Righting writing : what the social accomplishment of error correction tells about school literacy

School literacy has been identified with specific ways of talking about texts, especially during teacher-led literacy lessons. This paper considers school literacy through a focus on talk about error correction during a time of individual writing activity in an early years classroom. Conversation Analysis is used to develop descriptions of error correction sequences and the methods used to bring about error correction through talk about children’s written texts. It is argued that error correction illustrates school literacy, where talk about texts is constrained by the teacher’s orientations – in this case to making students work out errors.