Teaching an Embodied Thinking Process for Narrative Writing ‘With Grammar in Mind’: An Analysis of Writing Conferences and Teacher Talk

Figures & data

Figure 1. An illustration of writer and reader embodiment of narrative texts.

Table 1. Embodied concepts taught.

Embodied concept	Definition & Grammar	Abbreviated example of teaching
Vantage Point	The position in space from which the writer imagines their body viewing a scene, influencing choices of prepositional phrases (e.g. “beyond the hills”), adverbs (e.g. here; there) and verbs (e.g. came; went).	Imagine standing next to the character watching the scene unfold. Describe what is happening from your perspective using verb and prepositional phrases.
Scope	The closeness of the viewing angle to an object, limiting the degree of what a writer chooses to see in their imagination, influencing choice of noun phrases (e.g. “their hand” rather than “they”).	Zoom in close to just one part of the character’s body, so that you can’t see more than this part. Use a specific noun to perform the action.
Attentional Windowing	The writer’s ability to imagine tracking an object or character’s path of motion across space, influencing choices of verb and prepositional phrases (e.g. She dashed away, past the gate, and into the house).	Imagine watching the character move, from the start, through the middle, and to end. Describe their motion at each point using verbs or prepositions.
Fictive Motion	The writer’s ability to imaginatively scan the length of a stationary object to describe its size, influencing choices of action verb phrases (e.g. The tree rose from the ground; The tables stretched along the wall).	Look at that object in your mind, and scan from one end of it to the other. Describe that scanning using action verbs.
Figure & Ground	The writer’s ability to notice parts of a narrative scene that stand out to give them textual salience, influencing choices of deviating grammatical patterns (e.g. incomplete sentences; adjectives placed after nouns) and parallel grammar (e.g. repeated phrases).	Focus on the part of the scene that stands out most. Bring it into focus by using a repeated grammatical pattern.
Action Chains	The physical impact an object in the narrative scene has upon other object(s) altering them in some way, influencing choices of syntactic structure such as active clauses containing subjects and objects (e.g. He swung the bat, smashing the window).	When you feel that there is energy between things, imagine that energy passing from one thing to the other. Designate these as subjects and objects, and use active verbs to show that chain of energy between them.

Table 2. Summary of participating teachers’ experience.

	Teacher 1	Teacher 2	Teacher 3	Teacher 4
Years of teaching experience	26	22	9	20
Years of conferencing experience	6	6	5	7

Table 3. Themes and definitions identified in conference data.

Theme	Description	Number of conferences
Research
Building a shared narrative world Opening (40) Asking for elaboration (35) Narrowing (19)	Teacher questioning which supports the student to open up and elaborate upon sensory and emotive details of their narrative scene as a strategy for deciding what embodied concept to teach.	43
Missed opportunities for shared world building	Instances where an opportunity for the teacher to support the student to build a shared narrative world was missed in favor of researching the student’s attempt at skills.	32
Decide
Teaching point-research connection	Teaching points introduced emerge from the shared world building of the research stage.	40
No teaching point-research connection	Teaching points introduced independently from the research stage.	29
Teach
Grammar-embodiment link – explicit	Teacher-led explanations of embodied effect with explicit reference made to grammatical examples.	22
Grammar-embodiment link – implicit	Teacher-led explanations of embodied effect explored through several linguistically similar examples without reference to grammar.	30
Deviations States embodied concept without attempt to explore it (22) Deviating from embodied concept (17) Deviating from grammatical concept (15) Deviating from both grammatical and embodied concept (5)	Instances where the teacher has misunderstood either or both the embodied effect or the grammatical concept in their explanations.	24
Inviting student to imagine own narrative world differently Teacher-student collaborating to construct world (22) Instruction to construct world independently (11)	Dialogue which supports the student to embody their narrative scene according to the concept taught.	33
Directive text instruction	Teacher directions on what to write or instruction to deploy particular grammatical features.	29
Collaboration on text building	Teacher questioning that supports the student’s sentence construction according to the embodied concept taught.	15
Missed opportunity to collaborate on text building	Instances that presented as an opportunity to support the student to build a sentence, but were missed.	32