Debra Myhill – Keynote Speaker

Debra Myhill is Professor of Education at the University of Exeter, and Dean of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies.

Her background is in teacher education, and so her research is designed to inform better teaching, specifically of language and literacy, and in particular writing.

Debra Myhill is the Director of the Centre for Research in Writing, and in 2014, her research team was awarded the Economic and Social Research Council award for Outstanding Impact in Society. Her research interests focus principally on aspects of language and literacy teaching, particularly linguistic and metalinguistic aspects of writing, and the composing processes involved in writing. This research is inter-disciplinary, drawing on psychological, socio-cultural and linguistic perspectives on writing.

Over the past fifteen years, she has led a series of research projects in these areas, in both primary and secondary schools, and has been involved in commissioned research or advisory roles for policy-makers and examination boards. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Secretary/Treasurer of the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruction. In 2014, she served on the Education sub-panel for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), assessing the quality of UK educational research.

Debra Myhill is the author/co-author of numerous articles and several books including: Talking, Listening, Learning: Effective Talk in the Primary Classroom (Open University Press); Using Talk to Support Writing (Sage); The Handbook of Writing Development (Sage) and Writing Voices: Creating Communities of Writers (Routledge).