Sheffield Hallam University

Presented by Dr Lucy Taylor

Wednesday, 22nd May 2019, 16:30-18:00
Room 12.4.19, Charles Street Building, Sheffield Hallam University

This seminar explores some of the findings of a research project which investigated children’s free reading and writing choices. Data were collected in the form of survey responses, writing journals and interviews, with a key finding that 88% of the participants chose to write the type of texts they said they liked to read.

There was a clear indication that there was a link between children’s leisure reading and their volitional writing across a wide range of text types. In many cases these were not types of text that had been part of their school curriculum and demonstrated imaginative flexibility with form, content and style. It became apparent that the ways of thinking and talking about children’s texts that were available to me as a literacy researcher were not adequate and that I needed to take a new approach if I wanted to examine the relationships between reading and writing reflected in my data set.

In this seminar I will use examples from the data set of children’s writing to discuss my processes in working towards an approach drawing on the insights from new literacy studies and from cognitive linguistics. I will discuss how I used Text World Theory as a lens through which to view children’s reading and writing, and consider further questions raised by my research. I will show that it is important to continue to find new ways of thinking and talking about children as readers and writers, and new ways of responding to their created texts.

Dr Lucy Taylor is Lecturer in Education at the University of Leeds, specialising in Primary English. Her interests include children's reading and writing, multimodal literacies and children's literature.

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