Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction
for Learning to Make Writing Moves
in Literary Arguments
Jennifer VanDerHeide
Michigan State University, East Lansing,
USA
Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
pp. 1–22 | doi:10.1002/rrq.196
© 2017 International Literacy Association.
ABSTR ACT
Although teaching argumentative writing in schools is often about teaching
argumentative forms, this instructional approach limits students’ flexibility
and choice as writers, readers, and meaning makers. An alternative meth-
od, rooted in tenets of genre theory, offers a different approach. Rather
than treating argument as a static form, genre theory assumes that genres
(­including argumentative genres) are situated, typified ways that people
make moves through writing to accomplish goals through language. Taking
a genre theory and sociocultural, discourse lens, this article explores how
a teacher in an Advanced Placement Literature course approached the
teaching of argumentative writing. Through a moves analysis of focal stu-
dent ­essays and a discourse analysis of classroom talk, the study asks two
questions: (1) How does the teacher, through classroom talk, support stu-
dents in making moves of literary argument? (2) How do students make these
moves in s­ peaking and writing? Findings identify argumentative moves and
submoves that students made in their argumentative essays. The teacher
supported students’ learning by explicitly pointing to these moves in model
essays, ­posing ­questions that prompted students to make the same moves in
classroom talk, and revoicing student responses in more disciplinary ways.
Through small-­and large-­group discussions, students learned to make moves
that they later made in essays. In identifying classroom talk moves that serve
argumentative writing instruction in literary studies, these findings have
implications for classroom-­based argument writing instruction, for literacy
teacher preparation and professional development, and for future research
on approaches to teaching literature and writing.
T
he National Council of Teachers of English’s (2016) position
statement “Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of
Writing” forwards several beliefs about writing held by the pro-
fessional organization: Writing grows out of many purposes, writing
is embedded in complex social relations and their appropriate lan-
guages, everyone has the capacity to write, writing can be taught,
teachers can help students become better writers, writing is a process,
writing has a complex relation with talk, and writing and reading are
related. These beliefs, which draw on research, theory, and the exper-
tise of the researchers and teachers who drafted them, reflect an un-
derstanding of writing that is contextualized and complex and
foregrounds students’ agency as developing writers.
However, the teaching and learning of argumentative writing in
schools does not always reflect these tenets. Even in classrooms where
the teaching of other types of writing, such as narrative or poetry, re-
flects more contextualized, student-­ driven, multimodal composing,
1
learning to write arguments is often reduced to learning
to follow a form. My experiences as a researcher on a
large-­scale observational study of high school English
teachers’ teaching of argumentative writing (Newell,
Bloome, & Hirvela, 2015), as an instructor of preservice
teachers, and in providing professional development to
inservice teachers have introduced me to a variety of acro-
nyms for forms for written arguments, such as PIE (point,
information, and explanation), CER (claim, evidence, and
reasoning), ICEE (introduce a quote, cite a quote, explain
what it means, and evaluate why it matters), OREO (opin-
ion, reasons, examples, and opinion), as well as specific
requirements for the structure of the essay, such as five
paragraphs, two examples and a warrant in each para-
graph, and a counterargument paragraph. When argu-
ments are reduced to forms where students are asked to
drop content into predetermined slots, students are not
learning how to make arguments within the full com-
plexity of real social or disciplinary argumentation.
The purpose of this study is to explore one teacher’s
instructional method for teaching argumentative writ-
ing, a method that did not specify a particular form that
students needed to use. Instead, her instruction helped
students learn to make the moves—ways of acting in
writing—that constitute literary argument. I seek to ex-
plore what an alternative method may be, particularly
what the students are learning to do in and through
writing and how the teacher scaffolds this learning. In
so doing, I hope to add to the ongoing conversation on
how to teach argumentative writing with an option that
allows for flexibility and choice in what students write
and how they write it.
Theoretical Framework
and Related Literature
In this section, I explore typical approaches to argu-
mentative writing instruction. I then move to a brief in-
troduction of genre theory and explore how genre
theory offers a new perspective on teaching argumenta-
tive writing, an approach that focuses on teaching stu-
dents how to make the moves of a genre. Next, I explore
previous studies on literary argument to suggest the
different moves that might comprise it. Last, I discuss
theories of language and studies of classroom discourse
to suggest how students might learn to make these writ-
ing moves.
Typical Approaches to
Argumentative Writing Instruction
Although teachers and researchers have employed myr-
iad approaches to teach argumentative writing (for a
full review, see Newell, Beach, Smith, & VanDerHeide,
2 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
2011), three common approaches are teaching students
how to reason argumentatively, teaching students how
to use expert strategies, and teaching students argu-
mentative forms. The first approach focuses on scaf-
folding students’ reasoning so they learn to be explicit
about the connections between their claims and evi-
dence. One means of scaffolding is graphic organizers
that prompt students to organize a claim, supporting
reasons, counterargument, and explanations into a vi-
sual structure. Yeh’s (1998) pyramid-­like graphic orga-
nizer and bridge graphic organizer supported students’
reasoning in their essays in flexible ways. Another pri-
mary approach for teaching students to reason is
Hillocks’s (2011) inquiry approach. The key feature of it
is that the teacher sets up activities in which students
develop procedural knowledge for composing in the
genre through inquiry. As an example, one of Hillocks’s
activities asks students to examine an image of a crime
scene and make claims, based on the evidence provided
in the image, on what happened or who committed the
crime. The lesson includes the teacher prompting stu-
dents to unpack their reasoning, focusing on general
rules or warrants about how a piece of evidence sup-
ports their claim. Although quite different, these two
methods both value teaching students how to reason:
how to make claims, support them with evidence, and
provide warrants—or reasoning—to back up the evi-
dence. An assumption of both methods is that writing
is a form of reasoning, so to learn how to write, students
need to learn how to reason more effectively.
A second approach to teaching argumentative writ-
ing centers on teaching students expert criteria for good
writing and strategies to compose using these criteria,
such as Nussbaum and Schraw’s (2007) intervention
that taught students three strategies to integrate argu-
ments and counterarguments. Scholars of disciplinary
argumentative writing have taken up this approach
with the belief that experts in different disciplines em-
ploy different strategies to write arguments. For exam-
ple, De La Paz et al. (2017) taught students a system of
reading strategies (IREAD) to identify and evaluate evi-
dence in historical texts and taught strategies to write to
compose historical arguments, such as evaluating a
quote or providing a rebuttal. Similarly, when second-
ary and college students learned to employ specific
strategies for analyzing and writing arguments about
literature—drawn from studies of strategies that liter-
ary scholars employed (Fahnestock & Secor, 1991)—re-
searchers found that their essays were higher quality
and used greater textual evidence (Lewis & Ferretti,
2009; Wilder & Wolfe, 2009). The assumption for this
approach is that expert writers use cognitive strategies
to produce better texts, and by teaching students the
qualities of these better texts and how to employ these
strategies, students will write more like experts.
 A third common approach to teaching argumenta-
tive writing is teaching the form of argument. Although
writing scholars have not advocated or studied the effi-
cacy of this approach, studies of classroom instruction
have shown that teachers use these forms and acronyms
(e.g., those described earlier). Johnson, Thompson,
Smagorinsky, and Fry (2003) argued that the five-­
paragraph essay is ubiquitous in classrooms. Applebee
and Langer (2011) noted that the highest approach to
writing instruction (94.4% of English teachers surveyed)
was to “clearly specify the specific parts that must be in-
cluded in a particular kind of writing assignment” (p.
20). Underlying this structural formalist approach is a
belief that writing is a text and that to learn how to write,
students need to learn about texts and the parts of texts.
Writing scholars have expressed concerns over this fo-
cus on form and structure in schools. One concern is
that it actually is not teaching students how to write:
“The dangers of rote application are that gains would be
lost as soon as procedures are forgotten, transfer to un-
familiar situations would be limited, and students would
be unable to flexibly adapt the heuristics as needed”
(Yeh, 1998, p. 71). Hillocks (2005) worried that the focus
on form is at the expense of content, that the substance
of students’ writing does not matter. My concern is that
strict forms limit the potential texts that students can
create, limiting their learning and their participation in
classroom, disciplinary, and larger social conversations.
A Writing Moves Approach:
Learning From Genre Theory
The assumption in the previous examples is that argu-
mentative writing is a written text or a system of rea-
soning or enacted strategies. An alternative assumption
is that argumentative writing is social action, a theory
rooted in genre theory, which argues that genre is a so-
cial action (Miller, 1984). Genre theory’s focus on action
in and through writing offers a richer understanding of
argumentative writing and suggests potential methods
for teaching the genre. Rather than conceive of a genre
(e.g., argument) as a fixed form, genre is “the action it is
used to accomplish” (p. 151). Genre can then be under-
stood as actions through language that are typified in a
particular context for a particular purpose by “the peo-
ple who participate in genres and make the forms
meaningful” (Devitt, 2004, p. 3). This rhetorical action
involves both the substance of the writing (the ideas)
and the form it takes, and writers choose how to act,
what to say, and how to say it depending on the particu-
lar rhetorical circumstances, such as the audience and
what the writer hopes to accomplish (Devitt, 2004).
Genre scholars have described these circumstances
as the rhetorical situation. Although situation is a con-
cept with diverse definitions, simply put, the situation is
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 3
the multifaceted context in which the writer is writing,
and the context impacts the purposes for writing and
also affords and constrains the actions that are appro-
priate for writers to make (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010). At
the same time, writers participating in a genre within a
situation together make the situation (Collin, 2013).
To identify the typified actions in a recurring situa-
tion that constitute a genre, Bazerman (2004) argued
that an analytic tool is to look at the work people ac-
complish through the genre; rather than trying to un-
derstand a genre by its features, Bazerman suggested
instead looking at the actions that the features index.
Harris (2006) called these actions writing moves: ac-
tions people take in writing to get work done. These te-
nets of genre theory afford a view of argumentative
writing that is not situated in texts, reasoning, or com-
position strategies but in social action. Genre theory as-
sumes students to be writers who participate in
argumentative writing through making moves, moves
that help them accomplish work. Because genres are en-
acted in situations, there is no one decontextualized ar-
gument that students must learn how to write; instead,
students, as they write in a particular context or situa-
tion, help make the genre through their moves. So, what
counts as writing literary argument in one classroom
will likely differ from what counts as literary argument
in another classroom.
Some might argue that classrooms are not real situ-
ations and that the writing students do in classrooms is
not real work that they want to accomplish. However,
Bawarshi (2003) argued that a “classroom in its own
right is a dynamic, textured site of action mediated by a
range of complex written and spoken genres that con-
stitute student–teacher positions, relations, and prac-
tices” (p. 118). Whitney (2011) suggested that “the world
of the classroom…[is] just as real as the one outside”
(p.  58). There are likely various reasons why students
participate in social action through writing as they
­participate in classrooms.
Composition scholars and instructors at the college
level have advocated for a more inquiry-­oriented ap-
proach to writing instruction focused on participating
in genres within various rhetorical situations (Carter,
2009). This pedagogical model begins with students in-
vestigating the writing practices and rhetorical moves
within a real-­life literacy context, followed by participa-
tion in that rhetorical situation with writing. Collin
(2013) suggested a similar approach to teaching writing
in secondary classrooms, in which students collect texts
within a genre, collect data on how writers of that genre
participate in it, analyze texts to identify patterns of
moves, and analyze how those patterns help people take
action in a situation. In other words, students
­analyze  the moves writers make in a genre and what
those moves help them accomplish. Dean (2008)
suggested similar instructional methods but also
­advocated for varying students’ action in genres by
­asking them to write in atypical or combining genres.
Common Moves in Literary Argument
Arguments about literature vary because writers have
multiple purposes for reading, interpreting, and re-
sponding to literature. The kinds of moves students make
to participate in literary arguments relate to these pur-
poses and practices, often rooted in different critical the-
ories (Macaluso, 2015). In Hillocks’s (2011) widely used
practitioner book, he advocated for teaching students to
write literary arguments of judgment, such as whether a
character shows courage. To write this kind of argument,
students need to determine the qualities that constitute
courage; then, they make a claim about whether the
character shows these qualities, provide evidence from
the literature where the character does or does not show
courage, and provide warrants about how that evidence
exhibits or does not exhibit the qualities of courage. The
moves students need to make in this kind of literary ar-
gument differ from arguments that ask students to do a
different kind of interpretation.
For example, Sosa, Hall, Goldman, and Lee (2016)
asked students to write a literary argument to compare
and contrast how symbols in two stories “help you un-
derstand the characters and their worlds” (p. 106). Their
analytic rubric measured two dimensions: literary ar-
gumentation and literary interpretation. For literary ar-
gumentation, the researchers measured the students’
claims, evidence, and reasoning—principles or rules
that relate evidence to claims. These argumentative ele-
ments, like Hillocks’s (2011) literary argument, show
echoes of Toulmin’s (1958) model. However, the dimen-
sion of literary interpretation differed from the neces-
sary elements in Hillocks’s argument. Sosa et  al.
assessed for identification and interpretation of sym-
bolism, discussion of character change, and compari-
son and contrast of the symbols across the stories,
moves that differed from what Hillocks suggested for
an argument of judgment.
Previous studies have also shown additional moves
writers can make in literary argumentation. Marshall
(1987) and Newell (1996) studied students’ responses to
differing literary analysis tasks, some of which were ar-
gumentative, to determine how different tasks affect the
ways students write interpretations and arguments. The
researchers analyzed students’ writing for mode of liter-
ary response, drawing on the work of Purves and
Rippere (1968), and identified these modes as different
kinds of statements: descriptive (retelling part of a
story), personal (personal reaction to the story), associa-
tive (drawing on personal experience and knowledge to
understand the text), interpretive (inferences about
4 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
characters, form, or content), and evaluative (assessing
quality; modified from Marshall, 1987, & Newell, 1996).
I suggest that these statements are also different types of
moves that these students made in their literary inter-
pretations. Marshall and Newell found that students
made different kinds of moves depending on the writing
prompts and on the teacher’s instructional stance.
These types of arguments differ from what Rainey
(2017) found in a recent study of literature professors’
literary literacy practices. She identified six primary
practices employed in reading and interpreting litera-
ture as the professors participate in a larger community
of scholars through their writing (practices that likely
become moves in their writing): seeking patterns, iden-
tifying strangeness, articulating a puzzle, considering
possibilities, considering contexts, and making a claim.
Aside from making a claim, these moves are quite dif-
ferent from those in the studies and practitioner materi-
als associated with secondary classrooms. These moves
center on a view of argument as making a claim about
an interpretive puzzle or problem.
How Students Learn to Make
Writing Moves
How then might students learn to make these varied
writing moves? Theories of writing and learning sug-
gest that students need task-­specific (Hillocks, 1995)
knowledge of these moves (what Hillocks called declar-
ative knowledge), and students can learn about these
moves and how to make them (what he termed proce-
dural knowledge) within a social and cultural commu-
nity by participating through language. Rather than
viewing learning of procedural and declarative knowl-
edge as an individual, cognitive endeavor, I draw on
Rogoff’s (1990) stance that “learning is a process of
changing participation in community activities”
(p. 284). Vygotsky’s (1978) theory suggests that as p
­ eople
participate through language with others, the ways of
participating out in the intermental (social) plane move
to the intramental (individual) plane.
According to Vološinov (1973), individual con-
sciousnesses only come into contact in the presence of
semiotic material:
Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction
­between one individual consciousness and another. And the
individual consciousness itself is filled with signs.
Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been
filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently,
only in the process of social interaction. (p. 11)
This argument suggests a dialectic process that s­ emiotic
material, such as language-­in-­use, brings about: An in-
dividual puts forth ideas and meaning through
language-­in-­use and, in doing so, comes into contact
with the ideas and meaning of others, influencing oth-
ers’ consciousnesses and one’s own. It may be that as
students participate in classroom talk, they internalize
the ways they participate—the moves that they make—
and can then act in these same ways on their own, such
as in their writing.
In addition, Bakhtin (1981) suggested that all lan-
guage has within it an embedded history and future.
Bakhtin (1981) argued that all speech is dialogic, that an
utterance reflects not only the person speaking but also
all of those to whom the utterance is addressed. An ut-
terance is always a response in a social, cultural, histori-
cal context, part of a chain of utterances and voices
(Bakhtin, 1986), even when the voices to which the ut-
terance is addressed are “temporally, spatially, and his-
torically distant” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 53). These ideas
suggest that when students make moves in speaking
and in writing, the moves are in response to prior
teacher and student discourse and anticipate future re-
sponses; the classroom history and future are embed-
ded within students’ talk and writing.
How teachers structure classroom talk, then, can
provide opportunities for students to participate
through language. Students need “involvement in
thoughtful and reasoned dialogue, in which their teach-
ers ‘model’ useful language strategies and in which they
can practice using language to reason, to reflect, to en-
quire, and to explain their reasoning to others” (Mercer
& Littleton, 2007, p. 56). Two ways that teachers struc-
ture classroom talk are through questions and revoic-
ing. As Boyd and Rubin (2006) found, teachers’
questions work strategically to prompt different kinds
of responses from students over time, to move them to-
ward particular goals, which can prompt the reasoning,
reflecting, inquiring, and explaining that Mercer and
Littleton said students need. Revoicing (O’Connor &
Michaels, 1993) is also a move teachers make to show
students how to better align their own talk with the ex-
pectations of the classroom and disciplinary commu-
nity, a way to model language use. Teachers revoice a
student’s talk when they repeat back the main ideas the
student offered in a more disciplinary way, such as re-
sponding to the student’s description of a character
with a response such as “Joe certainly was a flat charac-
ter because he did not change throughout the story.”
Studies of argumentative writing instruction have
shown that classroom talk and learning to write are in-
tertwined in many ways. When students talk together
as a whole class or small group about the content of
their writing, they develop and borrow ideas that can
become sedimented in the writing (Kamberelis &
Scott, 1992; Sperling, 1995). Students also learn aspects
of how to write as they participate in talk. When talk-
ing about a genre such as argument, students’ under-
standings of the genre are situated in how the teacher
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 5
and students together construct the elements of it
(Lunsford, 2002), and students take up the teacher’s
way of talking when discussing writing models
(Samuelson, 2009). Within the context of literature
classrooms, the focus of discussions of literature also
points to what is worth talking and writing about in
literature. In a study of an Advanced Placement (AP)
Literature course, Rex and McEachen (1999) found that
classroom talk cued students to pay attention to aspects
of the literature they found puzzling. Wiseman and
Many (1991) found that the overarching literary stance
of the course had an effect on how undergraduate stu-
dents responded in writing to literature; students
whose courses took an efferent stance wrote from that
stance, whereas students whose courses took an aes-
thetic stance responded aesthetically.
Wiseman and Many’s (1991) finding foreshadowed
Nystrand and Graff’s (2001) study, which found stu-
dents writing reports instead of arguments, despite
much instruction in how to write an argument. Upon
closer analysis of the ongoing discourse of the class-
room, Nystrand and Graff found that the overall nature
of the discourse, or classroom ecology, invited closure
rather than dialogue, which may have encouraged stu-
dents to write in ways that followed a form and met the
requirements that they assumed their teacher wanted.
In contrast, when students learned to engage with one
another in verbal argumentation, a discussion approach
called collaborative reasoning, they used more of the
same argumentative moves in their subsequent writing,
without any specific instruction in argumentative writ-
ing (Reznitskaya et al., 2001).
To bring together genre theory, sociocultural the-
ory, and theories of language, then, I argue that learn-
ing to write in classrooms is not about learning
particular forms; rather, it is learning to participate in
social action to achieve particular goals through mak-
ing moves, which are typified ways of participating in
the genre. Students learn to make these moves through
social interaction, interacting with the teacher and
other students with language in ways that build their
declarative and procedural knowledge of the genre’s
moves. These interactions are dialogic and contextual-
ized sets of moves in speaking and writing through
which students respond to the teacher and other stu-
dents while participating in social action within the
classroom.
To better understand how a pedagogy focused on
moves might play out in a high school English language
arts classroom—a space that currently has a variety of
curricular and assessment constraints—this study ex-
plores the case of a senior-­year AP Literature course in
which the teacher did not teach students a particular
form for argumentative writing, despite the standard-
ized nature of the AP Literature curriculum and
summative exam. Instead, the focus of the curriculum
and instruction throughout the course was on teaching
students to make the interpretive, analytic, and argu-
mentative moves valued on the AP Literature exam, and
this instruction took place primarily through classroom
talk. Specifically, this study addresses two research
questions:
1. How does the teacher, through classroom talk,
support students in making moves of literary
argument?
2. How do students make these moves in speaking
and writing?
Method
This article draws from a semester-­ long (August
through December) study of students’ argumentative
writing development in one 12th-­grade AP Literature
course at a suburban high school. Participants were the
teacher (Ms. Howard; all participant and school names
are pseudonyms) and 20 students (nine males and 11 fe-
males). At the time of the study, Ms. Howard was in her
18th year of teaching at Bradford High School, her only
teaching position. For her, the teaching of writing was
an everyday activity because she saw everything that
she and the students did as being part of her writing in-
struction: reading literature, learning to analyze litera-
ture, discussing literature in class, writing informal
reflections, annotating readings, sharing writing in
groups, and so forth—all the teaching and learning of
writing. The particular context of AP Literature is well
suited to this study, as the primary purpose of the
course is to prepare for a standardized test, a similar
context to many secondary English classrooms in the
United States. This article focuses on a poetry unit that
took place from September through mid-­November. In
this unit, the students learned various poetic devices,
how to identify and analyze those devices within the
context of poems, and how to write arguments about
their interpretation and analysis of poetry.
Out of the students who agreed to be regularly in-
terviewed, Ms. Howard and I chose five focal students
who represented different kinds of experience with
writing literary argument. Lisa was the strongest reader
and writer in the class. She was analytical in her reading
of literature and in her reflections on her writing and
writing process and was a frequent contributor to
whole-­class discussions. Nick, who Ms. Howard sug-
gested as a focal student because she thought he would
be a strong writer based on his work in previous courses,
did not work overly hard in the class, as he admitted to
both Ms. Howard and me; she described his participa-
tion in class and his writing as “just skating on the
6 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
surface.” Ashley struggled with writing more than most
students in the class and rarely participated in whole-­
class discussions. She explained to me that she found
literature, especially poetry, hard to understand and
write about. Abe was a more typical writer in the course,
participated often in class discussions, typically with
great humor, and was thoughtful when describing his
writing and writing processes in interviews. Kate strug-
gled with reading and writing, she admitted to me, and
as a result did not participate much in whole-­class talk.
However, she said she appreciated listening to how
other students were understanding the reading.
Classroom Context
and Rhetorical Situation
As an AP course, it aligned with the goals set by the
College Board. The following is the College Board’s de-
scription of the goals of AP Literature; note how the
language focuses on text and the formal elements
within the text that contribute to meaning:
The course engages students in the close reading and criti-
cal analysis of imaginative literature to deepen their under-
standing of the ways writers use language to provide both
meaning and pleasure. As they read, students consider a
work’s structure, style, and themes, as well as its use of figu-
rative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone. (College
Board, 2017, para. 2)
Ms. Howard’s goals for the course aligned with the
goals set out by the College Board, as she indicated in an
interview, that the “main goals and purposes of this
course would be to teach students to think critically
about literature in a way that has them analyze how au-
thors use the tools of literature to create meaning.” The
test was scheduled for May.
Moving the context and rhetorical situation from
the AP course and test to the field of literature, Ms.
Howard identified her theoretical background as New
Criticism. According to Tyson (2006), the goal of New
Criticism is to analyze a piece of literature closely to un-
derstand how the formal elements work to create a
theme: “how something operates within the overall
meaning of the text was always the bottom line for New
Criticism” (p. 142). Her theoretical orientation was to
focus on understanding how the literary text works. A
few years ago when I interviewed Ms. Howard for a pre-
vious study, she used a sports car as a metaphor for lit-
erature. She explained that although one can certainly
enjoy a sports car by riding in it or driving fast, the peo-
ple who appreciate sports cars the most are those who
can look under the hood and understand how it works,
how it is able to drive fast and create the pleasurable ex-
perience of driving it. This orientation is rooted in the
goals of the AP test.
Instructional Context
Across the first semester, the course comprised three
units, each focused on a particular genre: poetry, a
Shakespearean play, and short stories. Ms. Howard ex-
plained her reasoning for the poetry unit, which is the
focus of this study:
Poetry allows for that practicing, that very intense close
reading, because the texts are shorter; they’re so much more
compact in their use of devices that just having the opportu-
nity to look closely in that way at these shorter pieces of lit-
erature, I think, has value.
Across these units, the students participated in
many different types of writing assignments: annotat-
ing readings, informal reading journals, poetry re-
sponses, independent reading papers, timed in-­class
essays to released AP Literature prompts, and summa-
tive out-­of-­class essays. For this study, I focus on the last
two types because they have similar tasks, and the
teacher and students spent the most time in class ad-
dressing them. This study focuses on the first three in-­
class essays (all in response to poetry) and the
out-­of-­class interpretive argument on a poem of their
choice.
In-­Class Essays
Approximately every four to six weeks, Ms. Howard
paused instruction for a couple days so students could
practice responding to a released AP Literature writing
prompt. The first three prompts were all interpretive
arguments about poetry. These essays were not graded
as part of the course, but Ms. Howard used them as a
formative assessment.
Out-­of-­Class Interpretive Arguments
At the end of each unit, Ms. Howard typically assigned
a summative, out-­of-­class interpretive argument. For
these essays, students could choose which piece of liter-
ature to write about and would develop their own argu-
ment about the piece. These essays each took several
weeks to write, as Ms. Howard had students first write
proposals (informal outlines) of the argument, which
they would submit to her for written feedback prior to
writing the essay. Because of the long process of the es-
say, the writing extended over several weeks, as the sub-
sequent unit progressed.
Methodology
This study is the case of one teacher’s instructional ap-
proach to teaching her students to write literary argu-
ments. I took an ethnographic stance (Dixon & Green,
2005) to best understand what the teacher and students
understood literary argument to be and how the
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 7
students learned to write these arguments. I employed
ethnographic methods of data collection (Heath &
Street, 2008) to study the situatedness of teaching and
learning in this context. To analyze these cultural pro-
cesses as they were constructed through language,
I used analytic methods from a genre theory perspec-
tive (Swales, 1990) to analyze students’ writing and
­discourse analytic methods (Bloome, Carter, Christian,
Otto, & Shuart-­Faris, 2005) to understand classroom
talk. I chose to bring together these two methods of
analysis as a means of creating a bridge between class-
room talk and the subsequent texts that students pro-
duce. Both methods look closely at language to make
sense of the actions people accomplish through writing
(moves analysis) and talk (discourse analysis) and the
particular ways they are working to accomplish this
­social action.
Data Collection
My primary methods of data collection consisted of
daily video and audio recorded observations, collection
of student-­and teacher-­created texts and artifacts, and
text-­based interviews with the teacher and five focal
students. I observed the class daily as a participant ob-
server, taking field notes and recording whole-­class and
small-­group activities with one video camera posi-
tioned on the teacher and most of the students and
three audio recorders placed around the room. When
students moved into self-­selected small groups, I placed
the camera and audio recorders in groups with focal
students. Collected texts and artifacts included class-
room handouts, all students’ on-­demand writing and
formal essays, and informal writing and drafts from the
focal students. In this study, I foreground the five focal
students’ three on-­ demand essays and one process-­
written summative essay.
I conducted retrospective, text-­ based interviews
(Prior, 1991) with the teacher and the focal students ap-
proximately once a month. My interviews with Ms.
Howard were typically about 50 minutes long, during
her planning period. We studied samples of student
writing, and I asked probing questions to better under-
stand how she viewed the students’ writing, what she
valued, and what she noticed students to be on the verge
of doing. I timed my interviews with the students to co-
incide with writing events. I met with the five students
individually and asked them to talk me through their
essay and their writing process, hoping to better under-
stand how they each conceived of the writing task and
to clarify terminology they used to describe their writ-
ing. When I needed clarification, I asked them to define
the term and then followed up by asking them to point
to and read a portion of their writing where they had
made that move.
Analysis
Moves Analysis of Students’ Essays
To determine the writing moves that the students em-
ployed, I conducted a moves analysis (Swales, 1990),
analyzing the five focal students’ four argumentative
essays (20 total) from across the semester for the par-
ticular writing moves they made in their literary argu-
ments. According to Upton and Cohen (2009), to
determine the unit of analysis, a moves analysis begins
with an analysis of the written texts for the possible
moves the writers make in the genre. The parsing and
naming of the moves was primarily influenced by the
interviews with the teacher and focal students about
what they understood the writing task to be; I delin-
eated chunks of text that had a specific function war-
ranted by the interview discussions. The first level of
moves, or functions, was a parsing of the essays into the
argumentative function of the different chunks of text. I
chose to foreground the argumentative function as the
genre, as named by the teacher and the students as a lit-
erary argument. Although my parsing and naming of
these moves was influenced by Toulmin’s (1958) catego-
ries due to their prevalence in English classrooms today,
I aimed to parse and name the moves as the students
and teacher used and discussed them. As a result, some
of the moves that Toulmin identified, such as counter-
argument, were not present in the students’ essays.
However, because these essays were literary argu-
ments, analyzing for the argumentative moves did not
account for the disciplinary-­based action the students
made in their writing. To account for the literary as-
pects of the arguments, I conducted a secondary analy-
sis of the ways the students made argumentative moves.
Although Swales (1990) and Upton and Cohen (2009)
would label these parts of moves as steps, I use the term
submoves because the literary-­specific submoves consti-
tute the argumentative moves. As in the first step of the
moves analysis, I aimed to parse and name the sub-
moves that the students made in the essays. Table  1
identifies, defines, and provides an example of all of the
moves and submoves derived from the moves analysis,
and Table 2 illustrates an analysis of a sample student
paragraph.

TABLE 1
Categories of Writing Moves Derived From Moves Analysis
Move Description Example from student essays
Primary moves

Making a claim Stating an arguable stance “The figurative language throughout

the poem helps portray Collins’ attitude
toward sonnets.”

Providing evidence Giving support (e.g., example, quote) for “In one of the first lines, the speaker
arguable stance says, ‘only ten more left like rows of
beans.’”

Providing commentary Commenting on evidence in a way that “Sonnets are known to be magnificent
works toward showing the reasoning that and interesting, yet the simile of ‘rows
links evidence to the claim and beans’ portrays them as boring and
homogenous.”

Literary analysis submoves

Retelling Providing a summary of or paraphrasing “The first stanza is like, this is what life
main points or events in a poem and then this is death.”

Stating meaning Stating a theme of a poem; theme can be “It’s critical of what modern warfare does
explicitly named in the message unit or to people.”
index a previously named theme

Pointing to the text At least one word in the poem directly “shaw, shine, the holy glitters”
quoted

Explaining effect of device on reader Explaining the particular effect of a “It also slows it down.”
named or indexed poetic device on the
poem

Explaining effect of device on meaning Discussing how a poetic device impacts “I think the physical descriptions really
the meaning parallel what emotions they are feeling.”

Connecting to experience Connecting to outside knowledge about “Sundays are traditionally a day of rest.”
life or literature

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TABLE 2
Moves and Submoves Illustrated in a Paragraph From a Student’s Final Essay
Move Submove
Making a claim Stating device’s impact on meaning
Providing evidence Retelling
Providing evidence Pointing to the text
Providing commentary Retelling
Providing evidence Pointing to the text
Providing commentary Stating impact of device on reader
Providing commentary Stating impact of device on meaning
Discourse Analysis of Interaction
in Classroom Literacy Events
To determine how the teacher, over time, prompted stu-
dents to make these same moves through the language
of the classroom, I conducted a discourse analysis
(Bloome et al., 2005) of typical cases (Mitchell, 1984) of
classroom literacy events (Heath, 1983). I transcribed
and analyzed discussions from three-­day-­long events at
three timepoints (September, October, and November)
to represent typical instruction at three different time-
points across the unit. Event 1 was two days in early
September when the teacher and students collabora-
tively analyzed a poem and sample essays written about
the poem, before any instruction in literary elements.
Event 2 was a three-­day sequence in October when
­students learned to analyze imagery in poetry. Event 3
was a three-­day sequence in November when students
learned to analyze sound devices in poetry. The two
three-­day sequences followed the same pattern: (1) Ms.
Howard led the students through whole-­class collab-
orative analysis of poems they had read for homework.
(2) Students met in small groups to collaboratively ana-
lyze new poems. (3) Students presented their analyses to
the whole class.
Because I sought to understand how the teacher
prompted students to learn and make the moves and
submoves evident in their essays, the discourse analytic
system was dependent on the moves analysis of the
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 9
Student’s text
“The poem is abundant with imagery that helps to
communicate the theme. Tactile imagery is most prevalent
because the feel of death is very important to Denby’s
argument.”
“The speaker begins the poem by explaining his expectations.”
“Prior to his own experience with death, he had heard that
‘at the first clammy touch / You yell, you wrestle with it, it
kicks you / In the stomach, squeezes your eyes’ (1–3).”
“The speaker first describes his expectations of death in order
to provide the contrast from which he bases his argument.
These expectations allow him to communicate his personal
experiences and how they were so different from what he had
‘heard.’”
“The speaker describes ‘the afternoon it touched [him]’ (5) as
‘a sweet thrill / Inside my arms and back’ (6–7).”
“Here the speaker is describing positive tactile imagery,
describing a sweet, enjoyable feeling. This directly contrasts
his expectations, which were highlighted by tactile imagery
describing pain.”
“The description of a good feeling along with the fact that the
speaker is essentially disproving his expectations make death
seem alluring and attractive.”
essays. I first analyzed each message unit of the tran-
script (Green & Wallat, 1981) for the writing move and
submove made (if any) by the teacher or students. I also
noted whether the teacher or students talked about a
move or submove, such as in the first event when they
analyzed model essays. The purpose of this part of the
analytic system was to connect the content and pro-
cesses of discussion in class to those of the essays the
students wrote. The second round of analysis focused
on the function of the teacher’s talk in relation to the
writing moves that she and the students made, whether
the discourse function was an explicit disciplinary
statement about literary analysis or argument (Wilder
& Wolfe, 2009), a question (Boyd & Rubin, 2006), or a
revoicing (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993). The purpose of
this second part of analysis was to determine the talk
moves the teacher made to teach students the declara-
tive and procedural knowledge of the moves and sub-
moves of literary argument. See Table 3 for a definition
and example for the categories of writing moves, sub-
moves, and discourse moves used in the discourse anal-
ysis, and Table 4 for a sample of the analytic system.
Researcher Positionality
I approach this study from an ethnographic, hermeneu-
tic perspective. Moss (1994), in writing about the assess-
ment of writing, argued that the extreme focus on
reliability may in fact be reducing the validity of writing
TABLE 3
Additional Categories of Writing and Discourse Moves Used in Discourse Analysis (Including the Categories in
Table 1)
Move Description
Teacher’s discourse moves
Explicit statement Stating disciplinary knowledge explicitly
Questioning Asking a question to prompt a response
Revoicing Reflecting on or refracting a previous
response
assessments and that a hermeneutic approach to reli-
ability might be more appropriate in some assessment
and research situations, where human interpretation is
acceptable as long as the thinking that led to that judg-
ment is made visible to others. I extend this idea to the
study of student writing from a research perspective, as
well as the interpretation of social interaction related to
writing events. Moss argued that a hermeneutic inter-
pretation can be warranted by the following criteria:
A reader’s extensive knowledge of the learning context;
multiple and varied sources of evidence; an ethic of disci-
plined, collaborative inquiry that encourages challenges
and revisions to initial interpretations; and the transpar-
ency of the trail of evidence leading to the interpretations,
which allows users to evaluate the conclusions for them-
selves. (p. 7)
To account for collaborative inquiry around the
analysis of the writing moves and the discourse analysis
of the classroom interactions, I shared the analyses with
the teacher and audio recorded our discussion. Her un-
derstanding of the data helped me refine a few of the
submoves and understand differently how students
made particular submoves. Following my revision to
the moves analysis findings, a doctoral student research
assistant also analyzed the student essays and the class-
room transcripts using the systems described earlier.
We agreed on most of the moves analysis and discourse
analysis, and where we did not agree, we discussed our
understandings, helping me further refine and bolster
my interpretations. Rather than make use of the re-
search assistant’s analysis to determine reliability in a
quantitative sense, I drew on her interpretations and
our discussion of differences to come to a richer, more
nuanced understanding of the writing moves and the
functions of teacher and student talk (Smagorinsky,
2008).
My own positionality as a former high school
English teacher and teacher educator also informs my
perspective. Although some readers might wish for a
more critical stance from the teacher or from me as a
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Example from teacher talk
“That’s precisely what is so good about this essay, is its
commentary. It leaves no analytical stone unturned.”
“What is the speaker talking about in this poem?”
Student: The cracked hands that ached.
Teacher: So, we would, you know, probably call that
visual as well as a little kinesthetic—the ache,
you know, evoking the aching of some muscles.
researcher, I view teaching as an activity that takes place
among many competing goals (Grossman, Smagorinsky,
& Valencia, 1999) and believe that teachers make the
best decisions that they can to help their students within
their particular contexts. I assume that Ms. Howard’s
choices come from a place of care (Noddings, 2013) for
her students.
Findings
Recall the two research questions for this study: (1) How
does the teacher, through classroom talk, support stu-
dents in making moves of literary argument? (2) How
do students make these moves in speaking and writing?
Data analysis resulted in the following findings, each of
which I explore in detail throughout this section:
• The teacher made these moves visible to students
through a whole-class inquiry-based analysis of
model texts, co-constructing and naming writing
moves with the students.
• The teacher used questions in whole-class discus-
sions of literature to prompt students to make
these writing moves in their talk, and she revoiced
their responses to show them more disciplinary
ways of making the moves.
• The students participated in class discussions us-
ing moves that they later made in their writing.
Classroom Talk to Make Writing
Moves Explicit
One finding from the discourse analysis of class discus-
sion is that Ms. Howard made explicit the moves that
constitute literary analysis and argument. In the first
event, she led the students through an analysis of stu-
dent responses to the prompt, representing various
score points on the holistic AP rubric. For the lesson,
Ms. Howard projected a sample student essay on the
smartboard, and students had their own copies of the
 TABLE 4
Sample Analytic Table
Argumentative moves Literary submoves Function

Explaining Explaining
Pointing effect of effect of Connecting
Move Making Providing Providing Stating to the device on device on to Explicit
number Speaker Message unit a claim evidence commentary Retelling meaning text reader meaning experience Questioning statement Revoicing

1 Teacher “All right.

2 So, just on a purely literal T

level, what is the speaker
talking about in this poem?

3 What’s going on here?” T

4 Mandy “His father.” S

5 Teacher “What about his father? T

6 Yes.”

7 Mandy “He’s a tyrant.” S

8 Other (inaudible, many voices) S

students

9 Teacher “OK.”

10 Mandy “Like the speaker doesn’t S S

really recognize the hard
work their dad does.”

11 Ashley “I wrote about how people S S

express their love in
different ways.

12 and some people will S S

misinterpret it,

13 and it’s love either S S

way. They just express
something different.”

14 Teacher “Yeah, yeah, good.

15 Joseph.”

(continued)

Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 11
 TABLE 4 
Sample Analytic Table (continued)
Argumentative moves Literary submoves Function

Explaining Explaining
Pointing effect of effect of Connecting
Move Making Providing Providing Stating to the device on device on to Explicit
number Speaker Message unit a claim evidence commentary Retelling meaning text reader meaning experience Questioning statement Revoicing
16 Joseph “I thought it was S S
interesting that it was
the ‘chronic angers of the
house.’”
17 Teacher “Yeah, yeah, it’s T T T

12 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)

unexpected because
initially you’re, like,
thinking it’s the dad
getting up and doing these
things, but there’s an edge
there.
18 You know there’s T T
something that isn’t quite
right,
19 and yet, you know we T T T
see love expressed in a
different way.
20 So, let’s look at how the T T
imagery is pairing with the
emotional content of this
poem and see what you
notice in each stanza.”
21 (reads the first stanza
aloud)
22 “What sort of imagery T
word choice do you notice
here?”
23 Zoe “Well, I noticed that, S S
like, at first I didn’t really
notice, like, the ‘too,’ but
then—”
24 Teacher “Yeah.”
25 Zoe “You realize that he did it. S S
26 He doesn’t have to get up. S S
27 He gets to stay.” S S
28 Teacher “Exactly.”
Note. S = student talk; T = teacher talk.
essays to mark up. After reading a sample of each essay
aloud, she asked the students to point out its strengths
and weaknesses. This discussion of sample essays is sig-
nificant because it marks the first time that the teacher
and students talked together about writing analytic ar-
guments about poetry, a genre the students would write
about three additional times prior to the end of the
semester.
Making a Claim
Much of their discussion about the writing samples fo-
cused on what kind of argument, specifically what
type of claim, was appropriate to make about the
poem. When analyzing the first essay (which received
a fairly low score on the holistic AP rubric), Ms.
Howard made two explicit statements about the nature
of the rhetorical situation. The first was that the task
was “about what the poet is doing with the poem and
you analyzing it.” Here, she made clear that this type
of argument is not a readerly response but was more
similar to a New Criticism analysis of the author’s de-
cisions and the particular poetic devices the author
used to convey meaning. Her second explicit state-
ment pointed out that their task was also not an evalu-
ative one: “Your role is not to judge the effectiveness or
to talk about the effect the poem might have on a
reader. It really is about how a poem achieves its par-
ticular purpose.”
Providing Evidence and Commentary
Ms. Howard and the students also discussed how to
provide evidence to support a claim. The students espe-
cially were concerned with how the writers incorpo-
rated quotations from the poem into their arguments,
mentioning it as an issue several times; providing evi-
dence for a claim seemed to be assumed, as they never
explicitly said that the authors should or did provide
evidence. What students focused on instead was how
the authors provided evidence, that the evidence needed
to be presented and blended in with “their own
thoughts” or their “reasoning.” This thinking and rea-
soning are what Ms. Howard and the students termed
commentary, which she first mentioned during the
analysis of the first sample essay when she explained
that what was missing from the argument was com-
mentary: “OK, so it is mentioning some devices, and it
is bringing in some quotes, but it’s listing without inter-
pretation or what I would call, what I’ve called before,
commentary.” She came back to the topic of commen-
tary when discussing the final, highest rated sample es-
say, in response to Abe’s comment that what jumped
out for him was a sentence that “connected” things. Ms.
Howard revoiced this move as commentary, that it fol-
lowed evidence and was “really good thinking,” “really
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 13
good ideas,” “very clear” thinking, and “as specific as
possible.”
Making Submoves
This discussion was also an opportunity for the students
and Ms. Howard to make visible the different kinds of
submoves that can accomplish making a claim, provid-
ing evidence, and providing commentary. Throughout
the discussions of the moves, they also made explicit
many of the ways one could make these moves, such as
using quotations or discussing the effect of the device.
For example, in the excerpts discussed previously, the
students mentioned quotations, which was one way of
making the submove of pointing to the text.
For another example, consider the following
exchange:
Andrew: Whoever wrote this can talk about de-
vices such as rhyme and then discuss
what they do for the poem and how
they portray the author’s attitude.
Ms. Howard: Good, so they’re not just pointing
out poetic devices, and they’re not
just looking at poetic devices in a
simplistic way, but they’re analyzing
devices in terms of how they impact
the speaker’s attitude.
Here, Andrew noticed the difference between the
submoves of stating the impact of the device on the
reader and stating the impact of the device on the
meaning. In response, Ms. Howard revoiced what
Andrew noticed, affirming the difference and privileg-
ing the second submove. Another thing to notice is
how both Andrew and Ms. Howard talked about the
writer and the actions the writer took in the essay. Even
though they did not know who the author was, they did
not talk about the essay as a text made up of various
elements, instead analyzing it for which argumentative
or disciplinary elements it did or did not have. They
noticed the actions that the author made through
moves.
Although this discussion is explicit teaching, it is not
teaching of a form; it is the teaching of moves. Ms.
Howard was not teaching the students how to drop a
claim, evidence, and warrant into a particular graphic
organizer or discussing particulars such as how many
quotes or how many paragraphs students needed to write
and in what order. Instead, she shared successful and less
successful models for students to analyze and make con-
jectures about what made these essays successful and less
successful in the particular rhetorical situation of the AP
Literature exam. She asked questions about what did and
did not work and revoiced students’ responses in more
disciplinary ways. Recall that analyzing models in the
genre is a key pedagogical move across many of the peda-
gogies based in genre theory, and Ms. Howard used a
similar model of inquiry and analysis here.
However, this conversation was one of the last times
that Ms. Howard discussed these writing moves in an
explicit way. Throughout the rest of the semester, the
primary way she prompted students to make these
moves was through questions. This shift is significant
when taken in light of other studies of argumentative
writing instruction (Newell et  al., 2015; Nystrand &
Graff, 2001), as the analysis of model essays is a com-
mon instructional tool that does not always transfer to
students’ actual writing. Analyzing model texts is a
method that helps students build declarative knowledge
of particular genres, a key aspect of learning to write in
response to specific tasks, particularly disciplinary
tasks (Hillocks, 1995). Analyzing model texts, however,
does not provide students the opportunity to make
their own writing moves, an opportunity students need
if they are to learn the procedural knowledge of genres.
Teacher’s Questions Prompt Writing
Moves in Students’ Talk
To explore how Ms. Howard’s questions facilitated stu-
dents’ learning of the procedural knowledge for making
various moves and submoves, we turn to classroom
­discussions later in the unit. Discussing poems was a
t ypical, almost everyday practice in this classroom
­
throughout the two-­month poetry unit. As the students
learned a new type of poetic device, they typically
moved through a three-­day sequence: the first day, dis-
cussing the poetic device and collaboratively analyzing
poems as a whole class; the second day, analyzing a new
poem in a small group; and the third day, each group
leading the class in a collaborative analysis of their
poem from the day before. Each discussion of poetry
took a similar format to the others; they began by try-
ing to get a literal understanding of the poem, moved to
pointing to literary devices in the text, analyzed the
­effect of the literary devices, and then connected those
effects to the meaning of the poem.
Most of this analysis focuses on event 2, when the
students learned about imagery and discussed “Those
Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. The night prior,
they read about imagery in their course text, Perrine’s
Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, and also
read a few poems, including this one, that made use of
imagery. Ms. Howard began the class with a discussion
about imagery, asking the students to help define
­imagery and name different kinds. They then moved
into the discussion of this poem.
Ms. Howard began the discussion by asking the stu-
dents to talk about what was literally happening in the
poem:
14 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
Ms. Howard: All right. So, just on a purely literal
level, what is the speaker talking about
in this poem? What’s going on here?
Mandy: His father.
Ms. Howard: What about his father? Yes.
Mandy: He’s a tyrant.
Students: (inaudible, many voices)
Teacher: OK.
Mandy: Like the speaker doesn’t really recog-
nize the hard work their dad does.
In a similar manner to how Ms. Howard began all
discussions of poetry, she began by asking for a literal
interpretation of the poem. This question prompted the
students to make the move of retelling. Mandy’s re-
sponse of “His father” was not the polished retelling of
an essay, so Ms. Howard prompted her to continue ex-
ploring what might be the story of the poem. It was typi-
cal for students to talk through what they thought was
happening when first discussing a poem, and often they
had different literal interpretations or many questions
about what particular words meant or what a vague
phrase might be referencing. For example, a minute later
in this discussion, a student wondered if the fireplace
was at home or was a furnace at work, and the students
decided that the speaker was talking about the home.
In the following excerpt, Ms. Howard began to shift
the conversation to analyzing for poetic devices by ask-
ing the students to identify instances of imagery:
Ms. Howard: So, some of the imagery that you see
here? What do you notice?
Beth: The “cracked hands that ached.”
Ms. Howard: So, we would, you know, probably
call that visual as well as a little kin-
esthetic—the ache, you know, evok-
ing the aching of some muscles.
Scott: I mean “the blueblack cold” kind of
implies that it’s dark out, and blue is
the color we associate with cold.
Ms. Howard: Yeah, really deeply cold and dark, so
you get the visual and the tactile
imagery.
In asking students what they “notice” and what im-
agery they “see here,” Ms. Howard prompted students
to point to the text. A student responded by pointing to
the text with a quotation, the “cracked hands that
ached,” which is an example of imagery. Ms. Howard
responded to her example with commentary that
named the particular type of imagery she pointed to
and provided a description of the effect of that device
on the reader, again modeling a submove. Last, another
student responded to the initial question about exam-
ples of imagery, sharing an example and also providing
commentary on what that imagery is doing in the poem.
After several minutes of the students discussing ex-
amples of imagery, Ms. Howard shifted the discussion
one last time with a new question:
Ms. Howard: So, how, to sum up, how would you
say the imagery in this poem as a
whole reinforces what this poem is
doing? How does the imagery work
for the poem’s purpose? What are
some ways we can pull together the
things you guys have said?
Andrew: Well, I think the physical descriptions
really parallel what emotions they are
feeling, the emotional relationship.
Ms. Howard: Great. So, the tactile imagery of the
cold air in particular, a great parallel
there.
Here, she prompted the students to move into mak-
ing the submove of discussing the effect of the device on
the meaning of the poem by asking them to discuss how
the imagery works for the poem’s purpose. She wanted
them to synthesize the analyses of individual instances
of imagery to talk about the work of the imagery overall
on the meaning or theme of the poem. Although Andrew
connected the imagery of the “physical descriptions” to
the emotions in the poem, Ms. Howard revoiced his re-
sponse to show a more disciplinary way of discussing the
connection, by naming the imagery as tactile imagery.
Although this conversation was similar to previous
and future discussions, the moves students made in re-
sponse to Ms. Howard’s questions changed across time.
If we flash back to the collaborative analysis of the poem
in event 1, the students only responded with the moves
and submoves that the teacher’s questions prompted,
and many times, they missed opportunities to make the
moves that Ms. Howard was trying to prompt. For ex-
ample, in event 1, when Ms. Howard asked the students
what poetic devices they noticed in the first three stan-
zas, Henry responded, “There’s some imagery here,” an-
swering the question but providing nothing additional.
When she then prompted him to expand with the ques-
tion “What in particular?” he responded by pointing to
the text with “The mirror that’s meant to be bright and
shining now has seaweed crawling over it.” In his re-
sponse, Henry replied with the prompted submove of
pointing to the text but did not make any additional
moves. In almost every case, except when students did
not respond at all with any prompted move, they only
made the move that was prompted. It was not until later
discussions in events 2 and 3 that analysis showed them
consistently responding with the prompted moves and
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 15
potentially anticipating Ms. Howard’s future questions
by making unprompted moves.
Students’ Change in Writing Moves
in Talk and in Text
To better illustrate the ways that classroom talk may
have been a form of writing instruction for learning
moves, I turn to examples from three of the five focal
students to highlight various ways their writing moves
changed over time and how those changes may have
been related to the kinds of writing moves these stu-
dents were making as they talked in class.
Ashley: Learning Ways
to Provide Commentary
After writing her first in-­class essay, Ashley was frus-
trated by her lack of providing commentary. In her con-
ference with Ms. Howard, she reflected, “I thought my
commentary wasn’t great. It was super short. I felt like
the quotes were my essay, like I didn’t really write it.” In
the following excerpt from her first in-­ class essay,
Ashley seems to have attempted commentary twice (in
bold, which I added here and in other student excerpts),
but in both of these, the commentary merely offered a
retelling of the text she pointed to.
In line 24, the speaker says, “In shadowy silent distance
grew the iceberg too” which means that the ship and the
iceberg are coming closer. Then in the last line of the poem
the speaker conveys that the iceberg and ocean overpowered
the ship: “And consummation comes, and jars two hemi-
spheres” (33). Hardy’s imagery makes the reader imagine
that the water and ocean take over the weak ship.
This excerpt reflects the entire essay in that it was
mainly a retelling of the poem rather than an analysis of
poetic devices and how they contributed to the theme.
Prior to her conference with Ms. Howard, Ashley would
have learned about commentary during the collabora-
tive analysis of the sample papers; recall that in that dis-
cussion, Ms. Howard and the other students referenced
several times the importance of commentary in the
more successful essays. Perhaps this emphasis on com-
mentary signaled to Ashley that commentary should be
an area of focus for improving her writing.
Between the first in-­class essay and the poetry anal-
ysis essay, Ashley had opportunities to practice provid-
ing commentary in whole-­ class and small-­ group
discussions. For example, during the whole class analy-
sis of “Those Winter Sundays,” she participated a few
times, which was atypical for her. It is worth noting that
Ashley had chosen this poem to closely analyze prior to
the class discussion, and she had her notes available to
her to reference as she talked. Following the initial por-
tion of the discussion described earlier, she followed up
Mandy’s point that the speaker did not recognize the
father’s hard work by saying, “I wrote about how people
express their love in different ways, and some people
will misinterpret it.” In this statement, Ashley made the
submove of stating meaning, moving beyond the simple
retelling that she had done throughout her first in-­class
essay. This submove indicates that she was beginning to
interpret potential themes in a poem.
Later in the conversation, Ashley participated again
to talk more specifically about the role of auditory im-
agery in the poem:
Ms. Howard: So, how, to sum up, how would you
say the imagery in this poem as a
whole reinforces what this poem is
doing? How does the imagery work
for the poem’s purpose? What are
some ways we can pull together the
things you guys have said?
Student: Well, I think the physical descriptions
really parallel what emotions they are
feeling, the emotional relationship.
Ms. Howard: Great, so the tactile imagery of the
cold air in particular, a great parallel
there. What else? What about the au-
ditory imagery?
Ashley: I think you can parallel the feel of
the house kind of.
Ms. Howard: How so?
Ashley: Um, well, they describe the cold is
“cold splintering, breaking” and
then they said chronic anger to the
house, so kind of like a distant—
Ms. Howard: And a harshness to it.
Ashley: Yeah.
In this excerpt, Ashley again moved beyond just re-
telling the poem. She actually began by providing com-
mentary when she said that auditory imagery parallels
the feel of the house, commentary on the lines she later
points to—upon Ms. Howard’s prompting of “How
so?”—the “cold splingering, breaking” and the “chronic
anger of the house.” In the initial commentary, she
commented on those two lines to say that they parallel
each other, moving toward indicating the impact of the
poetic device on the theme. As Ashley defined it, com-
mentary is “basically, using my own language to de-
scribe the poem. Or when I quote something,
explaining it instead of making the reader have to…
meaning like I quote it, and then I explain what that
means, which is easier for the reader, which is impor-
tant.” She also compared commentary with “directing
the essay.”
16 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
In the three poetry essays that Ashley wrote follow-
ing this conversation, she consistently made the move of
providing commentary. For example, in this short ex-
cerpt from her summative poetry analysis paper, she
took time to make two commentary moves about one
simile:
The figurative language throughout the poem helps portray
Collins’ attitude toward sonnets. In one of the first lines, the
speaker says, “only ten more left like rows of beans” (4).
Sonnets are known to be magnificent and interesting, yet
the simile of “rows of beans” portrays them as boring and
homogenous. By comparing the next 10 lines of the son-
net to “rows of beans,” the reader now compares the form
of poetry to something that is very dull, connecting back
to the overrated idea. (F.4.6–9)
Here, she provided commentary that stated the effect of
the device, and then connected the effect of that device
to the poem’s meaning, that sonnets are overrated.
Rather than commenting on an example from a poem
by retelling it, like she did in the first essay, Ashley pro-
vided commentary in ways that were more similar to
what she had practiced in the whole-­class discussions.
Nick: Incorporating Moves and Submoves
in More Complex Ways
In contrast to Ashley’s essay, Nick’s first essay indicated
an understanding that he should analyze and interpret
the poem rather than merely summarize it. However, in
the first essay, he made the moves of making a claim,
providing evidence, and providing commentary in a
very lockstep way, and his commentary did not employ
the submoves that he and the other students used in
later essays. For instance, in his second paragraph, Nick
made a claim about word choice, followed by three
pieces of textual evidence:
The word choice adds to the mystery. The sea-­worm “crawls-­
grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent” (4). The Titanic is a
“creature” (17) and the iceberg a “sinister male” (19). The
iceberg grows “in shadowy silent distance” (24). Because of
this language, it is almost like we, as readers, are unlocking
the code to what happened that night. And it makes the
poem good and engaging.
Here, Nick provided evidence in a choppy way, list-
ing each additional piece of evidence in its own sen-
tence, not connecting it to any of his own reasoning. He
also attempted to provide commentary for these three
pieces of evidence, indicating that he understood that
he needed to say something about the evidence he pro-
vided; however, it is not commentary that is specific to
his textual evidence, just saying that this language helps
readers with “unlocking the code to what happened that
night,” which does not really explain the effect of the
device or connect the evidence to a larger meaning of
the poem.
Over time, Nick was changing in his use of argu-
mentative moves, and by his fourth essay, the summa-
tive poetry analysis essay, he showed that he could
makes these moves—making a claim, providing evi-
dence, and providing commentary—in such a way that
together they built an argument across a paragraph. In
a paragraph about how imagery supported the poem’s
meaning that death was alluring, Nick made use of im-
agery that described death as initially negative and then
positive. He then used the contrast of these two types of
imagery to build his argument. To do this, he needed to
provide commentary that commented on evidence pro-
vided earlier in the paragraph and then provide com-
mentary that connected different pieces of evidence
together.
The poem is abundant with imagery that helps to commu-
nicate the theme. Tactile imagery is most prevalent because
the feel of death is very important to Denby’s argument. The
speaker begins the poem by explaining his expectations.
Prior to his own experience with death, he had heard that
“at the first clammy touch / You yell, you wrestle with it, it
kicks you / In the stomach, squeezes your eyes” (1–3). The
speaker first describes his expectations of death in order
to provide the contrast from which he bases his argument.
These expectations allow him to communicate his per-
sonal experiences and how they were so different from
what he had “heard.” The speaker describes “the afternoon
it touched [him]” (5) as “a sweet thrill / Inside my arms and
back” (6–7). Here the speaker is describing positive tactile
imagery, describing a sweet, enjoyable feeling. This di-
rectly contrasts his expectations, which were highlighted
by tactile imagery describing pain. The description of a
good feeling along with the fact that the speaker is essen-
tially disproving his expectations make death seem allur-
ing and attractive.
Througout the poetry unit, Nick had many oppor-
tunities to practice making these moves and submoves
in small-­group and whole-­class discussions. During the
three-­day sequence on imagery, Nick, Carly, and Kate
(another focal student) discussed imagery in the poem
“The Dead” by Rupert Brooke. As we will see to be typi-
cal in the next section, Kate prompted Carly and Nick
to analyze the effect of imagery on the poem:
Kate: So, um, what is imagery do to the poem?
Carly: It doesn’t do anything.
Nick: I guess it just, I don’t know how to word
this, but just, like, tells us what the—it
seems like, I guess in the second stanza,
that the speaker doesn’t think that death is
a bad, a negative cause. Like they say when
this guy dies, he leaves, like, all this, like—
Kate: Radiance and—
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 17
Nick: The imagery communicates his ideas.
They’re not like normal ideas. Through
this imagery, you can see what he—
Kate: So, he—so the dying isn’t, like, that bad.
Nick: Yeah.
Kate: And the imagery shows that it’s kind of an
odd thought.
Nick: Yeah.
Throughout this conversation, Nick, with Kate’s
help, moved through an interpretation of the imagery,
jumping around from the evidence (the radiance in the
second stanza), some retelling of what the speaker said,
and explaining the effect of the imagery on the reader,
showing that death is not bad. By interweaving these
moves, and building them with Kate, Nick indicated the
more complex way that he was working through his
analysis and interpretation, similar to how he integrated
moves in the summative poetry analysis essay. By com-
bining retelling and explaining the effect of the device
on the poem through providing commentary, he made
moves in this conversation that are similar to commen-
tary in this excerpt from his essay: “Here the speaker is
describing positive tactile imagery, describing a sweet,
enjoyable feeling. This directly contrasts his expecta-
tions, which were highlighted by tactile imagery de-
scribing pain.”
A few weeks later, during event 3, Nick again par-
ticipated in discussion as his group presented their
analysis of sound devices in “Blackberry Eating” by
Galway Kinnell. Here, Ms. Howard prompted them to
point out consonant sounds with her first question, and
her second question prompted them to state the effect
of the devices on the poem:
Ms. Howard: So, what are particular consonant
sounds that predominate? Obviously,
you pointed out b, but what else?
Owen: “Squeeze, squinch.”
Jack: S, the s consonant sounds.
Teacher: OK, and—
Jack: B.
Nick:  P, the “prickly,” “penalty,” “peculiar.”
Ms. Howard: K is huge if you look at the end of a
lot of words. So, you could then
characterize the poem overall as
cacophonous.
Nick: Cacophonous.
Owen: Yeah, I said there’s a lot of cacophony.
Nick: But it’s almost used in a way to point
out his appreciation of the language.
He’s not using it in a harsh way and
 saying I’m upset about this, but it’s
almost, like, to point out that I really
like the language.
Ms. Howard: And that’s a really good point. We
always want to make sure that when
we look at euphony or cacophony, we
don’t automatically think that ca-
cophony is bad and euphony is good.
After Ms. Howard confirmed that they were con-
sidering the poem cacophonous, Nick jumped to stat-
ing the effect of the device on the meaning, making an
unprompted move to share how he thought the ca-
cophony contributed to the poem’s meaning in an un-
expected way. Here, he went beyond commenting on a
specific instance of a sound device to talk more gener-
ally about how the sound devices together worked to
impact the poem’s meaning, similar to how he later
discussed the impact of imagery on meaning in his
summative poetry analysis: “The description of a good
feeling along with the fact that the speaker is essen-
tially disproving his expectations make death seem al-
luring and attractive.”
Kate: Learning a Sequence
of Questions and Moves
Whereas Ashley’s and Nick’s participation and writing
illustrate how students were learning to make the moves
of literary argument that aligned with the AP test and
were encouraged by Ms. Howard, Kate’s participation
and writing illustrate a student learning discourse
moves that were prompted in discussion but not en-
couraged in writing. In her first essay, Kate showed that
she did not know how to read or write about poetry. Her
essay was a mix of her jumping into the poem at various
places and trying to make sense of what she was read-
ing. For example, she wrote, “In the third stanza, there
is glass. This glass is the water or maybe the ship. You
could see through the water and find gross things that
live there.” Kate’s writing showed that she did not have a
method for how to move through the reading and anal-
ysis of the poem or how to write about it.
As mentioned previously, Kate did not participate
often in whole-­class discussions. Although her partici-
pation in large-­group discussions did not signal active
listening, her participation in small groups did. When
meeting in small groups to analyze a poem for a particu-
lar set of poetic devices, she often took on Ms. Howard’s
typical role by posing questions to group members.
One of the first times Kate met in a small group was
with Nick and another student, Carly (the conversation
referenced in the previous section). Because it was the
first small-­group analysis, Ms. Howard listed the fol-
lowing on the board:
18 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
1. Read poem aloud more than once.
2. Paraphrase for literal level.
3. Interpret poem on deeper, figurative level. What is the
purpose? How does the meaning grow and shift?
4. Annotate poem for imagery.
5. Discuss role of imagery in poem. Vivid experience?
Convey emotion? Suggest ideas? What is the role of pre-
dominant forms of imagery? How does it match meaning
or experience of poem?
6. How does the imagery correspond to shifts?
7. Significance of particular instances of imagery
Kate turned around to look at the board often as the
three of them talked about the poem. In reference to the
second step, she began the conversation by asking,
“Should we, like, write down a paraphrase, or should we
just go through it?” to which Nick suggested that they
should just talk about it. They then talked for several
minutes about what they thought was literally happen-
ing in the poem, retelling. She also asked Carly what
imagery she had noticed in the poem, which prompted
Carly to talk about the poetic device of imagery and
point to the text to provide evidence.
A month later, Kate met in a new small group, this
time with five other girls, including Ashley. This time,
the focus of the poetry analysis was for sound devices,
and Ms. Howard did not provide any guiding questions.
After reading the poem aloud, some of the other students
started naming words that had distinct sounds. Kate in-
terrupted to prompt the group to paraphrase the poem:
Kate: So, what is it all about?
Sarah: This one doesn’t have a deeper meaning.
It’s about animal loving.
Kate: So, should we go by stanza?
Jane: Yeah.
After discussing the stanza, Kate verbally para-
phrased the group’s talk: “So, it’s just about nurture and
how humans and animals connect.” Just as in the small-­
group conversation a month prior, she insisted on tak-
ing time for retelling, even making the move herself to
paraphrase others’ retellings. Given that Ms. Howard
began every discussion of a poem by asking students to
retell what was happening, often moving stanza by
stanza through the poem, it may not be surprising that
Kate took up the same practice in her small groups, in-
sisting that this retelling work be done before moving
onto analysis of literary devices.
It also may not be surprising then that Kate made
the move of retelling often in her essays. In her second
in-­class essay, her entire first paragraph was a retelling
of the poem, beginning with “On a literal level,” a simi-
lar phrase to Ms. Howard’s typical question, “So, on a
literal level, what’s happening here?” The remainder of
the essay followed the same pattern as Ms. Howard’s
typical questioning sequence, the same questioning se-
quence Kate preferred to follow in small-­group discus-
sions as well. After the first paragraph, which was a
literal retelling, Kate’s second and third paragraphs fo-
cused on pointing out instances of poetic devices, such
as imagery and repetition. In her last paragraph, she
discussed the “deeper meaning” of the poem, perhaps
her way of trying to make the move of discussing the
effect of the device on the overall meaning. Although
this sequence followed the typical discussion sequence
in class, Ms. Howard’s discussion of this essay in our
interview indicated that the essay was not what she was
expecting, that Kate was focusing too much on her own
experience of reading the essay rather than analyzing
the poetic devices.
In her summative poetry analysis essay, Kate con-
tinued to make the move of retelling, but rather than a
full paragraph, she followed up pointing to the text with
retelling it, beginning to use retelling more as commen-
tary, in the same way Ashley was in her first essay. For
example, Kate wrote,
One quote that describes this concept is, “Wheather abroad /
And weather in the heart alike come on / Regardless of pre-
diction” (12–14). This quote shows that one can predict the
weather but may not be protected from common unexpected
events.
Although in her final essay Kate made moves compara-
ble to some students’ first essays, she showed in her par-
ticipation and writing that she was learning to make the
moves prompted by Ms. Howard. However, unlike
many other students, Kate did not recognize that some
of the moves, such as retelling, that were part of the pro-
cess of reading and interpreting poetry were not moves
that were privileged in the written arguments.
Discussion and Implications
This classroom is one case of learning to write literary
arguments by learning to make writing moves in speak-
ing and in writing. The teacher’s questions during dis-
cussions of poetry prompted students to make the
moves and submoves they would subsequently write,
and the teacher’s revoicing allowed her to model these
moves in more disciplinary ways. It may be that in us-
ing these three talk moves (explicit statement, question-
ing, and revoicing) over time, the teacher supported the
students’ learning of declarative and procedural knowl-
edge for literary argument.
Although it may not be surprising that the primary
moves were to make a claim, provide evidence, and pro-
vide commentary, how the students made these
moves—or what counted for making these moves—dif-
fered from the kinds of claims, evidence, and warrants
Classroom Talk as Writing Instruction for Learning to Make Writing Moves in Literary Arguments | 19
suggested by Hillocks (2011) or anticipated by Sosa et al.
(2016). Also, how the students made the moves through
the submoves is particular to this classroom. Recall that
Marshall (1987) and Newell (1996) examined the modes
students used in their literary analysis (e.g., descriptive/
retelling, personal, and evaluative statements) and Sosa
et al. examined analytical moves (e.g., identication and
interpretation of symbolism, discussion of character
change). Although Ms. Howard’s students also made
some of these submoves as they made the primary
moves, they also made different moves that these schol-
ars did not analyze, such as explaining the impact of
poetic devices on a poem’s meaning. So, despite the
likely expected finding that students were making
claims, providing evidence, and providing commen-
tary, it is important to note that what counted as mak-
ing these moves was situated within the rhetorical
situation. Classroom talk—organized by the teacher’s
explicit statements, questions, and revoicing—helped
students define the rhetorical situation within which
they were participating.
It is important that this study is rooted in an AP
Literature classroom, as one purpose of an AP course is
to prepare students to succeed on a standardized test. It
would have been understandable for the teacher to fo-
cus on teaching students potential successful forms for
the literary arguments on the test, a practice which
Hillocks (2002) found to be common across classrooms
in several states with high-­stakes standardized tests.
Instead, the teacher taught the students to make the
moves that can result in an effective literary argument.
This study suggests that rather than learning argument
as a formulaic five-­paragraph essay, students could po-
tentially learn to argue through learning to make writ-
ing moves, which teachers can prompt through explicit
instruction, questions that elicit particular moves, and
revoicing of those moves. Rather than learn the features
of a genre, students learned how to act within a genre,
how to make moves that are appropriate and effective in
a rhetorical situation. For students such as Ashley and
Nick, their writing was an opportunity to continue the
kinds of conversations they had in class while interpret-
ing poetry, rather than showing how well they could
drop content into a prescribed form.
Although this classroom exemplifies one potential
for students learning to make writing moves rather
than learning form, their learning was certainly con-
strained in many ways. The students did not have full
agency to enact any moves, without consequence, that
they deemed appropriate for themselves and the rhe-
torical situation as they interpreted it, as is clear by
Kate’s use of retelling in her writing. Although genre in
the classroom is mutually constituted by the teacher
and students, as Russell (1997) argued, the teacher is
less likely to pick up students’ ways of writing because
of systems of power and privilege at play. DeStigter
(2015) also reminded us that we cannot assume that ar-
gument is a genre that gives power to those who partici-
pate in it, for “the justifications that matter are those
that are acceptable to people positioned to make conse-
quential decisions” (p. 19). In addition, the test, with
outside readers, was not a rhetorical situation in which
students could truly have an impact on the ongoing
conversations within the field of literature. Thus, al-
though this classroom and teacher help point toward
the potential for learning to write in a way that is not
formulaic, there are many more ways that teachers and
students together can create classrooms where students
have even more freedom and agency to co-­construct
what moves are appropriate in given rhetorical situa-
tions and more of an opportunity to make a real differ-
ence through writing for significant situations.
Implications for
Teaching and Research
Ms. Howard’s teaching suggests a potential model for
teaching argumentative writing. First, the teacher leads
the students in an analysis of writing samples within
the genre to unpack the moves writers make to accom-
plish work in the genre, explicitly naming the moves
and scaffolding students’ understanding of what the
moves do. This stage of the pedagogical model is simi-
lar to the instruction suggested by Carter (2009), Collin
(2013), and Dean (2008). It is the second step that is
new: The teacher poses questions that prompt students
to make the moves in class discussions so classroom
talk becomes a rehearsal for the procedural knowledge
necessary for writing in the genre. Paired with these
questions, the teacher revoices students’ responses to
model more complex ways of making these moves. This
additional pedagogical step illustrates how social pro-
cesses can contribute to language learning, that learn-
ing to write should be a social process in which students
learn to make the writing moves of a genre by talking
about writing with others and through trying out and
hearing writing moves in conversations.
Future research could explore the efficacy of this
model for teaching argumentative writing. Because this
model is flexible for supporting various types of literary
or social argumentative writing, researchers could study
this model through design-­based research with teachers
across grade levels and classroom contexts and, in doing
so, allow teachers and students to fine-­tune the model to
best meet the needs of diverse classrooms. Researchers
could also explore potential methods for helping teachers
implement this model. Many teachers would need sup-
port to shift from teaching argumentative writing as a
strict template. Teachers would need support in building
their own knowledge of genre, their ability to analyze
20 | Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0)
writing for moves, and crafting questions that prompt
students to make particular moves. To truly develop a
model of classroom talk as writing instruction, research-
ers also need to more thoroughly trace the connections
between the social world of classroom talk and students’
subsequent writing so researchers and teachers can have
an explanatory theory for how talk supports writing.
Conclusion
If schools are to be spaces where students can learn to
write arguments, about literature or any other topic, as a
way of participating in classrooms, communities, and
beyond, students need to learn how to make appropriate
writing moves for the social action they want to accom-
plish. They are more likely to learn to make these moves
when the teacher takes a moves-­based approach rather
than a form-­based approach. Shifting writing instruc-
tion from one approach to another may seem daunting,
but future research and professional development could
focus on helping teachers identify the moves they want
their students to make in writing and then helping
teachers plan the kinds of explicit instruction, questions
to prompt moves, and revoicing of moves that they can
implement in their classroom talk practices. An ap-
proach to teaching writing focused on moves could
complement many different approaches to teaching ar-
gumentative writing but would allow students to learn
the declarative and procedural knowledge necessary to
make arguments for a variety of contexts and purposes.
NOTE
This work was supported by a dissertation fellowship from the
College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State
University.
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Submitted October 31, 2016
Final revision received May 15, 2017
Accepted May 22, 2017
JENNIFER VANDERHEIDE is an assistant professor of English
education in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan
State University, East Lansing, USA; e-mail jvheide@msu.edu.
Her research focuses on adolescent writing development, how
dialogic teaching supports learning to write, and teacher
development of dialogic teaching practices.