Developing metalinguistic understanding in the secondary English classroom: the role of teachers’ framing questions and responsive talk moves in dialogic metalinguistic talk about written text

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 meaning 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 manoeuvre learners’ attention to written text, opening differently framed lines of enquiry that are sustained and advanced by teachers’ responsive talk moves. This paper proposes that teachers’ skilful orchestration of framing questions and responsive talk moves operate to develop metalinguistic understanding by connecting personal, tacit, or partially formed understandings with more explicit verbalisation 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 theorisation of pedagogical approaches that may empower learners to convey and communicate their own meanings and intentions in writing.