Further Thoughts About Teaching Writing 

Lately I've been thinking about the teaching and learning of writing. To be able to communicate effectively in writing is an important prerequisite for the future academic success of our learners.  So it concerns me that in my school, statistics indicate a significant group of students who are achieving below expectations in both surface features and deeper features. These results are reflected in my own class of year 8 students.

It is clear to me that the students who who sit in the below / just below cohort in writing are capable learners. After all, they started school at 5 years old with very few skills and now they can write. They can write at around level 2, maybe up to beginning level 3. They have learnt that much. So clearly they can learn.

So initially I wanted to know why. WHY have these kids not managed to meet the required standard? But then I realised that the 'WHY' doesn't matter. Laying blame, speculating and pointing finger as to why these students haven't achieved won't improve their performance. It won't prepare them for high school. Asking why is a cop-out. The real question, the important question is WHAT? As in 'What am I going to do about it?'

I needed to identify the issues. What is it that prevents any piece of student writing from being assessed at the required level?  On taking a close look at the work of the underachieving writers in my class I felt that there were two specific things holding them back:

1. Vocabulary. The writing of the students in the target group lacks a general maturity of vocabulary. These writers tend to use too many 'baby' words in a row. This sort of thing..."and then we got in the car and went to ..." They don't seem to have a very big 'internal resource bank ' of words and they tend not to explore new words.

2. Sentence Structure. Target group students write almost entirely in mid-length (sometimes long) simple sentences. They generally do not include commas or other more advanced forms of punctuation and sentences most often begin with simple words such as 'then, the, when, I,' etc. Some forget about sentences completely.

 So, this seems easy! I just have to fix those two issues and the problem will be solved. So there's that question again; 'What am I going to do about it?'

1. What am I going to do to assist students to develop a wider vocabulary and use it in their writing?

• I am going to read aloud to my class everyday from quality literature and specifically teach the meaning of selected unfamiliar words.
• I am going to use these texts to discuss words and develop 'interesting word charts' which will be displayed and referred to.
• I am going to create a classroom environment rich in text.
• I am going to ensure that learning new words is interesting and fun and occurs almost daily.

2. What am I going to do to assist students to develop a greater variety of sentence structures in their writing?

• I am going to read aloud to my class everyday from quality literature and use these texts as sentence structure exemplars.
• I am going to teach specific lessons on punctuation. Students will be taught how to apply commas, colons, speech marks, apostrophes. These short lessons will be whole class but may be re-visited with target group writers.
• I am going to use sentence structure as an on-going focus of success criteria for writing.
• I am going to give students targeted written feed forward about sentence structure. They will use this feed forward to create personalised writing goals.

You will notice that I believe part of the answer to both of these questions is the reading aloud and discussion of quality literature. To constantly be showing learners what good text looks like and sounds like is a really powerful teaching tool. Reading aloud to students is something that I feel strongly about. I think it is a topic which warrants its own blog post. Watch this space (and check out my read-alouds.)

Other important points include the explicit teaching of vocabulary and punctuation and providing really good, targeted written feed forward on students' writing. This is then used by the students to create personalised learning goals for the next piece of writing. Please read my previous blog post on this topic.

However, to me the real key to improving student achievement in writing is when I (the teacher) can identify and focus on the specific issues and ask "What am I going to do about it?" 

Teachers, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about this.