English in Australia Volume 57 Number 1 • 2022 39 39 Writer Agency Writer Agency, Choice-Making and Embodied Grammar Brett Healey and Paul Gardner, Curtin University Abstract: Writing involves a complex web of deliberations as writers make specific choices from their repertoire of grammatical resources. However, curriculum and assessment criteria that favour top-down prescriptions of writing marginalise the agency of the writer (Gardner, 2012). Conversely, we posit a bottom-up process that integrates grammar teaching with the agentic role of the writer as they make ongoing writerly choices. This study draws on Myhill’s work (2012, 2022) on the teaching of ‘grammar as choice’ by exploring the impact of explicitly teaching six embodied grammatical concepts: generating energy; tracking motion; scanning the scene; creating perspective; focusing; and zooming in. The study demonstrates how explicitly teaching these concepts to 11 Year Five students during short, personalised writing conferences improved the range and application of their linguistic choices, their writerly agency and the quality and quantity of their writing. The study contributes to the growing body of research that emphasises students’ agency as writers. Keywords: writer agency, writing, cognitive grammar, narrative, writing conferences Introduction Control of linguistic choices for meaning-making is central to the narrative writing process and to the student’s developing agency as a writer. Writers make choices at several levels, including mode, topic, content, text structure, and lexico-grammar (Kellogg, 1994; Sharples, 1999; Wyse, 2017). In addition, they make process-oriented choices, including planning for writing, monitoring progress, revising, and approaching publication (Flower & Hayes, 1980). For students to develop strong agentic voices, the teaching of writing needs to afford them opportunities for choice-making. This includes teaching the necessary metacognitive skills, as well as creating spaces in lessons and task flexibility that allow students to enact effective choices. However, across Anglophone countries, writing instruction has been heavily influenced by a skills-based teaching and assessment paradigm that privileges traditional interpretations of technical accuracy of words and sentences, with little attention given to writers’ ability to express meaning (D’Arcy, 1999; Gardner, 2012). This focus is more likely to result in teaching such skills in isolation rather than the socially situated processes of creativity. We see the skills-based paradigm enacted in national assessments of writing in Australia, which give higher weighting to transcriptional and textual features such as grammar, punctuation and paragraphing than they do to compositional features such as audience and ideas (ACARA, 2017), resulting in an overemphasis on teaching formulaic transcriptional and textual features (Gardner, 2018) that ultimately stifles creative expression in secondary students’ writing (Carey et al., 2022). What does this mean for writing as an act of choice-making? Different paradigms of writing composition influence the way in which students are positioned as writers (Gardner, 2014a). Paradigms in which choice and meaning-making are central to writing privilege writer agency and identity. This implies that ‘space’ needs to be made for students to enact their writer identities, enabling them to use the sociocultural resources (Dyson, 2002; Jones & Beck 2020), including personal and inherited narratives