Language choices made by successful student writers
Author: Dr Damon Thomas, University of Queensland on behalf of the QSWP team (Kelly Shoecraft, Jack Walton, Ken Tann, Nathan Lowien, Andrew Scott, Amy Gillespie Rouse, Caryn Hellberg, and Nathaniel Swain)
In this blog Damon shares some initial findings emerging from the Quality Student Writing Project (QWSP) currently being undertaken by a team of nine researchers from the University of Queensland, Griffith University, University of New England and Deakin University.
The QSWP is the latest contribution to an enduring educational linguistic undertaking. Since the early 1980s, educational linguists have been identifying language choices which are correlated with educational success, while at the same time developing pedagogies designed to make these choices available to all students, no matter their background. The origins of this undertaking, and the foundational ideas underpinning this work, are recorded in a seminal account by Joan Rothery, who with Jim Martin initiated this work in 1979-80 (Rothery, 1996).
The QWSP research team is exploring questions such as:
What language choices do successful students make when writing in different contexts?
How do their choices change as they get older or when they write in different genres to meet different social purposes?
The insights below emerged from two small-scale QSWP studies of primary school students' genre (structural) and sentence-level choices, drawing on a larger analysis of high and low scoring NAPLAN writing samples. These insights were initially shared at the 2025 Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) National Conference.
To undertake the studies, the researchers drew on both SFL descriptions of text structure (genre, text stages, phases) and language features, alongside the commonly taught PEEL mnemonic and language features mentioned in AERO's (2025) sentence structure and grammar course.
1. How do high-scoring student writers structure persuasive and narrative texts to meet the demands of the NAPLAN writing text?
The first study explored how high-scoring student writers structured both persuasive and narrative texts.
To PEEL or not to PEEL in persuasive texts
First, we wanted to know whether, when writing persuasive texts, high-scoring students follow the commonly taught PEEL phases (i.e., Point, Elaborate, Example/Evidence, Link) to structure their argument paragraphs. We analysed 30 high-scoring analytical and hortatory exposition texts written by Year 3 and Year 5 students.
Writers of analytical expositions frequently used Point, Elaborate, Reason, Rebuttal, and Summary phases, but notably, the Example and Link phases common in PEEL were rarely used.
For hortatory expositions, the writers typically included Point, Elaborate, Evaluate, Example, and Reiterate phases, again omitting the traditional Link phase.
Year 5 students were also more likely than Year 3 students to use figurative devices like rhetorical questions to end their argument paragraphs.
From this small study, we conclude that while certain PEEL phases were indeed used by these high-scoring students to persuade their readers and to score highly, these students also made several other phase choices. Exploring such choices in high quality mentor texts may prove helpful for teachers preparing their students to complete the NAPLAN writing test.
Structuring narratives for maximum engagement
Second, we wanted to know whether, when writing narrative texts, high-scoring students follow the basic narrative stages of Orientation, Complication and Resolution. These stages are promoted in the NAPLAN narrative writing marking guide.
We analysed 34 high-scoring narrative texts written by Year 3 and Year 5 students. We expected high-scoring students to follow the three basic narrative stages, but a third of high-scoring Year 3 students, and more than half of the high-scoring Year 5 students, did not include a standard Orientation stage, while five did not include a standard Resolution.
So, how did these students orient the reader and 'finish' their stories?
High-scoring students often started their narratives with a 'Hook' phase designed to catch the reader's attention and ensure they would want to keep reading. Instead of gradually building to a complication for the characters to solve, these narratives often began in the heat of the action, engaging readers immediately.
Some high-scoring students used a 'Drip-feed' approach, drip-feeding character and setting details throughout the narrative's stages, rather than including a single block of orientation at the start.
Several high-scoring students included a 'Big reveal' at the end of their texts to provide unexpected context or to resolve mysteries.
In these and other ways, to tell their stories and engage readers, high-scoring students were able to move beyond basic linear narrative structure.
2. What sentence-level choices are made by writers of high- and low-scoring narratives?
The second study compared the sentence-level choices made by high- and low-scoring primary school students. Starting with the features mentioned in the Australian Education Research Organisation’s [AERO] (2025) sentence structure and grammar course, and adding additional features from SFL, we investigated the students' use of the following features:
verb groups/process types
noun group parts (pre- and post-modifiers, main/head nouns)
adjective groups
adverbials/circumstance types
connectives
clause types and sentence types
subject-verb agreement
nominalisation and appositives.
The differences between high- and low-scoring sentence-level choices were stark.
While low-scoring students used verb groups to express 'doing' processes almost exclusively (e.g., went, saved), high-scoring writers used verb groups to achieve a wide range of process types beyond 'doing', including 'saying' (e.g., mumbled, announced), 'thinking' (imagined), 'feeling' (heard, bothered), and 'relating' (was, wasn't) processes.
High-scoring writers packed in much more detail into noun groups, predominantly through the use of detailed pre-modifiers when naming characters, places, and ideas (e.g., the young toddler’s desperate cries; the razor sharp, blood-stained teeth; the three-metre-long unbeatable shark). In contrast, low-scoring students wrote noun groups that were either too simple (e.g., the Play grownd) or overly convoluted (e.g., the thing that I did that was very brave...).
Perhaps most importantly, high-scoring writers demonstrated stronger grammatical control through their use of advanced features like nominalisation (e.g., the realisation hit him) and appositives (e.g., one more punch to the gills, the most powerful he had ever made), while the low-scoring students struggled with run-on sentences (e.g., geuss what esle i did that da i went on the worlds biggests water silde ever because i did that mum and dad gave me 1000 dollares for going on the worlds biggest water slide and biggest roller coaster) and problems with sentence-verb agreement (e.g., Trent ded not wont to... so he jump of; he wood die... I fall faster... I will cooshin).
The QSWP is an ongoing project that aims to investigate quality student writing in different contexts using SFL tools and other approaches.
In 2025, members of our team had an open-access article published in the Australian Educational Researcher journal about high-scoring students' figurative language choices (see Thomas et al., 2025).
Further articles about other aspects of language are in progress, including:
students' use of vocabulary to develop narrative characters and settings (i.e., lexical strings and taxonomic relations),
students’ evaluative language choices used to persuade and entertain (i.e., Appraisal).
We are also developing a model of writing education, Writing Education Compass, first presented at the 2025 PETAA conference.
The team look forward to sharing more updates as we continue our work. For more information about the project, contact Damon Thomas at damon.thomas@uq.edu.au.
References
Australian Education Research Organisation. (2025). Understanding sentence structure and grammar. https://www.edresearch.edu.au/guides-resources/courses/understanding-sentence-structure-and-grammar
Rothery, J. (1996). Making changes: Developing an educational linguistics. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in society (pp. 86–123). London: Longman.
Thomas, D. P., Walton, J., Tann, K., Shoecraft, K., Lowien, N., & Scott, A. (2025). Figurative language and narrative writing: Insights from high-achieving primary school students. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52, 4097-4126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-025-00890-w
About the author
Dr Damon Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy Education in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. His research interests include the development, teaching, and assessment of writing, argumentation, and dialogic pedagogies. Before starting his academic career, Damon was a primary school teacher in Launceston, Tasmania.