Effective professional development (PD) in teaching writing involves supporting teachers' knowledge of the writer's craft, including their thinking processes, linguistic knowledge and practical strat...

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 hav...

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 hav...

The writing process method is applied by teachers intending to engage students in the types of processes writers go through recursively when creating a text, including planning, drafting, revising,...

Writing workshop, as conceived by Donald Graves and other US researchers in the 1980s, positively transformed the writing instruction of many teachers. However, others experienced considerable challe...

Effective narrative writers create immersive reader experiences through precise linguistic choices. Teachers can support effective linguistic choice-making in young writers through the process of imaginative embodiment, a method of narrative thinking framed by cognitive stylistics concepts and their embodied effects. In this article, I assess the effects of an imaginative embodiment pedagogy on fifth grade writers’ narratives by examining how their linguistic choices contribute to immersion. As part of the study, four Grade 5 teachers attended a training session on imaginative embodiment and applied the approach throughout a nine-week narrative writing unit with 12 students via one-on-one writing conferences. To study the effects of the approach, a linguistic analysis was conducted on student writing completed before and after the writing unit. The analysis was driven by a stylistic checklist that codes grammatical features to embodied effects, as well as an interpretive analysis of these features’ overall effectiveness on immersion. Findings suggested that students’ linguistic choices changed in response to learning the process of imaginative embodiment. Specifically, choices were characterized by their embodied effects, contributing to greater textual immersion. This suggests that teaching imaginative embodiment can improve writers’ narratives by affording them specific strategies for expressing meaning.