Debra Myhill
Biographic Data
| ID | 3497996 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debra Myhill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debra |
| FAMILY NAME | Myhill |
| SIGNATURE | MYHILL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3207-3859 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Metalinguistic awareness in additional language learning across the lifespan: A critical commentary
This commentary reviews the contributions to this Special Issue on metalinguistic awareness (MLA) in additional language learning across the lifespan. The collection expands the field by examining MLA in diverse age groups and learning contexts, moving beyond the traditional focus on university students. The papers draw on varied theoretical perspectives and methodologies, offering complementary insights into how MLA is conceptualised, developed,…
Teaching creative writing in primary schools: A systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity
Teaching writing is complex and research related to approaches that support students’ understanding and outcomes in written assessment is prolific. Written aspects including text structure, purpose, and language conventions appear to be explicit elements teachers know how to teach. However, more qualitative and nuanced elements of writing such as authorial voice and creativity have received less attention. We conducted a systematic literature rev…
Qatari student writers’ metalinguistic understanding of transitions in L2 English written argument
Research in metadiscourse has foregrounded the multiple ways in which writers build a relationship with readers through internal discourse. Yet, few studies consider the relationship between the texts writers create and the metalinguistic thinking which informs their decision-making as writers. This paper draws on data from a larger study which sought to address this gap by investigating both the occurrence of metadiscourse in students’ writing a…
Jimmy Van Rijt: Understanding Grammar the Impact of Linguistic Metaconcepts on L1 Grammar Education
This book takes as its starting point the contested issue of explicit grammar teaching, providing a contextual framing for the book’s focus on learners’ development of conceptual understanding of linguistic terms. A thorough and critical synthesis of the ‘grammar debate’ is provided, drawing on perspectives from both L1 and L2, and from across different educational jurisdictions. This synthesis discusses the historical shift in L1 teaching, espec…
Engaging with readers: Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the use of pronouns in building reader-writer relationships
Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the written academic argument is important both to increase writer independence and inform writing instruction. This article draws on a study which investigated undergraduate students’ metalinguistic understanding of the metadiscourse features in their own written arguments. The specific focus of the paper is to determine what metalinguistic understanding students express about the use of pronouns in writ…
Writing as a craft: Re-considering teacher subject content knowledge for teaching writing
The importance of teacher subject knowledge as key professional knowledge has been emphasised in successive studies over the past thirty years, yet there are very few empirical studies which address either content or pedagogical knowledge for teaching writing. At the same time, in a number of international jurisdictions, writing attainment lags behind reading attainment. This article addresses these concerns by considering what might constitute s…
Going meta: Bringing together an understanding of metadiscourse with students’ metalinguistic understanding
The study involved a cross-linguistic corpus analysis of metadiscourse usage in first language (L1) Arabic university students' argumentative texts in English and Arabic in a university in Qatar, paralleled by 'writing conversation' interviews with a sub-sample of the student writers to explore their metalinguistic understanding of metadiscourse used in their own Arabic and English texts. Thus, it explored, firstly, the linguistic differences in …
A Reflexive Approach to Teaching Writing: Enablements and Constraints in Primary School Classrooms
Writing requires a high level of nuanced decision-making related to language, purpose, audience, and medium. Writing teachers thus need a deep understanding of language, process, and pedagogy, and of the interface between them. This article draws on reflexivity theory to interrogate the pedagogical priorities and perspectives of 19 writing teachers in primary classrooms across Australia. Data are composed of teacher interview transcripts and nuan…
Grammar re-imagined: Foregrounding understanding of language choice in writing
The topic of grammar teaching has remained a stubbornly contentious subject of discussion for more than 50 years, tending towards binary, even polemical, positions. Yet scrutiny of the research shows how little attention has been afforded to considering what the relationship between learning about grammar and learning about being a language user might be; or to effective pedagogical practices for teaching grammar. Instead, the debate has reverted…
Dialogue, erasure and spontaneous comments during textual composition: What students' metalinguistic talk reveals about newly-literate writers’ understanding of revision
The impact of the socio-cultural context on L2 English writing of Egyptian university students
Writing conversations: Fostering metalinguistic discussion about writing
“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research Papers in Education on 08 January 2016, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02671522.2016.1106694.”
Conceptualizing metalinguistic understanding in writing / Conceptualización de la competencia metalingüística en la escritura
This paper will present a theoretical analysis of research on metalinguistic understanding, illustrating how current research does not yet adequately address metalinguistic development in writing. Existing research on metalinguistic understanding has focused more on language acquisition, oral development and bilingual learners. Research on metalinguistic understanding in writing has tended to look more closely at young learners developing writing…
Da Fala Para a Escrita: O Desenvolvimento Linguístico Na Escrita
As pesquisas realizadas anteriormente sobre o desenvolvimento linguístico na escrita priorizavam seu desenvolvimento inicial e as interações entre fala-escrita na primeira fase de aquisição. Este estudo explorou o desenvolvimento linguístico em escreventes mais velhos, do segundo ciclo do ensino fundamental. Este estudo com duração de dois anos contém dois objetivos: investigar as construções linguísticas na escrita de estudantes secundários e ex…
Grammar matters: How teachers' grammatical knowledge impacts on the teaching of writing
Re-thinking grammar: The impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing and students’ metalinguistic understanding
This paper reports on a national study, involving a mixed-method research design comprising a randomised controlled trial (RCT), text analysis, student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. It set out to investigate whether contextualised teaching of grammar, linked to the teaching of writing, would improve student outcomes in writing and in metalinguistic understanding. The RCT involved 744 students in 31 schools in the south-west and …
TLRP’s ten principles
Since 2005, a number of special issues of Research Papers in Education have been devoted to reporting research from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), which is sponsored by the Ec
Developmental trajectories in mastery of paragraphing: Towards a model of development
Learning to write paragraphs and thus learning how to sub-divide a text for topical and organisational coherence is an accepted part of acquiring writing maturity, and most teachers of writing will include explicit teaching of paragraphing techniques within their writing instruction classes. However, there is relatively little pedagogical or empirical attention devoted to understanding the nature of development in paragraphing — how writers incre…
Shaping futures: Literacy policy in the twenty‐first century
When the United Nations marked the beginning of the twenty‐first century by establishing a set of Millennium Development Goals to end poverty, it was no surprise that achieving universal primary ed
Children's patterns of composition and their reflections on their composing processes
This article reports on an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded study into secondary‐aged writers' compositional processes, both as observed in a naturalistic classroom setting and as gathered through post hoc reflections. The sample comprised 38 children drawn from Year 9 and Year 11 who were observed, using an annotated timeline, responding to a writing task in the classroom and were subsequently interviewed, using stimulated recall. The…
How Talk Becomes Text: Investigating the Concept of Oral Rehearsal in Early Years’ Classrooms
The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well-researched and well-understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term ‘oral rehearsal’ is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy documents, yet as a concept it is not well-theorised. Indeed, there is relatively little reference to the con…
Talk, talk, talk: Teaching and learning in whole class discourse
UK national initiatives in education, such as the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, have been implemented to improve learning and raise standards. These initiatives place considerable significance on whole class interactive teaching, and political rhetoric makes great play of this pedagogic strategy. Teachers have been encouraged to use up to 15 minutes of whole class teaching in literacy and numeracy as a key focus for developing pupil …
Seeing things differently: Teachers' constructions of underachievement
The identity of the underachiever has become synonymous with the stereotypical identity of boys. Teachers know what underachievement looks like: it looks like a boy who is bright, but bored. Evidence from a research study reported here demonstrates that teachers are more likely to select boys as underachievers than girls and that teachers construct underachievement differentially by gender. The consequence is that underachievement in girls is oft…
Troublesome boys’ and ‘compliant girls’: Gender identity and perceptions of achievement and underachievement
Working within a methodological framework that identified four focus groups, high‐achieving boys and girls and underachieving boys and girls, this article presents teachers' perceptions of how gender identity is seen to influence achievement levels. Beliefs about gender identity informed the teachers' perceptions in relation to each of the four focus groups, whereby the underachieving boy and the high‐achieving girl were seen to conform to gender…
Making Connections: Teachers’ Use of Children's Prior Knowledge in Whole Class Discourse
This paper investigates teachers’ use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior lea…
Troublesome boys’ and ‘compliant girls’: Gender identity and perceptions of achievement and underachievement
Working within a methodological framework that identified four focus groups, high‐achieving boys and girls and underachieving boys and girls, this article presents teachers' perceptions of how gender identity is seen to influence achievement levels. Beliefs about gender identity informed the teachers' perceptions in relation to each of the four focus groups, whereby the underachieving boy and the high‐achieving girl were seen to conform to gender…
Bad Boys and Good Girls? Patterns of Interaction and Response in Whole Class Teaching
The article describes the findings of a cross‐phase study into boys' underachievement which investigated patterns of classroom interaction by boys and girls. The data illustrate how underachievers, of either gender, are the least likely group to be participating positively in the classroom and most likely to be engaged in off‐task interactions. The underachieving boys' reluctance to participate emerges in year 1, but by year 4 the underachieving …
Re-thinking grammar: The impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing and students’ metalinguistic understanding
This paper reports on a national study, involving a mixed-method research design comprising a randomised controlled trial (RCT), text analysis, student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. It set out to investigate whether contextualised teaching of grammar, linked to the teaching of writing, would improve student outcomes in writing and in metalinguistic understanding. The RCT involved 744 students in 31 schools in the south-west and …
Talk, talk, talk: Teaching and learning in whole class discourse
UK national initiatives in education, such as the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, have been implemented to improve learning and raise standards. These initiatives place considerable significance on whole class interactive teaching, and political rhetoric makes great play of this pedagogic strategy. Teachers have been encouraged to use up to 15 minutes of whole class teaching in literacy and numeracy as a key focus for developing pupil …
Seeing things differently: Teachers' constructions of underachievement
The identity of the underachiever has become synonymous with the stereotypical identity of boys. Teachers know what underachievement looks like: it looks like a boy who is bright, but bored. Evidence from a research study reported here demonstrates that teachers are more likely to select boys as underachievers than girls and that teachers construct underachievement differentially by gender. The consequence is that underachievement in girls is oft…
Conceptualizing metalinguistic understanding in writing / Conceptualización de la competencia metalingüística en la escritura
This paper will present a theoretical analysis of research on metalinguistic understanding, illustrating how current research does not yet adequately address metalinguistic development in writing. Existing research on metalinguistic understanding has focused more on language acquisition, oral development and bilingual learners. Research on metalinguistic understanding in writing has tended to look more closely at young learners developing writing…
Grammar matters: How teachers' grammatical knowledge impacts on the teaching of writing
Writing conversations: Fostering metalinguistic discussion about writing
“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research Papers in Education on 08 January 2016, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02671522.2016.1106694.”
Children's patterns of composition and their reflections on their composing processes
This article reports on an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded study into secondary‐aged writers' compositional processes, both as observed in a naturalistic classroom setting and as gathered through post hoc reflections. The sample comprised 38 children drawn from Year 9 and Year 11 who were observed, using an annotated timeline, responding to a writing task in the classroom and were subsequently interviewed, using stimulated recall. The…
How Talk Becomes Text: Investigating the Concept of Oral Rehearsal in Early Years’ Classrooms
The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well-researched and well-understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term ‘oral rehearsal’ is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy documents, yet as a concept it is not well-theorised. Indeed, there is relatively little reference to the con…
Making Connections: Teachers’ Use of Children's Prior Knowledge in Whole Class Discourse
This paper investigates teachers’ use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior lea…
Writing as a craft: Re-considering teacher subject content knowledge for teaching writing
The importance of teacher subject knowledge as key professional knowledge has been emphasised in successive studies over the past thirty years, yet there are very few empirical studies which address either content or pedagogical knowledge for teaching writing. At the same time, in a number of international jurisdictions, writing attainment lags behind reading attainment. This article addresses these concerns by considering what might constitute s…
Shaping futures: Literacy policy in the twenty‐first century
When the United Nations marked the beginning of the twenty‐first century by establishing a set of Millennium Development Goals to end poverty, it was no surprise that achieving universal primary ed
Bad Boys and Good Girls? Patterns of Interaction and Response in Whole Class Teaching
The article describes the findings of a cross‐phase study into boys' underachievement which investigated patterns of classroom interaction by boys and girls. The data illustrate how underachievers, of either gender, are the least likely group to be participating positively in the classroom and most likely to be engaged in off‐task interactions. The underachieving boys' reluctance to participate emerges in year 1, but by year 4 the underachieving …
Seeing things differently: Teachers' constructions of underachievement
The identity of the underachiever has become synonymous with the stereotypical identity of boys. Teachers know what underachievement looks like: it looks like a boy who is bright, but bored. Evidence from a research study reported here demonstrates that teachers are more likely to select boys as underachievers than girls and that teachers construct underachievement differentially by gender. The consequence is that underachievement in girls is oft…
Troublesome boys’ and ‘compliant girls’: Gender identity and perceptions of achievement and underachievement
Working within a methodological framework that identified four focus groups, high‐achieving boys and girls and underachieving boys and girls, this article presents teachers' perceptions of how gender identity is seen to influence achievement levels. Beliefs about gender identity informed the teachers' perceptions in relation to each of the four focus groups, whereby the underachieving boy and the high‐achieving girl were seen to conform to gender…
Making Connections: Teachers’ Use of Children's Prior Knowledge in Whole Class Discourse
This paper investigates teachers’ use of prior knowledge in whole class teaching contexts and draws on data from an ESRC-funded study. The paper explores how teachers conceptualise prior knowledge, principally as that which has been taught in school. It demonstrates strong teacher awareness of how the teaching under consideration fits with learning previously undertaken by the class, but less awareness of how the learning might build on prior lea…
Talk, talk, talk: Teaching and learning in whole class discourse
UK national initiatives in education, such as the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, have been implemented to improve learning and raise standards. These initiatives place considerable significance on whole class interactive teaching, and political rhetoric makes great play of this pedagogic strategy. Teachers have been encouraged to use up to 15 minutes of whole class teaching in literacy and numeracy as a key focus for developing pupil …
Developmental trajectories in mastery of paragraphing: Towards a model of development
Learning to write paragraphs and thus learning how to sub-divide a text for topical and organisational coherence is an accepted part of acquiring writing maturity, and most teachers of writing will include explicit teaching of paragraphing techniques within their writing instruction classes. However, there is relatively little pedagogical or empirical attention devoted to understanding the nature of development in paragraphing — how writers incre…
Shaping futures: Literacy policy in the twenty‐first century
When the United Nations marked the beginning of the twenty‐first century by establishing a set of Millennium Development Goals to end poverty, it was no surprise that achieving universal primary ed
Children's patterns of composition and their reflections on their composing processes
This article reports on an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded study into secondary‐aged writers' compositional processes, both as observed in a naturalistic classroom setting and as gathered through post hoc reflections. The sample comprised 38 children drawn from Year 9 and Year 11 who were observed, using an annotated timeline, responding to a writing task in the classroom and were subsequently interviewed, using stimulated recall. The…
How Talk Becomes Text: Investigating the Concept of Oral Rehearsal in Early Years’ Classrooms
The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well-researched and well-understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term ‘oral rehearsal’ is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy documents, yet as a concept it is not well-theorised. Indeed, there is relatively little reference to the con…
TLRP’s ten principles
Since 2005, a number of special issues of Research Papers in Education have been devoted to reporting research from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), which is sponsored by the Ec
Re-thinking grammar: The impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing and students’ metalinguistic understanding
This paper reports on a national study, involving a mixed-method research design comprising a randomised controlled trial (RCT), text analysis, student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. It set out to investigate whether contextualised teaching of grammar, linked to the teaching of writing, would improve student outcomes in writing and in metalinguistic understanding. The RCT involved 744 students in 31 schools in the south-west and …
Grammar matters: How teachers' grammatical knowledge impacts on the teaching of writing
Da Fala Para a Escrita: O Desenvolvimento Linguístico Na Escrita
As pesquisas realizadas anteriormente sobre o desenvolvimento linguístico na escrita priorizavam seu desenvolvimento inicial e as interações entre fala-escrita na primeira fase de aquisição. Este estudo explorou o desenvolvimento linguístico em escreventes mais velhos, do segundo ciclo do ensino fundamental. Este estudo com duração de dois anos contém dois objetivos: investigar as construções linguísticas na escrita de estudantes secundários e ex…
Conceptualizing metalinguistic understanding in writing / Conceptualización de la competencia metalingüística en la escritura
This paper will present a theoretical analysis of research on metalinguistic understanding, illustrating how current research does not yet adequately address metalinguistic development in writing. Existing research on metalinguistic understanding has focused more on language acquisition, oral development and bilingual learners. Research on metalinguistic understanding in writing has tended to look more closely at young learners developing writing…
The impact of the socio-cultural context on L2 English writing of Egyptian university students
Writing conversations: Fostering metalinguistic discussion about writing
“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research Papers in Education on 08 January 2016, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02671522.2016.1106694.”
Dialogue, erasure and spontaneous comments during textual composition: What students' metalinguistic talk reveals about newly-literate writers’ understanding of revision
A Reflexive Approach to Teaching Writing: Enablements and Constraints in Primary School Classrooms
Writing requires a high level of nuanced decision-making related to language, purpose, audience, and medium. Writing teachers thus need a deep understanding of language, process, and pedagogy, and of the interface between them. This article draws on reflexivity theory to interrogate the pedagogical priorities and perspectives of 19 writing teachers in primary classrooms across Australia. Data are composed of teacher interview transcripts and nuan…
Grammar re-imagined: Foregrounding understanding of language choice in writing
The topic of grammar teaching has remained a stubbornly contentious subject of discussion for more than 50 years, tending towards binary, even polemical, positions. Yet scrutiny of the research shows how little attention has been afforded to considering what the relationship between learning about grammar and learning about being a language user might be; or to effective pedagogical practices for teaching grammar. Instead, the debate has reverted…
Jimmy Van Rijt: Understanding Grammar the Impact of Linguistic Metaconcepts on L1 Grammar Education
This book takes as its starting point the contested issue of explicit grammar teaching, providing a contextual framing for the book’s focus on learners’ development of conceptual understanding of linguistic terms. A thorough and critical synthesis of the ‘grammar debate’ is provided, drawing on perspectives from both L1 and L2, and from across different educational jurisdictions. This synthesis discusses the historical shift in L1 teaching, espec…
Engaging with readers: Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the use of pronouns in building reader-writer relationships
Students’ metalinguistic understanding of the written academic argument is important both to increase writer independence and inform writing instruction. This article draws on a study which investigated undergraduate students’ metalinguistic understanding of the metadiscourse features in their own written arguments. The specific focus of the paper is to determine what metalinguistic understanding students express about the use of pronouns in writ…
Writing as a craft: Re-considering teacher subject content knowledge for teaching writing
The importance of teacher subject knowledge as key professional knowledge has been emphasised in successive studies over the past thirty years, yet there are very few empirical studies which address either content or pedagogical knowledge for teaching writing. At the same time, in a number of international jurisdictions, writing attainment lags behind reading attainment. This article addresses these concerns by considering what might constitute s…
Going meta: Bringing together an understanding of metadiscourse with students’ metalinguistic understanding
The study involved a cross-linguistic corpus analysis of metadiscourse usage in first language (L1) Arabic university students' argumentative texts in English and Arabic in a university in Qatar, paralleled by 'writing conversation' interviews with a sub-sample of the student writers to explore their metalinguistic understanding of metadiscourse used in their own Arabic and English texts. Thus, it explored, firstly, the linguistic differences in …
Teaching creative writing in primary schools: A systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity
Teaching writing is complex and research related to approaches that support students’ understanding and outcomes in written assessment is prolific. Written aspects including text structure, purpose, and language conventions appear to be explicit elements teachers know how to teach. However, more qualitative and nuanced elements of writing such as authorial voice and creativity have received less attention. We conducted a systematic literature rev…
Qatari student writers’ metalinguistic understanding of transitions in L2 English written argument
Research in metadiscourse has foregrounded the multiple ways in which writers build a relationship with readers through internal discourse. Yet, few studies consider the relationship between the texts writers create and the metalinguistic thinking which informs their decision-making as writers. This paper draws on data from a larger study which sought to address this gap by investigating both the occurrence of metadiscourse in students’ writing a…
Psychology (22 works) · Linguistics (16 works) · Mathematics education (14 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (13 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Writing and Handwriting Education (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Teaching method (8 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (7 works)