Review. Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity, edited by Anna Camps and Xavier Fontich, 2020

espanolResena. La actividad metalinguistica como espacio de encuentro de la escritura y la gramatica: Un itinerario de ensenanza e investigacion en educacion linguistica, editado por Anna Camps y Xavier Fontich, en prensa francaisCompte rendu. Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity, edite par Anna Camps et Xavier Fontich, 2020 EnglishReview. Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity, edited by Anna Camps and Xavier Fontich, 2020 catalaRessenya. Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity, editat per Anna Camps i Xavier Fontich, 2020

The book compiled by Anna Camps and Xavier Fontich in Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity (in Spanish also, see below) offers a journey through the research career of GREAL (Grup de Recerca sobre Ensenyament i Aprenentatge de Llengües, Research Group on Teaching and Learning of Languages) of over 25 years (from 1991 to 2017). The GREAL group brings together primary and secondary teachers and researchers and was founded in the 1990s by Anna Camps Mundó, Professor of the Department of Didactics of Language and Literature, and of Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB ). The group has reported on innovative research projects on the teaching of written composition, on the students' metalinguistic activity, and on the teaching of grammar in Spain. For his part, Xavier Fontich Vicens has experience both as a secondary school teacher and as a lecturer at the UAB. His work focuses on teaching L1 grammar and its connections to writing.
In the Prologue, the prominent psychologist and linguist Jean-Paul Bronckart, founder of Sociodiscursive Interactionism, stresses the importance of this research group in overcoming the historical division between grammar and writing. According to Bronckart, GREAL has managed to articulate strictly theoretical research with the development of innovative teaching tools. He also highlights the contributions of the group in relation to the concept of metalinguistic activity, which is a central aspect of the volume, observed and studied exhaustively in some of the works included in the book.
As the editors observe in the Introduction, the teaching of L1 grammar at school has been controversial for the past three decades. With the entry of the communicative approach and the functionalist perspectives of the language, on the one hand, and the crisis of transmissive approaches, on the other, added to the curricular changes that propose to work on the development of reading and writing skills, emerges the need to rethink the methodology of teaching language in the field of the disciplinary didactics. GREAL's contributions to this methodological change have sought to articulate theory with practice by dealing with problems that arise in real classrooms, based on the observation and analysis of student knowledge as the basis for the further development of classroom interventions, which have in turn become the object of investigation based on case studies.
The volume consists of eight parts that bring together a total of 34 chapters (originally articles published in Spanish, French and Catalan), written by both researchers and primary and secondary teachers. The papers and the problems addressed in them are presented chronologically. However, given the time span of 25 years during which the papers were published, specific themes were recursively revisited. Indeed, specific research questions occasionally call for a reassessment, inspired by new perspectives that arise and the cross-fertilization across topics.
The five texts in Part 1 ("Writing process and learning process") explore the interrelation between writing and learning through a tool for classroom intervention: Instructional Sequence (IS). Camps highlights the need to complement the views on the complex object of teaching that constitutes the written composition, which she conceptualizes as a social activity and, in this sense, as a linguistic practice articulated in school social practices. The author emphasizes that the writing activity must be a planned task that is meaningful for the students (a position extensively presented in "Language projects between theory and practice"); it is a complex and recursive process that requires the intervention of the teacher while it is being carried out. At this point, Camps returns to Vygotsky's contributions on the regulatory role of language, raising the need to speak when learning to write. In Ribas's chapter these notions are used to show the importance of formative evaluation as a regulatory process that allows teaching procedures to be adapted to the needs of the students.
Part 2 ("Writing Instructional Sequences") brings together five examples of projects designed in terms of the model just mentioned: an instructional sequence on poetry with the aim of experiencing literary communication as a real communicative experience (Milian); a project that seeks to characterize medieval heroes by reading various works of European literature, thus including the notion of intertextuality (Colomer, Milian, Ribas, Guasch and Camps); the transformation of a short tale into a piece of news, thereby exploring the relationship between the macrostructure of news and its grammatical content (e.g., syntactic schemas) (Zayas); an interview with a character from a literary project, which explores grammatical issues specific to the genre (Fontich); and finally a paper on the collaborative writing of theatrical reviews, based on the review as a specific model and embedded in an outing to the theater (Farrera).
"Metalinguistic activity in the process of writing" (Part 3) contains a series of papers/chapters that explore writing assignments focusing on the metalinguistic activity such assignments have triggered, and showing with empirical evidence the relationship between metalinguistic activity and collaborative writing processes. Camps and Milian focus on the complexity of the adjective "metalinguistic", reviewing work by different authors coming from various theoretical affiliations. Guasch's work analyzes specific reading errors that originate in interference between languages (namely, Catalan and English). And the text by Camps, Guasch, Ribas and Milian focuses on the enormous productivity that group interaction represents when writing. In this work, the authors develop the basic theoretical-methodological concept of "attempted text", an intermediate product that takes place during the collaborative writing process. It is an oral text with a written text profile (a sort of a written text "still in the air") that is characterized by complex syntax, high level of formality, and a specific prosody. The attempted text undergoes a process of reformulation, in accordance with certain rhetorical parameters, which highlight the metalinguistic activity emerging in the collaborative process of production and revision at different degrees of explicitness.
Part 4 ("Students' grammar concepts") delves into the problems of reflection and metalinguistic knowledge of students. Camps proposes an integrative approach, which basically consists in understanding metalinguistic activity as a cline ranging from purely implicit knowledge to explicit metalinguistic activity, verbalized in metalanguage. The papers/chapters that follow deal with students' concepts about specific grammatical categories: personal pronoun (Camps, Milian, Guasch, Pérez, Ribas and Castelló), subject (Notario), and verb (Durán). These authors maintain that the grammatical knowledge of the students constitutes a conglomerate of diverse knowledge, characterized by a lack of integration, which is evidenced by the separation between the declarative and the procedural contents.
"The teaching of grammar: Grammar Instructional Sequences" (Part 5) is a complementary model to IS. In the initial text, Camps suggests a dual-path programme that integrates the use of language and the study of the grammatical system. "Instructional Sequences to work on grammar at school" (Camps, Guasch, Milian and Ribas) suggests three routes on which to anchor grammatical learning: writing, grammatical system and inter-/ intralinguistic contrast. Camps and Fontich's chapter on the pronoun "hi" in oral Catalan is positioned within the third route. The two final papers (by Zayas and Camps and Milian, respectively) support the need to elaborate a pedagogical grammar. This grammar should present a hierarchy of linguistic facts that start from the semantic-pragmatic dimension towards forms, since pedagogical grammar should become a tool that helps the selection of forms that will allow the speaker to build her discursive perspective, and a means to progressively construct and systematize grammatical concepts.
Part 6 ("Metalinguistic activity and grammar learning") brings together papers that analyze metalinguistic reflections deployed by students in real interactions, some of them within classroom interventions articulated as GIS. Camps highlights the importance of generating tasks that promote students' metalinguistic activity, considered as the primary source of grammatical learning. In line with these observations, we find the texts on the verb and on the concepts of tense, mood, and transitivity in secondary school (Casas-Deseures, Durán and Fontich) and work by Gil and Bigas on the segmentation of a text into words in the context of early literacy.
Studies that explore the relationship between the teaching of writing and teaching grammar feature in Part 7 ("Writing, grammar and Metalinguistic activity"). Milian reviews the two decades during which the Instructional Sequence model was developed and in this way highlights the validity of such a model (both in terms of classroom interventions, as well as for teacher training and research), while at the same time reflection on the causes of its rather modest success in regular classrooms. The papers by Fontich and Giralt, Rodríguez-Gonzalo, and Delgado report on classroom practice that opens up complementary lines of reflection.
Closing the volume, Part 8 ("An approach to research into language teaching") constitutes a theoretical and practical synthesis of research in language teaching within the field of didactics. Camps considers that language teaching has its own object of study: the didactic (also called pedagogic) system, which is dynamic and made up of various and confluent activity systems. The author highlights the necessary relationship that must arise between classroom practices, innovation and research, and the indispensable collaboration between teachers and researchers. The texts by Milian and Camps and Uribe are respectively studies developed within the framework of the activity theory and focused on the complex learning processes of discursive genres.
The future trends of inquiry triggered by these approaches are outlined in the Postface of the volume. Here the editors defend the idea that a possible and general framework for future work is the conceptualisation and operationalization of the concept of metalinguistic activity. Likewise, Camps and Fontich highlight certain aspects already extensively studied but that require further exploration, among which further reflection on specific grammatical aspects meaningful within the writing process; ways to help students conceptualize key notions of the grammatical system; and the need to make progress in the elaboration of reference (or pedagogical) grammars for teaching.
The teaching of language can only be successful when embedded in a diversity in theoretical and methodological approaches and linguistic perspectives that start from the pragmatic-semantic level as the motivator of the morphosyntactic and lexical choices of the speakers. This is the path shown in the volume, an itinerary that has managed to integrate various linguistic, pedagogic, and methodological approaches as a way of improving the teaching of grammar and of overcoming the gap between grammar and discourse. The theoretical work presented coherently supports research that aims to help schoolchildren to become both competent writers in the framework of the social practices in which they participate and better connoisseurs of the key aspects of the grammatical system of language.
Research and teaching at the intersection: Navigating the territory of grammar and writing in the context of metalinguistic activity constitutes an essential reference work for all teachers and researchers interested in teaching grammar in Language Arts. While the translation into English of the texts in this volume (as already mentioned, originally published in Spanish, French and Catalan) will make them accessible to the international community, the volume gathers them together in an original and new way that seeks to show how GREAL research group has navigated the intriguing territory of grammar and writing based on the fundamental concept of "metalinguistic activity".

Reseña. La actividad metalingüística como espacio de encuentro de la escritura y la gramática: Un itinerario de enseñanza e investigación en educación lingüística, editado por Anna Camps y Xavier Fontich, en prensa
San Juan, Universidad Nacional de San Juan, en línea de acceso libre
Tal como destacan los editores en la Introducción, la enseñanza de la gramática en la escuela ha sido motivo de controversia en las últimas tres décadas. Con el ingreso del enfoque comunicativo y las perspectivas funcionalistas de la lengua, por un lado, y la crisis de los planteos transmisivos, por otro, sumado esto a los cambios curriculares que proponen trabajar sobre el desarrollo de las competencias de lectura y escritura, surge la necesidad de replantear la metodología de enseñanza de la lengua desde el campo de la didáctica disciplinar. Los aportes a este cambio metodológico del GREAL han perseguido articular la teoría con la práctica al ocuparse de los problemas que surgen en las aulas reales, partiendo de la observación y el análisis de los conocimientos de los estudiantes como base para el ulterior desarrollo de intervenciones didácticas, objeto a su vez de investigación principalmente a partir del estudio de caso.