Hello, I'm Debra Myhill and I'm a Professor of Education at the University of Exeter in England, and I run a centre for research in writing. I'm going to talk to you about writing, specifically about the three different dimensions of writing in research - cognitive, socio-cultural and linguistic - because they're different angles on writing and researchers research them from different perspectives. But in the writing classroom, we need to take account of all three because children themselves are individual writers with cognitive processes; they're in a classroom, which is social; and they're using language which is linguistic.

I'll go through each of the dimensions and look at associated classroom practices, but I'll also be emphasising the importance of what I've been calling going meta. Try to think about the teaching of writing as encouraging thinking, discussion and understanding, and not simply about doing. My hope is that, through this, you'll be able to reflect on your own writing classrooms and how you are nurturing children so that they can become thriving, flourishing writers who enjoy writing and feel that they are independent as authors.

Teaching a child to write is one of the most important things we do. We know how important reading is, but perhaps we forget just how important writing is. In our modern digital world writing is everywhere. Not just as standard written texts such as magazines, newspapers and books but also the myriad forms of digital writing - texts and emails blogs and websites and social media to name but a few.

Teaching a child to write is empowering them for the future. In this presentation I'm going to consider what it means to be a teacher of writing. Firstly, I'd like to offer an overview of how research can inform our understanding of writing and learning to write using this diagram to represent the key ideas.

Research on writing draws on three very different disciplines – psychology, sociology, and linguistics - which rarely engage with each other. One reason there are these different disciplinary perspectives is because writing is a very complex process involving our thinking and mental processes, our language skills and our social knowledge about writing. Each discipline is a particular focus or emphasis but, from the perspective of the classroom all three are important, as writers need to become increasingly adept at drawing on their linguistic, cognitive and cultural resources.

Framing the way you think about teaching writing using these three dimensions should help you plan and implement purposeful, engaging and creative writing lessons.

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Evolutionarily, we were never born to read. We were born to speak. Taste. Run. We were born to think. But never to read. Reading is a completely new circuit in the brain. So how in the world did it happen?

It happens because of certain principles that begin with the fact that we have neuroplasticity that allows us to create brand new circuits.

The reading brain is plastic. It's going to be influenced by what it reads, the written language, by your instruction. If you neglect some aspects that circuitry is not going to be as interesting, or work as well.

I want to emphasize just a few parts, but it is essential that you realise when you are working on the Big six, you are working on the precursors of the reading circuit. That's what you are doing.

And I break parts of the oral language system out. It's essential that we work on the phonemes of the language that is to be read.

And orthographic patterns, semantics, syntax, morphology, I truly call this POSSM, so that teachers realise one of the things we do, every single day in those early years, is to work on building representations and knowledge in phonology, orthography semantics, syntax and morphology.

Morphology simply refers to the tiniest units of meaning. So what the morphemes do is give us a heads up on fluency. The children who are learning the morphemes of their language are then given, by the time they're six and seven, the visual piece of that and it begins to literally build their fluency.

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My topic today is oracy, which I take to mean the proficient and capable use of spoken language.

I'm going to talk about oracy today in relation to two themes. Which you might think of as the two sides of the coin of oracy, in the sense that they're inseparable but I think can be made usefully distinct.

The first is learning through talk. By which I mean the use of spoken language as the medium for education by which teachers teach and students learn. And I'm going to talk about that under the heading of dialogic teaching. And so under it, I'll be concerned with teachers oracy skills as well as those of their students.

The other theme is learning to talk. As human beings, we're all uniquely programmed to learn language and to do so quite easily. But it's not hardwired in. Unlike the bees language, which they used to forage for nectar, which they're just born with, children have to learn language and it depends on the experiences they get as to how well they learn it and what they learn to do with it. So the quality of their language experience is crucial for the development of their oracy skills.

Dialogic teaching. Learning through talk.

Talk as a medium for classroom education has been the subject of study for many years. It only really became possible once recording of sound and vision was easy to achieve in classrooms. But it's only very recently that large-scale studies have been dedicated to understanding what makes talking classrooms effective or otherwise.

First of all, these teachers achieved higher levels of participation amongst our students. That is, more students were involved in talking with the teacher in the classroom, and with each other.

Secondly, they encourage their students to elaborate their ideas, not all the time but there were some times in which they really did try and get the students to explain a bit more what they were thinking. So they say 'well, can you tell me a bit more about that please' or 'I don't really sure what you mean. Can you say a bit more?' So the children were given the space and the opportunity to explain what they were thinking.

And thirdly, they encourage the questioning of ideas by students. They would say 'are you sure that's right' or 'do you agree with what Trevor said' or 'listen to what Marlene said, do you think really think she's on the right track there?' And so they actually got the children to use language to interrogate their own thoughts and those of the other students.

And then fourthly, they organized productive group work. On the basis of the research we've done and others have done we know that group work is most effective when people do these things.

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