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Testing Times for Writing
The results of the Key Stage 2 writing tests continue to lag behind the results for reading. Will the government’s proposed spelling, punctuation and grammar test improve the situation? It’s time to take a look at what learning to write involves today, how the most effective schools and teachers go about the business of teaching it and what the most productive practices look like. Professor Henrietta Dombey explains the issues.
Should we worry about our children’s achievements in writing?
A few decades ago, before the term ‘landline’ was invented, parents complained about how much time their children, particularly teenagers, spent on the family phone. Now, of course, it’s the mobile and the computer. For communicating at a distance, the voice has largely been replaced by tapping fingers and thumbs. Net result? Our children are writing more than ever. And it’s not just text messages. Ofcom (2011) reports that 28% of 8-11 year olds (and 75% of 12-15 year olds) with access to the internet have created a profile on a networking site.
Writing has changed. In today’s multimodal world, composition tends to be visual as well as verbal – as much about design as it is about word choice. But it’s still about constructing and encoding meaning, and it’s still a more complex and demanding process than reading. So, despite the new technology, it’s harder to learn.
Purposes for writing
Adults and children write for a range of purposes, to:
- work out ideas and shape emerging thoughts,
- order and extend thinking,
- reflect on experiences, ideas or learning,
- create aesthetically satisfying works,
- communicate with others, known and unknown, in a range of formal and informal ways.
Children need to experience all these purposes for writing in their primary education, if they are to see the point of writing anything more than brief messages. At its fullest, to write means to experience the satisfaction that comes from wrestling with meaning to take your own thinking forward, or tussling to get the words and their shape on the page right, to create a poem, story or PowerPoint presentation that conveys something important to others.
Most out-of-school digital writing doesn’t stretch to such achievements. Most children need to learn these in school.
What children have to learn
Of course, children need to learn the ‘basics’ of transcription, that is to:
- form letters, write easily and legibly and use a keyboard,
- punctuate and spell appropriately.
But to become a writer means learning about composition too – learning to:
- produce the language of written text, (different in terms of vocabulary and grammar from most spoken language),
- develop a personal voice (presenting oneself on paper or screen),
- exploit the potential of written language and shape it to meet its various purposes (often involving substantial revision),
- construct multi-modal text.
In England’s primary schools, all this has to be achieved in English, a particular challenge for those who speak other languages at home.
Basics first?
Politicians tend to see this as a two-step process – handwriting, spelling to be tackled first, before children attempt composition. But research evidence suggests that the most effective teaching balances communicative purpose and technical skills from the start (Knapp et al., 1995; Medwell et al., 1998; Louden et al., 2010).
Children learn to write best when they learn the technical skills as they are needed to achieve their communicative purpose.
Pre-school learning
Many children learn quite a bit about writing before they start school. Nearly all pre-school children have some sense of the purposes of written language. Children learn to write in school more easily and more successfully if they also have:
- a secure grasp of spoken language and an awareness of what it can do,
- listened to stories read aloud (making the forms and meanings of written language familiar),
- engaged with nursery rhymes and word play (developing an awareness of speech sounds),
- experimented with drawing and writing,
- already learned to write their names unaided and recognise the letters of the alphabet .
This learning isn’t the result of a deliberately taught home curriculum, but comes from young children and experienced users of written language sharing in the processes of meaning making in their homes, through active engagement with their social and cultural worlds (Neuman and Roskos, 1997). Even the alphabetic knowledge that makes a difference seems to come not from decontextualised teaching, but from having letters pointed out in a context of reading and writing text that involves the child (Riley, 1996).
Lessons from effective schools
Studies of the most effective schools have shown us that the most effective teachers of writing go about this complex and vital task in a broadly similar way. They:
- balance the technical and compositional aspects of learning to write,
- integrate these complementary aspects,
- emphasise attention, engagement, metalinguistics and challenge (eliciting, as well as involvement, strategic talk about the process of composition),
- prioritise a richly conceived literacy (helping children to take pleasure in written language),
- devote more time to small group teaching (so engaging better with the children’s different needs and interests),
- know what their pupils can do and what they need (ensuring that they teach children, not just the curriculum),
- create classroom atmospheres that are more discursive, conversational and dialogic (making the classroom more open to the exploration of ideas),
- build explicitly on children’s personal and cultural backgrounds (ensuring that children don’t feel that writing is not for them or their kind),
- share the purposes for writing and the criteria of success with learner (giving children a sense of direction)
- believe that meaning, purpose and function are of prime importance and that all children can learn to write effectively.
Such approaches, dispositions and beliefs appear to be more important than curricular content. So a sure route to improving writing is to support teachers’ understanding of the process and belief in the power of children to learn.
Productive classroom practices
In addition to these qualities of proven effectiveness, a number of specific classroom activities appear to be highly productive for literacy teaching in general and writing in particular.
Children tend to make a good start in learning to write where their teachers:
- model and share the process of writing (writing large texts in front of the children, articulating the decisions involved and inviting the children to help them get meaning down on the page or screen),
- encourage the exchange of written messages, (including texting and message boards for Year 2).
Children continue to make progress where their teachers:
- engage in writing themselves (so becoming alive to the joys and problems of composition),
- regularly read substantial and powerful texts aloud (infusing children’s writing with a wider range of vocabulary, sentence structure and resonant rhythms),
- make links between reading and writing (demonstrating how important effects are achieved through writing),
- make extensive use of drama, and involve children in writing arising out of this (tapping the extraordinary power of drama to enable children to take on new forms of language and use this to wrestle with problem situations),
- provide authentic purposes for writing (from shopping lists to Powerpoint presentations on a plan for the school playground),
- allow children to engage in sustained periods of writing (not just 40 minutes a week),
- see writing as central to shaping thought and expressing ideas in all curriculum areas (ensuring that it’s used to aid learning, not just to record it),
- teach spelling explicitly in the context of purposeful writing (while training attention to both the sounds of words and their visual configurations),
- teach a fluid handwriting style (giving priority to clarity and fluency, rather than neatness),
- talk about punctuation (emphasising the effect on meaning it produces),
- foster talk to generate ideas, rehearse orally and to reflect on the process of writing (enabling children to draw on the power of talk to organise and elevate their learning),
- organize and support collaborative ‘writing workshops’ and other forms of collaborative writing (recognising that a small group an usually achieves better results than a lone individual),
- encourage and support children’s use of private ‘writing journals’ (giving children unparalleled ownership of the text though choice of topic and of reader),
- promote the production of multimodal text (connecting classroom writing to the world outside school, through PowerPoint, comic strips etc.),
- recognize and respect bilingual children’s writing achievements in other languages and other scripts (allowing them to build on achievements, rather than setting them at naught).
Grammar teaching
So what about grammar teaching? Despite a number of research projects, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that teaching grammar outside the context of composition improves children’s writing (Hillocks, 1986; Andrews et al., 2006). But there is some evidence that grammar teaching in the context of writing could be more productive.
Writing might be improved where teachers:
- introduce key terms such as ‘synonym’ ‘verb’, ‘noun’, ‘sentence’ and ‘noun phrase’ in the context of shared writing (Hunt, 2001).
But one study carried out with primary children doesn’t demonstrate this conclusively. And we don’t yet know which of these terms are likely to be most useful in the primary years, or when and how they might best be introduced. What’s clear is that to have any hope of improving children’s writing, just like spelling, punctuation and handwriting, grammar teaching needs to be integrated into the writing of texts that have a real communicative purpose and matter to the children.
So what about the test the government is shortly to introduce, to judge children, teachers and schools on grammar, spelling, and punctuation? If it’s anything like the pilot, this test will ask children to underline subordinate clauses, turn sentences from active to passive and correct artificially contrived errors in such invented sentences as “The children are going to a shopping centre tomorrow and they had bought some new toys”. This won’t show whether children avoid bizarre errors of this type in their own writing, much less whether they write effectively.
Instead it will have the usual ‘backwash’ effect of such tests of de-contextualised knowledge and skills: it will push teachers and schools towards the very kind of de-contextualised grammar teaching that has been shown not to improve children’s writing. So there’s a serious risk that introducing this test will mean that our children will become less effective writers.
And the role of parents in all this?
- Don’t worry that texting and tweeting will ruin your children’s spelling, or ability to construct more substantial compositions. The evidence tends the other way.
- Make it evident how writing plays a part in ordering and enlarging your life.
- Engage your children in as many interesting writing activities as you can.
- Find out the school’s policies on handwriting, spelling and keyboard use. Support these at home.
- Value the pieces of writing that your children bring home from school
- Carry on reading to them texts that you can both share and enjoy.
Henrietta Dombey is Professor Emeritus of Literacy in Primary Education, University of Brighton. See also Professor Dombey’s articles, ‘How Should We Teach Children to Read?’ in BfK No. 156 (Jan 2006) and ‘Panic About the Teaching of Reading’ in BfK No. 186 (Jan 2011).
References
ANDREWS, R.C., TORGERSON, S., BEVERTON, A., FREEMAN, T.,LOCK, G., LOW, G., ROBINSON, A. & ZHU, D. (2006) The effect of grammar teaching on writing development. British Education Research Journal 32, 1, pp. 39-55
HILLOCKS, G. (1986) Research on Written Composition: New directions for teaching. Urbana IL: National of Teachers of English
HUNT, G. (2001) Raising awareness of grammar through shared writing. In J. Evans (ed.) The Writing Classroom: Aspects of writing and the primary child 3-11. London David Fulton.
KENNER, C. (2004) Becoming Biliterate: Children learning different writing systems. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books
KNAPP, M.S. and Associates (1995) Teaching for Meaning in High-Poverty Classrooms New York: Teachers’ College Press.
LOUDEN, W., ROHL, M., BARRAT-PUGH, C., BROWN, C., CAIRNEY, T., ELDERFIELD, J., HOUSE, H., MEIERS, M., RIVALAND, J., & ROWE, K.J. (2005). In teachers’ hands: effective literacy teaching practices in the early years of schooling. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 28, 3, pp. 173-252 (Whole issue).
MEDWELL, J., WRAY, D, POULSON, L. & FOX, R. (1998) Effective Teachers of Literacy. Exeter: The University of Exeter for the Teacher Training Agency.
NEUMAN, S.B., and ROSKOS, K. (1997). Literacy knowledge in practice: Contexts of participation for young readers and writers. www.reading.org/publications/journals/RRQ/”>Reading Research Quarterly, 32, 1, pp. 10-32.
OFCOM (2011) Children and parents: media use and attitudes report [online] available at http://org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/oct2011/Children_and_parents.pdf accessed 19.10.2012
Henrietta Dombey is Professor Emeritus of Literacy in Primary Education, University of Brighton. See also Professor Dombey’s articles, ‘How Should We Teach Children to Read?’ in BfK No. 156 (Jan 2006) and ‘Panic About the Teaching of Reading’ in BfK No. 186 (Jan 2011).