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Introduction: The act of writing is widely acknowledged to be a complex and challenging activity, and in parallel, we know that student motivation to write is a predictor of writing performance. So understanding what characteristics of the writing classroom support or foster motivation remains a salient concern. Research has shown that UK teachers are more likely to see themselves as readers than writers, which may affect how they teach writing. Methods: This paper reports on student focus group interview data from a study which sought to strengthen teachers' sense of themselves as writers, and to examine the impact of this on students' classroom experience of writing and their writing outcomes. The participant teachers experienced a creative writing residential, which established a writing community led by two professional writers, with the goal of changing teachers' professional practice in their own writing classrooms. The study was mixed methods, comprising a randomized controlled trial and a comprehensive qualitative dataset collating data from both the residential and the classroom. This paper presents the qualitative analysis of 32 interviews with 16 student focus groups, exploring their responses to their teachers' changed practices and how it connected with their motivation to write. Results: The interview analysis shows how many students responded positively to new teaching practices which gave them greater autonomy and choice, and established a more collaborative way of working. This led to increased confidence in and motivation to write. Discussion: The study highlights the importance of the classroom environment in supporting and sustaining motivation to write, and underlines that motivation is not simply an internal characteristic of an individual but is situated within the context of a community of writers.
RESUMEN
This mixed-method quasi-experimental study examined whether metaconceptual grammar teaching impacts on (a) students' L1 grammatical understanding, (b) their 'blind' use of grammatical concepts and (c) their preference of using explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in explaining grammatical problems. Previous research, involving single group pre-postintervention designs, found positive effects for metaconceptual interventions on secondary school students' grammatical reasoning ability, although a negative side effect seemed to be that some students started using grammatical concepts 'blindly' (i.e., in an inaccurate way). While there are thus important clues that metaconceptual grammar teaching may lead to increased grammatical understanding, there is a great need for more robust empirical research. The current study, involving 196 Dutch 14-year old pre-university students, is a methodological improvement of previous work, adopting a switching replications design. Bayesian multivariate analyses indicate medium to large effects from the metaconceptual intervention on students' grammatical understanding. The study found a similar effect of the intervention on students' ability to use explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in tackling grammatical problems. No evidence for increased 'blind' concept use as a negative byproduct of the intervention was found. Additional qualitative analyses of in-intervention tasks provided further evidence for the effectiveness of metaconceptual interventions, and seemed to indicate that cases of blind concept use, rather than being a negative side effect, might actually be part of a gradual process of students' growing understanding of grammatical (meta)concepts. We discuss these findings in relation to previous work and conclude that linguistic metaconcepts can improve L1 grammatical understanding.
