endearing vocatives such as ‘Darling’ in his conversations with Mrs Fox contribute to constructing a favourable judgement of a character who is essentially doing something wrong (stealing chickens), while at the same time assigning a negative judgement to the character Boggis through his dialogue. Central to Karen’s pedagogy was the highly dialogic scaffolding of student metalinguistic knowledge, drawing on ‘really good’ or ‘big’ conversations (see her interview comments in Section 3) to ensure that new linguistic knowledge, like other new knowledge, is salient, cognitively accessible within students’ ZPDs (Vygotsky, 1986) and connected to their everyday experiences.

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An interview involving one of Karen’s nine year old students Andrew (identified as a reasonably competent writer), illustrates the extent to which he has appropriated this metalinguistic knowledge. Fig. 5 below shows an extract from the orientation stage of the narrative that Andrew had brought to his interview. Andrew spoke about his writerly choices in this orientation, illustrating his strong sense of authorial agency, particularly in terms of the relationship with his readership: “I like to put ‘the peculiar ten year-old London boy’, so you want to like his character like how is he. When you write like a story with the character you want people to think how is the character, how it look like and put enough description to let the reader imagine how he look like and how he is.” There is a clear deliberateness in his decision to influence his reader’s alignment to his character through his choice of Attitude and Graduation resources. While he does not explicitly define his choices as such, he is able to articulate the intended effect of his choices. Such choices have been explicitly scaffolded by Andrew’s teacher, Karen, through her joint deconstruction, with her students, of Attitude and Graduation resources. Drawing on the ‘big conversations’, amongst other pedagogic strategies which explicitly support LSK, students’ sense of agency as writers is strengthened. In the interview extract below, Andrew, Kane and John reflect on their learning from one such ‘big conversation’ about the interpersonal language of the model text. The key choices that the students discuss are those available through the Attitude system for expressing feelings, judgements and appreciation of people, places and things, and resources for adjusting the force of Attitude in narrative through the Graduation system. Andrew: Well we’re learning about Fantastic Mr Fox. Kane: And adjectives and negative and positive. Researcher: Okay. What about adjectives and negatives and positives? Kane: As a negative adjective it would describe something bad. It doesn't make you feel for them, you feel bad, and also positive which makes you feel good and wants you to side with them. Researcher: Did you use any positive or negative adjectives in your story? Kane: I used some but I I am going to use some but I haven't written much yet. Researcher: Okay, so you intend to use more. Are you going to use positive or negative adjectives? Kane: I think I'm going to use you know a combination of both because of the evil witch of the West I want to include some negative and for the main character I want to include some positive . . . John: I like to use adverbs which describe the verb. Researcher: Can you give me an example of what you've used there. I can see you pointing at one. Were you pointing at one there? No, I'm sorry, okay. Did you use one in your writing there? John: I kind of forgot to use it. Researcher: That's okay but you like to use adverbs? When do you like to use the adverbs? John: When it starts getting tense. Swimming, like he was swimming desperately to land.

Through their reflections, the students’ metalinguistic awareness is revealed in two key ways: through the connection they make between form and function (e.g. Kane’s “a negative adjective would describe something bad”); and through their capacity to specify how the resources would be used and for what effect (e.g. John’s understanding of how Graduation, through the use of adverbs, can intensify the action within a narrative in the example “was swimming desperately to land”).

[(Fig._5)TD$IG]

Fig. 5. Extract from Andrew’s narrative.

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Importantly, while being able to identify the potential rhetorical impact of certain grammatical resources, these student voices also reveal something of the cognitive load on these nine year olds as they struggle to operationalise this in their writing, for example Kane’s response “I am going to use some but I haven’t written much yet” or John’s remark “I kind of forgot to use it”. Such comments indicate the processes in which students engage as they make sense of their classroom learning; an immediate translation into their own writing is not necessarily the first step for them. Rather, a reflection on recent learning and how it might be used signals a significant initial stage in the complex process of shifting from the guided practice offered through their work in the classroom to appropriation of their new knowledge into their writing. The voices of Andrew, Kane, John, Brent, Cindy and Paolo, as students of varying abilities, suggest something of the patterns of their appropriation of the interpersonal grammatics (outlined in Table 1) that their teachers had recontextualized from the project workshops. The student meta-talk reflects their ability to ‘think with grammar in mind’ (Halliday, 2002) through making connections between form and function, recognising how language choices can be used to build actionreaction sequences and making considered selection of interpersonal linguistic resources to establish point of view. This capacity for students to articulate insights into their decision making as writers supports Carter’s view that “explicit grammatical knowledge gives writers both choice and control over their language use” (1990 cited in Myhill & Watson, 2014, p.46). 5. Conclusion The analyses of interview transcripts from two teachers and six of their students has enabled us to track how primary school students of different ages agentively construe the act of writing as a “dialogic interplay between reader and writer” (see opening paper, this volume). Coupled with the analysis of teacher curriculum materials and teacher workshop presentations, we have been able to hear how designed-in conversations about the interpersonal impact of grammatical choices open up options for student writers. In classrooms such as Karen’s and Anna’s, well designed metatalk has created “a dialogic space for learning about writing and becoming a writer” (see opening paper, this volume). Through a description of representative sets of recontextualizations, these case studies suggest that teachers equipped with an explicit metalanguage, one premised on an understanding of language as systems of functional choices, have powerful resources to open up “a repertoire of infinite possibilities” (Myhill & Watson, 2014, p. 54) for their students. The students also demonstrate, in their reflective talk about their writing, how their appropriation of dialogically scaffolded and functionally oriented language knowledge has opened up more extensive and deliberate “webs of meaning” (see opening paper, this volume). They are able to use more “scientific” ways of thinking (in a Vygotskian sense), about writerly craft, even if, like John, they “forget to use it” or struggle with rehearsing its use in their writing. If, as outlined in the opening paper to this volume, writing and reflecting on writing demands “deliberate semantics— deliberate structuring of the web of meaning” (Vygotsky, 1986), the functional model of language, incorporating principled knowledge of linguistic strata and metafunctions, offered potentially extensive and systematic “webs of meaning” both for teachers and students. Of the culturally-shaped resources for supporting meaning-making in writing, grammatical systems form part of the more scientific set, requiring learners to organize concepts and relationships more systematically than they might in their everyday operations. Anna, Karen and their students were all learners in this project, coming to terms with a new language informed English curriculum. 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