Professor Debra Myhill - recontextualising writing as design

Professor Debra Myhill is acting Dean and Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Transfer of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies, and subject leader for English with Media.

"My background is in teacher education, and so my research is obviously designed to inform better teaching, specifically of language and literacy, and in particular writing.

"I focus mainly on writing development. We know a lot about how people become readers; we know a lot about how people become talkers; but we know an awful lot less about how people become effective writers.

"We also know an awful lot about ‘early years’; a lot of language-acquisition research is ‘early years’ focused, as is a lot of reading development work. We know much less about adolescence. So my research focuses on those two areas that are historically under researched: writing development, and particularly writing development in adolescence.

"The other aspect of my research that’s pretty critical is that it is interdisciplinary. Education by definition is an interdisciplinary area, as it isn’t a discipline in itself; it draws on others. In my research on writing I draw on cognitive psychology, linguistics, and socio-cultural theory.

"In terms of cognitive processes, what I’m really interested in is what happens when we try to orchestrate the act of producing written text; how do we coordinate mentally and juggle the different cognitive demands that writing makes upon us? So for example, when you’re a very young writer, the physical act of holding a pen and coordinating the shape of letters draws heavily on your working memory and cognitive load, leaving you with very little mental space left to think about what you’re writing.

"As you mature, those processes become automated, so you have more capacity to think about what you write. But as you become older and more experienced, you also become more aware of the demands of writing, and so a whole new set of cognitive demands come in; about how you imagine the audience of your text. How do you become the reader, and imagine how someone else will receive what you are writing?

"Alongside that I’m interested in the composing processes. For example, if you’re writing a poem, how do you go about that? Do you write a plan? Do you write down lots of ideas? Does the whole thing just come out? If you’re writing an academic essay, do you do the same process? Or does the genre of the text influence the composing process that you adopt? Equally, does gender, or writing ability, affect the composing process that you adopt?

"The other aspect I’m interested in regarding cognition is about meta-cognition; to what extent are writers, particularly adolescent writers, able to reflect on their own processes, in order to strategically intervene to help themselves?

"The linguistic aspect of my research is very much about syntactical development in mature writers; how do you manage complex expression, which is what you’re trying to do as a teenager, and what is syntactical development like at that stage?

"The other area I look at is the social processes of writing: the processes that shape how we become writers; the way we’re schooled, the influences from outside upon our writing; the cultural processes of writing – Asian ways of writing argument are different from Western ways of writing argument, for instance.

"I combine all these ideas together into the concept of reconceptualising writing as design; because if you draw on cognitive processes, linguistic processes, and social processes, as writers we are making choices."