Converging Paths: Dialogic Literacy and Linguistic Agency in Newman’s Research and Holistic Language Instruction

When Practice and Scholarship Meet at the Summit

A reflection on Ruth Newman’s 2025 study and Holistic Language Instruction, exploring how research and practice converge to reimagine inclusive, dialogic literacy for neurodivergent and multilingual learners.

Introduction

There are moments in the landscape of education where theory and practice, though charted along separate paths, meet at the summit—different routes, same view. It is in that spirit of convergence, not coincidence, that I find myself in dialogue with Ruth Newman’s 2025 article on developing metalinguistic understanding in the secondary English classroom. Her work, rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics and shaped through rigorous classroom discourse analysis, examines how teachers’ framing questions and responsive talk moves can generate meaningful, student-led reflection on the choices embedded within written texts. It is, by any measure, a valuable contribution to the field—an empirically grounded study that articulates how metalinguistic dialogue operates in real time, with real students. Yet, as I read her findings, I was struck less by their novelty and more by their resonance. What Newman captures through research, I—and many others working in inclusive education—have lived through practice.

Newman, R. (2025). Developing metalinguistic understanding in the secondary English classroom: the role of teachers’ framing questions and responsive talk moves in dialogic metalinguistic talk about written text. Research Papers in Education, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2024.2447559

Holistic Language Instruction, my practitioner-authored book published in 2024, was born not from theory but from necessity. It reflects years of teaching and learning alongside students whose relationships with language defy standard metrics: autistic learners with gestalt language processing profiles; multilingual students navigating linguistic systems under pressure to assimilate; disabled youth denied full access to language-rich environments. These students are often framed as lacking metacognition, as struggling to understand how language works. But my experience has taught me something different—that when supported through intentional, inclusive, and dialogic practice, these same students often demonstrate extraordinary metalinguistic insight. They notice what others miss. They echo with purpose. They manipulate language with precision once the conditions are right. What they lack is not capacity, but access.

And this is where the convergence between our work becomes not only striking but significant. Newman’s framework of “framing questions” and “responsive talk moves” offers a language for describing practices that inclusive educators have long employed—often without recognition. It provides a research-based scaffold for pedagogical instincts developed in the margins, where formal training rarely reaches. Both our works, whilst emerging from different professional contexts, affirm a core belief: that metalinguistic development is not the domain of a privileged few, but a possibility for all. And that possibility becomes most potent when students are not treated as passive recipients of literacy, but as active participants in the shaping of meaning.

This shared vision matters. It matters because literacy education—particularly in the current climate—is being driven increasingly by standardisation, surveillance, and prescriptive models of correctness. In contrast, both Newman’s article and Holistic Language Instruction argue for a return to dialogue, to noticing, to curiosity. We propose a pedagogy that sees students not merely as test-takers or text-decoders, but as meaning-makers capable of rich linguistic reasoning. In what follows, I offer Holistic Language Instruction as a practice-based companion to Newman’s study—written not in anticipation of her findings, but in alignment with them. Together, I hope our work contributes to a broader reimagining of what it means to teach language with justice, depth, and humanity.

Framing Questions: Naming the Impact of Language

One of the most compelling contributions of Newman’s article is her taxonomy of framing questions—the intentional prompts teachers use to initiate and guide classroom dialogue about how language works. These are not generic comprehension checks or procedural interjections, but deliberate openings for metalinguistic awareness. She categorises them into four types: Effect Open questions, which ask what impact a piece of language has on the reader; Choice Open questions, which invite students to notice which language choices contribute to that effect; Choice Focusing questions, which direct attention to specific features like word class or phrase structure; and Choice Alternative questions, which imagine how changing the language would alter the meaning. Each of these, in its own way, repositions language not as fixed or rule-bound, but as dynamic, responsive, and crafted. The teacher in this model is not a passive facilitator, gently steering student-led inquiry, but an active and discerning partner in the meaning-making process—someone who knows where the linguistic terrain might open up, and who invites students to step into it with confidence.

This framing of teacher questions as acts of pedagogical intention rather than neutral probes aligns powerfully with the approach I take in Holistic Language Instruction. Long before I had access to an academic taxonomy for what I was doing, I had learned that questions like “What’s the story here?” or “Why this word and not another?” could open the door to genuine linguistic engagement—especially for students accustomed to being excluded from it. For GLPs, who often communicate through rich but non-linear utterances, and for multilingual students whose language repertoires span cultural and syntactic boundaries, these questions act as entry points into metalinguistic play. They do not test knowledge; they activate awareness. They honour the speaker’s relationship with language rather than reducing it to right or wrong answers.

In this way, both Newman’s framework and my own pedagogical approach reject the modern trend of treating teachers as neutral conduits or facilitators. Language is never neutral, and neither is teaching. To ask a meaningful question about language is to model what it looks like to attend closely, to care about precision, nuance, and effect. It is to say, implicitly, that the student’s ideas are worth expanding, their interpretations worth exploring. It is an act of co-authorship, not correction. And in classrooms where marginalised learners are too often positioned as recipients of simplified instruction, these questions—framed with intention and posed with care—become powerful acts of inclusion. They are, as Newman and I both argue, invitations to agency.

Responsive Talk Moves: Co-Creating Meaning in the Margins

If the power of a good question lies in its capacity to open space, then the power of a good response lies in how that space is held. Newman’s analysis doesn’t stop at framing questions; she also highlights what she terms “responsive talk moves”—the ways in which teachers pick up, extend, and shape student contributions in real time. These moves are often subtle: an invitation to elaborate, a request for clarification, a pause to validate a student’s idea before moving on. Yet their impact is profound. They convey that the student’s thinking is not just tolerated but taken seriously—that their contribution is part of a shared project of meaning-making. What Newman shows, through careful transcription and discourse analysis, is that these responsive turns are what sustain dialogic momentum. They are what transform isolated observations into collaborative inquiry.

In Holistic Language Instruction, I describe a similar process, though from a different vantage point. Working with GLPs and multilingual learners, I have learned that much of what is called “off-topic” or “non-standard” language is, in fact, deeply metalinguistic—it simply doesn’t arrive in the expected form. It might come in the shape of a scripted phrase, a multilingual expression (e.g., “Spanglish”), or an emotionally charged fragment that gestures toward a meaning still taking shape. In these moments, the role of the teacher is not to redirect but to attune—to listen for what the student is trying to do with language, and to respond in ways that help them build towards clarity and ownership. This is where I find Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) to be invaluable—not only as a writing framework but as a relational posture. SRSD, when used properly, doesn’t just model composition strategies; it models emotional safety. It makes the invisible visible. It says: “This is how we work through uncertainty. This is how we manage the energy of our ideas. This is how we return to the page even when we’re not sure we’re getting it right.”

In both Newman’s analysis and my own practice, then, responsive talk is never performative. It is not about praise for its own sake or the mechanical following of a protocol. It is relational—an extension of trust, curiosity, and care. It assumes that students are already thinking metalinguistically and that our job is to help them hold those thoughts long enough to shape them. This is particularly critical for students who have learned, often through painful repetition, that their language is misunderstood or devalued. In such contexts, responsive talk becomes not just a pedagogical tool, but an ethical act. It signals that dialogue is not a performance for a grade or an audience, but a way of being with language, with others, and with oneself. Newman names this dynamic in the mainstream classroom; Holistic Language Instruction extends it to the margins and insists that the margins are not ancillary—they are foundational.

Model Texts as Mirrors and Windows

One of the core methods Newman examines is the use of published model texts as a stimulus for classroom discussion. These texts, often drawn from literary or high-quality informational sources, become the shared ground upon which metalinguistic dialogue unfolds. Through carefully framed questions, students are invited to analyse how an author’s linguistic choices produce tone, position the reader, or foreground particular meanings. In this context, the model text serves as both a mirror and a window—a mirror for reflecting on how language works, and a window into possibilities beyond the students’ own immediate repertoire. Newman’s analysis captures how these discussions help students develop a vocabulary for talking about language’s functions, not just its forms.

In Holistic Language Instruction, I embrace the notion of model texts but expand the definition of what counts as “model-worthy.” My students do not always see themselves reflected in the canonical texts presented to them, and for those with non-linear language development, gestalt processing styles, or non-English backgrounds, such texts can sometimes feel more like closed doors than open windows. As a result, I work to centre texts that are rhetorically rich in different ways—rhetorical algebra problems presented in sentence form, multilingual narratives that switch codes with purpose, and most significantly, student-authored texts. In my classroom, students are not only readers of model texts but producers of them. We analyse the linguistic choices in their writing with the same respect we would offer a published author, not as an exercise in error correction but as a practice of authorship. What happens, again and again, is that students begin to see their own language not as something to fix but as something to understand, refine, and eventually, take pride in.

Where Newman’s work highlights how linguistic noticing can emerge through close reading of established texts, Holistic Language Instruction insists that this noticing must also be applied to the language students themselves bring to the page. The two approaches are not at odds—they are mutually reinforcing. Her work offers a valuable analytic framework for guiding student attention to the impact of language; mine offers a wider field of what kinds of texts—and what kinds of voices—can be placed at the centre of that attention. In both cases, the goal is the same: to foster a sense of linguistic agency and to honour the process of becoming a meaning-maker. But in HLI, that process begins with the radical assertion that students themselves are already authors—that their language, in all its complexity, is worth noticing.

Expanding the Frame: Who Gets to Be a Language Analyst?

Whilst Newman's study focuses on mainstream classroom discourse and the role of teacher language in shaping metalinguistic insight, Holistic Language Instruction insists that these pedagogical practices must extend beyond the mainstream and include those most often excluded: GLPs, AAC users, and students who communicate primarily in home or heritage languages. In this shared landscape, HLI provides an expanded frame for what it means to be a language analyst. The question “Who gets to notice language?” is no longer rhetorical—it’s foundational. HLI answers it with conviction: everyone.

Where Newman explores how dialogic teaching fosters student agency, HLI brings that same lens to contexts typically regarded as peripheral or too complex—classrooms where communication doesn’t always conform to standardised norms and where linguistic hierarchies remain entrenched. The insistence in HLI that all students are capable of metalinguistic insight—regardless of processing style or language background—makes it not only complementary to Newman’s work but essential to its broader application. This is especially true when considering systemic inequities that impact disabled and multilingual students, who are often denied access to the types of instructional discourse Newman analyses.

The forthcoming Decolonising Language Education (Hoerricks, 2025) further reinforces this position, framing language analysis itself as a decolonial act when offered to students historically excluded from it. The book argues that colonial education systems have long defined who is permitted to be ‘an analyst’ of language—typically monolingual, analytic, and aligned with the dominant culture. In contrast, HLI and Decolonising Language Education collectively reframe metalinguistic inquiry as a birthright of all learners. By explicitly designing instruction that honours neurodivergent processing, language plurality, and cultural belonging, HLI invites students from the margins to participate not only in dialogue about language, but in reshaping the structures of language education itself.

Convergence, not Coincidence: A Shared Educational Ethos

It would be easy, on a surface reading, to frame the relationship between Holistic Language Instruction and Newman’s article in terms of precedence. My book was published well before her paper was accepted for publication; many of the practices she details through empirical classroom analysis appear, in another register, throughout HLI as the day-to-day strategies of a neurodivergent, multilingual-inclusive pedagogy. But to cast this as a matter of who said it first is to miss the deeper, more important truth—that both works are part of a wider movement in education, one defined not by individual claims to innovation, but by a collective shift in how we understand language, learning, and the role of the teacher.

What we see here is not coincidence, but convergence. A convergence of values, of questions, of commitments. Both Newman and I are responding, in our own ways, to the limitations of dominant literacy paradigms—those that view metalinguistic awareness as the preserve of analytic learners, or that imagine the teacher’s role as neutral rather than deeply relational. Both of us, too, are guided by the belief that language is not simply a tool to be mastered but a medium for identity, power, and connection. And crucially, both texts are underwritten by a deep respect for the student as a thinker, a meaning-maker, and an agent in their own learning.

Yet what I also hope this convergence illustrates is the necessity—and the legitimacy—of educator-generated theory. For too long, the knowledge produced by teachers in the field has been viewed as anecdotal, subordinate to the peer-reviewed findings of academic researchers. But what Newman’s article and HLI together demonstrate is that practice is not the opposite of theory—it is theory in motion. The questions I ask in classrooms, the frameworks I develop to support students who fall outside the centre of traditional models, are not just methods—they are epistemologies. They are grounded, embodied, and tested not in abstract but in community. And when research later validates those practices, it is not proof of their value—it is confirmation of what many of us already knew.

In this shared ethos—this convergence of inquiry, care, and critical engagement—we begin to glimpse what a more inclusive vision of literacy might look like. One where metalinguistic awareness is not a specialised skill, but a common right. One where teaching is not transmission, but co-construction. One where both scholars and practitioners are seen not as rivals but as collaborators in the urgent task of making language education more human, more just, and more whole.

Final thoughts …

In tracing the alignment between Ruth Newman’s research and the pedagogical praxis articulated in Holistic Language Instruction, what emerges is not a story of duplication or hierarchy, but of harmony. Both works speak, in their own idioms, to a shared conviction: that language is best learned when it is made visible, deliberate, and co-constructed. That students flourish when their insights are not extracted but invited. And that metalinguistic development is not a by-product of elite instruction but a right that belongs to every learner—especially those historically denied the opportunity to engage in such reflection.

Newman brings to the conversation the analytic clarity of close classroom study, offering a taxonomy and evidence base that strengthen the case for dialogic instruction. HLI, by contrast, brings the lived texture of those classrooms that are rarely studied but frequently marginalised—those filled with students whose languages, bodies, and processing styles challenge dominant norms. Together, the two works offer what the other alone could not: research validation and lived applicability, structure and flexibility, theory and touchstone.

The convergence of our work is a reminder that educational transformation does not begin in one place. It emerges through multiple lines of flight—researchers, teachers, students, community members—all working to widen what counts as knowledge, what counts as language, and who gets to participate in its shaping. It is, in that sense, not a finished project but an open conversation.

So let us continue that conversation—across classrooms and conferences, across disciplines and difference. Let us hold open the space where theory and practice meet, not as rivals, but as co-authors in a more just and inclusive vision of literacy. Because this dialogue is not only worth continuing—it’s where the real work begins.