Improving narrative writing by teaching the linguistics of imagination

Abstract Narrative authors use their imaginations to generate and select content for their writing. Narrative imagination is central to young writers’ agency over their choices. However, writing pedagogies have become more formulaic, allowing little room for personal agency, while efforts to teach imagination have fallen by the wayside, regarded as vague, fanciful, and lacking in clear writing strategies. In response, a narrative writing pedagogy was designed around specific strategies linking imagination with linguistic choices (“imaginative strategies”), informed by cognitive stylistics and mental imagery. To investigate its impact on student writing, four year 5 teachers received training in the pedagogy before implementing it with 12 students in a 9-week narrative unit through individual writing conferences. A mixed-methods case study was conducted to explore changes in writing quality. According to pre- and post-test data, student writing improved significantly overall, especially regarding experience and meaning . To explain these improvements, a text analysis explored the change in one student’s writing over the course of the unit, coding linguistic features to imaginative strategies and interpreting their impact against experience and meaning. It was found that the writing progressively incorporated more of these features, resulting in greater narrative immersion. The findings have important implications on how teachers support students’ narrative thinking while allowing full scope for fostering student agency.