What happens when, as a teacher, you ask what a text means and how that meaning is created? In a recent study, Ruth Newman looked at classroom conversations in English classes in which students talk about the language in texts. It is about ‘the subject’ or ‘the message’ and how a writer uses language to create a particular effect. Above all, I will discuss how teachers guide such conversations.
This research is all about metalinguistic understanding – a difficult word for something that is actually very logical: understanding how language works. Not just ‘it is exciting’, but also ‘because the writer uses short sentences with a lot of repetition’. Not just ‘the main character sounds sad’, but also ‘because he does not use verbs, as if he has no energy’. Such insights do not arise by themselves. They come to life in conversations where students are challenged to substantiate their impressions, think of alternatives, and explore writers’ language choices. And that is precisely where the teacher plays a key role.
The research is based on 14 English lessons in British secondary education, in which teachers talked to their classes about model texts. The conversations were filmed and analysed for teachers’ questions and how they responded to them. The focus was on the so-called ‘framing questions’ (which get the conversation going) and ‘responsive talk moves’ (such as asking further questions, reformulating or suggesting alternatives). This gave the researcher insight into how teachers develop metalanguage through their language use with students – and how subtle that process actually is.
Newman shows how powerful the right question at the right time can be. An open question like “How do you feel about this passage?” invites associations. But to really delve into the language, you need questions like “Which words make you feel that way?” or “What if the writer had chosen a different word?” Such questions put students to work as mini-researchers of text. The teacher moves along, reformulates statements, asks further (“Why do you think that?”), or explains something without taking control of the conversation. Something I have often seen strong teachers do in language lessons.
This research shows (again) how language awareness grows through interaction. What Newman describes – teachers who deliberately create space for such conversations while subtly guiding them – is a good example of how didactics and content come together. It requires subject knowledge and sensitivity to what is going on in a classroom.
The great thing is that this kind of metalinguistic conversation is not just for language lessons. Attention can also be paid to how language forms meaning in history, geography, or even mathematics.
Abstract of the study :
In this paper, whole class episodes of metalinguistic talk are examined for their potential to support the development of Key Stage Three (KS3, age 11–14) learners’ metalinguistic understanding of how linguistic choice shapes mean in written text. Drawing on data from the first phase of a three-year ESRC funded project, this paper explores how teachers’ framing questions foreground and maneuver learners’ attention to written text, opening differently framed lines of inquiry that are sustained and advanced by teachers’ responsive talk moves. This paper proposes that teachers’ skillful orchestration of framing questions and responsive talk moves operate to develop metalinguistic understanding by connecting personal, tacit, or partially formed understandings with more explicit verbalization of the relationship between linguistic choice and rhetorical effect. Presenting a contextually and disciplinary sensitive analysis of dialogic talk in the writing classroom, this paper is of empirical and theoretical significance to the field of dialogic talk, educational linguistics, and writing research, and advances the theorization of pedagogical approaches that may empower learners to convey and communicate their own meanings and intentions in writing.