Strand leaders

Research in Writing strand

Our centre emerged from the previously titled Centre for Research in Writing, and writing is still very much at the heart of our activities. A decade of research into the development of writing in school-aged children led by Emeritus Professor Debra Myhill has shaped national and international policy, improved children's writing abilities and changed classroom practice. This legacy continues with our research into Metatalk for Writing and Writing the Future and also overlaps with much of our research in other strands.

Feature projects

These are some of the projects we are involved in to explore the themes of our strand.

Metatalk for Writing

Run by Dr Ruth Newman, this project investigates the impact of high-quality classroom talk on children’s writing. 

Find out more>>

Writing the Future

This 3-year project s a cross-linguistic and a cross-gender comparison of metadiscourse and voice, run by Dr Esmaeel Abdollzadeh.

Find out more>>

Feature publications

Watson. A, . Newman R & Morgan, S. (2021) Metatalk and metalinguistic knowledge: the interplay of procedural and declarative knowledge in the classroom discourse of first-language grammar teaching, Language Awareness, 30:3, 257-275, DOI: 10.1080/09658416.2021.1905655

Pearson, W. & Abdollahzadeh, E. (2023) Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Systematic Review. Lingua, 293, 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2023.103561