Bridging Talk With Text: The Mediating Role of Teacher-Led Modelling in a Metalinguistic Talk Pedagogy for Writing

This article draws on data gathered during a 3-year study that was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and set out to investigate how dialogic metalinguistic talk mediates metalinguistic learning and informs students’ writing choices. Working with seven secondary English teachers in the South-West of England, pedagogical strategies and lesson sequences were explored for their potential to promote dialogic metalinguistic talk in Key Stage 3 (11 to 14 years of age) classrooms. This article reports on how teachers used one specific strategy, described here as metalinguistic modelling, to make thinking about language choice explicit and to scaffold writerly independence. Drawing on qualitative data capture of 33 whole lessons, this study develops the notion of metalinguistic modelling as a “bridging” mechanism that connects talk, text, and writing in the dialogic development of metalinguistic understanding, mediating the internalisation of thinking about language choice and activating procedural activity. This article offers an empirical conceptualisation of metalinguistic modelling as a key repertoire of a metalinguistic talk pedagogy and advances a theorisation of its role in writing instruction.