This paper draws on data from a national study, involving an experimental intervention with 54 schools across the country, in which teachers were mentored in a pedagogical approach involving explicit attention to grammatical choices and which advocated high-level metalinguistic discussion about textual choices. The research focused upon primary children aged 10-11, and in addition to statistical analysis of outcome measures, 53 lesson observations were undertaken to investigate the nature of the metalinguistic discussion. The data were analysed inductively, following the constant comparison method, with an initial stage of open coding, followed by axial coding which clustered the data into thematic groups. The analysis demonstrates the potential of metalinguistic talk in supporting young writers' understanding of how to shape meaning in texts and the decision-making choices available to them. It signals the importance of teachers' management of metalinguistic conversations, but also the role that teachers' grammatical subject knowledge plays in enabling or constraining metalinguistic talk. The study highlights the importance of dialogic classroom talk if students are to develop knowledge about language, to become metalinguistically aware, and to take ownership of metalinguistic decision-making when writing. The grammatical choices we make, including pronoun use, active or passive verb constructions, and sentence patterns-represent relations between writers and the world they live in. Word choice and sentence structure are an expression of the way we attend to the words of others, the way we position ourselves in relation to others. In this sense, writing involves cognitive skills at the level of idea development and at the sentence level. Our interest is in this concept of grammatical choice in writing, which counterpoints strongly with traditionalist views of grammar as principally concerned with rules and compliance. Carter and McCarthy (2006, 7) helpfully distinguish between the grammar of structure, which describes how language is organised as a system, and the grammar of choice, which is more concerned with how grammatical choices make meaning. For example, consider Dickens' description of Magwitch's first appearance in Great Expectations: A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin. Here Dickens uses minor sentences, with no main verb, in the form of three noun phrases, headed by 'man' to present Magwitch to the reader. The choice of visual detail offered in the prepositional phrases (with no hat; with broken shoes, with an old rag round his head) suggests he is on the margins of society, and the detail of the 'great iron on his leg' invites the reader to...

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The linguistic demands of poetry writing, quite apart from the transcriptional aspects of writing, make this perhaps the most challenging form of writing children encounter in school. These would include, among others, poetic techniques such as using line breaks and chunking meaning in stanzas; invention and handling of imagery; playfulness and ambition in vocabulary. In this paper I want to examine some of the linguistic and cognitive demands which writing poems makes on children. I will analyse these using Sharples' model of thinking about writing, specifically his description of 'rhetorical and content modes'; and I will argue that poetry writing makes unique demands upon children in both of these modes. I will critically examine how the content and rhetorical modes can be expanded through the use of published poems as literary forms, and will discuss the potentials and pitfalls of this approach.

This paper investigates the personal epistemologies of teachers in relation to the place of linguistic and literary metalanguage in the teaching of poetry writing. The data draw on 93 interviews with 31 secondary English teachers in the UK, following lesson observations, and the data are a subset of a larger study investigating the impact of contextualised grammar teaching on writing attainment. The analysis indicates that teachers' personal epistemologies relating to metalanguage are ambivalent and, at times, contradictory. Teachers tend to view literary metalanguage as linked to the creative freedom of writing poetry, whereas linguistic metalanguage is constructed as associated with rules and restrictions. At the same time, teachers reveal a lack of confidence with subject knowledge in both literary and linguistic metalanguage, which may be shaping their epistemological beliefs. Teachers' comments on the place of literary and linguistic metalanguage in poetry writing are paradoxical, but do appear to be strongly connected with their personal epistemologies. They subscribe to a literate epistemology which values literary metalanguage as part of the knowledge base of a creative, expressive subject, but linguistic metalanguage is not included within this literate epistemology.

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