TEACHING WRITING SKILLS

From How Children Learn to Write by J. Smith and W. Elley, 1996.

Donald Graves and the Process approach:

Donald Graves is an American teacher and researcher into how children write. His book Writing: Teachers and Children at Work published in 1983 has had a tremendous influence on how children are taught writing in many western countries. He basically outlines what has come to be called the process approach. This approach takes the premise that children initially want to learn how to write and we have to give them the space to write what they want. It also requires regular writing to occur. [cf SSR]. Emphasis is on the meaning rather than on surface features like punctuation, spelling etc. Research shows that students will learn their spelling and punctuation and grammar just as well but their writing will be more adventurous and innovative. The Key Concepts of process writing are: 1. Ownership. Students must be able to choose what they write about and in what form. Graves recommends that students choose their own topic at least 80% of the time. Clearly there are practical considerations here. If students continually write about the same thing or write work which is intended to put down others then the teacher may have to guide the student to new or more appropriate topics. 2. Drafts and Revision. Students must redraft and revise their initial work. This requires input from peers and teacher and reinforces the concept of an audience for the writing and the importance of social interactions in literacy learning. Revising does not just mean writing a good copy of the first draft or merely correcting surface errors. Students should be encouraged to look at their overall purpose in writing and to redraft with this in mind. Clearly conferencing and the aspects discussed here are crucial in this process. 3. Conferencing. This is where most of the teaching takes place. Teacher and pupil meet and discuss what has been written. The role of the teacher is to ask questions of

the writer as they are the authority on their work. Teacher can say Why did you write this...? or I liked this part where... or I dont understand this... You try to alert the writer to how an audience may respond to their writing to make them aware that what is clear to them may not be to an outsider. Most conferences will focus on a single aspect of the writing. This is to improve the understanding and awareness of this aspect. Trying to discuss too many things at once may have an overwhelming effect. Conferences should always be constructive and helpful without negative judgments. 4. Publishing. Giving the writing a real purpose is important if students are to invest in it. Publishing is a broad term with many faces eg - sharing with a friend, sharing with the class, putting on public display, printing in a booklet etc. 5. Teacher modelling of writing. Graves considers this to be of prime importance. He suggests teachers use a variety of techniques in modelling the process of their writing (writing on large sheets of paper, overhead transparencies...) and that they verbalise what they are doing and why as they do it. This models the strategies and thought processes you go through as you write.

Cambournes model of literacy - learning the natural way.

Brain Cambourne is an Australian who has built on the work of Graves and has been influential on the teaching of writing in Australia, New Zealand and USA. He outlined 8 variables that he believed to be necessry in a language classroom. 1. Immersion Children should be surrounded by language in their environment so that they can obsorb the rules and knowledge about form and style and learn an enthusiasm for it. 2. Demonstration Ways of writing, structuring, genre, planning, revising etc need to

be modelled - either by the teacher or by peers. 3. EngagementFor any real learning to occur the learner must be actively engaged in the learning process. If they are switched of or bored they will not be learing as they should be. 4, Expectations Expectations of writing behaviour are important. Too high or too

low expectations will have a detrimental affect on student interest and engagement. 5. Responsibility Follows on from Graves encouraging students to choose their

own topics and also suggests that they should have control over the aspects of form, style etc that they want to focus on and improve or experiment with. 6. Employment their skills. 7. Approximation Students should be encouraged to take risks and not worry about Basically just suggests that students have the opportunity to use

errors. Mistakes should be seen as opportunities for learning rather than indicators of performance. 8. Response Feedback is important. Teachers response should be informative and

non-threatening or judgemental. This suggests that formative rather than summative tasks should be stressed. Should focus on the message rather than the surface features of the writing.

Cognitive models of writing: Flower and Hayes.

Flower and Hayes researched how expert writers (ie adults) went about their writing and devised a model to fit what they found. They found that the 3 processes mature writers undergo are: Planning, Writing, Revising. They found that this is not a linear pattern that is followed but is a recursive activity going backwards and forwards between the steps. The diagram below shows all the elements they believed are involved in the writing process.

TASK ENVIRONMENT WRITING ASSIGNMENT Topic Audience Motivating Cues TEXT PRODUCED SO FAR

WRITERS LONG TERM MEMORY Knowledge of Topic Audience and Writing Plans

WRITING PROCESSES

PLAN

TRANSLATE

REVIEW

Organise Set Goals

Evaluate Edit

MONITOR

Bereiter and Scardamalias work in the 1980s gave insights into the
problems beginning writers have in managing this very complex process. They identified four kinds of problems that young writers face when they set out to begin a writing task:

1.

Learning to produce continuous text without a turn-taking partner Too often the young writer stops after one point has been made. They need someone, or something, to prompt them to continue. This could be done with nods, questions, etc. Learning to search ones memory to generate more suitable content Young children appear to have no system to help them to think of something relevant, even though they may have much passive information waiting to be retrieved. They need memory aids and prompts. Learning to think ahead, to plan beyond the present sentence Young writers often can not see beyond the moment and the particular sentence they are writing. Learning to revise ones own writing Children often cannot get beyond the actual words they have written and find it hard to shift from writing to evaluating what has been written.

2.

3.

4.

IMPROVING WRITING OUTPUT AND FLUENCY IN STUDENTS:

In broad terms there are four areas that must be focussed on to improve student engagement in writing and hence their output and fluency. 1. Feedback:

We need to foster functional beliefs about writing through giving effective feedback on how to improve writing and showing care and interest in the students. It is important that feedback given to students enables them to become aware of their own cognitive processes if they are to gain mastery of them. Teachers need to give feedback that "gives each pupil specific guidance on strengths and weaknesses." The positive forms of feedback to give students are - "reinforcement", "corrective feedback", "remediation feedback", "diagnostic feedback" and "mastery learning. 2. Goal-setting:

We need to set challenging, and authentic, writing tasks which are linked with the students personal and social goals as much as possible. Teachers can help to facilitate a mastery goal approach by structuring their classes and tasks in such a way that "performance" is devalued and "effort" is emphasised. This helps to foster students beliefs that they are able to control the outcomes of their writing which, in turn, leads to greater effort and selfefficacious beliefs about their ability to produce good writing. 3. Topic & Discourse Knowledge:

Interest in a topic is thought to have positive influences on a students writing because it links what students know about a topic with what they value. We should be careful to give students the opportunity to write on topics they are knowledgeable about and to teach them the topic knowledge they need to be able to do the task. We also need to give specific training in the writing conventions of particular genre, guidance in why these genre are valuable, and feedback to help monitor student success in using the genre to build student knowledge of, and confidence in, a variety of discourse structures. 4. Self-Regulation:

We need to teach specific cognitive strategies that will help students to plan, produce and revise their writing successfully. Studies into various forms of self-regulation, from planning strategies to composing and revising strategies, clearly show that teaching self-regulation strategies will improve writing performance.