Closing the Writing Gap

Alex Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000591392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sekundarschulbildung

This book explains seven critical steps to improve children's writing. Though seemingly 'natural', writing proves devilishly difficult for far too many school pupils and closing this gap can have a lasting impact on their academic and life success.

With the goal of giving every teacher the knowledge and skill to teach writing with confidence, it makes sense of the history and 'science' of writing, synthesising the debates and presenting a wealth of usable evidence about how children develop most efficiently as successful writers.

It trains teachers to be an expert in how pupils learn to write, from the big picture of planning, editing and revising your writing, to the vital importance of grammar and spelling with accuracy. Highly practical strategies and easy-to use classroom activities are included to help teachers seize opportunities across the curriculum every school day to teach the critical writing process.

Closing the Writing Gap will guide teachers at every stage of their career and when used with Alex Quigley's much-loved books on Vocabulary and Reading gives school leaders evidence-based approaches to literacy that can be applied across a school or a group of schools.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179962-1

Our lives can be filled and fulfilled by writing. That story begins with our birth certificate and ends with our epitaph. In between, each day, we use writing to learn, to love, to remember, to console, to entertain, to imagine, to argue, and to simply be.

These blots of ink you see before you embody the greatest tool of our modern civilisation. They represent our urge to communicate and our means to do so. In a mere few thousand years, we have gone from a small number of people engraving notches on stone and bone to around five billion people being able to write and to communicate. The story of writing has rapidly accelerated, with writing quickly becoming an act of near-instant global connectedness.

Though most of the world now enjoys the power and pleasure of writing, there remains a gap between those who can write with fluency and skill and those who cannot. Around 7.1 million adults in England are functionally illiterate.¹ Put simply, imagine lacking the confidence to email your boss or to write a job application. Too many adults and young people are unable to perform these seemingly simple acts of daily writing, or to enjoy the potential benefits they offer. That is the harsh truth of being functionally illiterate.

No statistic, however big, nor school data, can capture the frustration and daily losses suffered by those people, and pupils, who struggle to write.

Sadly, most young people and adults who struggle to write do not go on to write the story of their own lives and their voices go unheard. Instead, debates about writing get embroiled in narrow grumblings about grammar terminology or squabbles about style. Meanwhile, too many pupils suffer countless small losses and teachers lack training in the fundamentals of teaching writing, grammar, and more. The sound and fury of media headlines seldom translates into support for teachers to close this writing gap.

The dubious lore that ‘we all have a novel within us’ belies a cold truth. Few people write a novel. Even fewer still write daily with the confidence and fluency that those who have flourished at school can take for granted. We labour under the miscomprehension that writing is a natural gift and is not hard-earned. Too easily, we forget the thousands of hours of deliberate practice it takes to learn to write, from the mark making of young children with crayons, or similar, to pupils gripped by the pressure of writing extended essays in vast exam halls.

It is argued that writing is the ‘neglected “R”’² in comparison to reading and a(r)ithmetic. Given that writing ability will either unleash or circumscribe the talents of our pupils, we need to give writing the attention it deserves, in every classroom, at every stage of schooling.

The writing gap in the classroom

Let’s begin with a writing activity, just like those undertaken by pupils daily.

First, quickly read this short passage about a cyclone in Kolkata:

A powerful and catastrophic tropical cyclone has hit the east Indian city of Kolkata. The devastating storm has led to the tragic deaths of an estimated one hundred people in West Bengal and beyond. Cyclone Amphan destroyed coastal areas with a storm surge of around sixteen feet, triggering widespread flooding. As a result, low-lying areas have been left in swamp-like conditions, with houses flattened, power outages, and thousands of trees uprooted in the wake of the cyclone.

Now, your classroom writing task is to write a single sentence summary, in ten words or less, of this passage about cyclone Amphan in the box below. And, crucially, you must write the summary sentence with your non-writing hand.

How did you do? Just as importantly: how did this task make you feel?

Take a moment to consider the sheer array of knowledge and skill that meant you were able to enact this essential, and perennial, writing activity.

On reflection, you will have noted the physical discomfort of writing with your ‘other’ hand. It reminds us of the hard-won nature of automatic, fluent handwriting. For pupils, these basic writing processes can help or hinder writing goals. Second, to write a short summary, you had to bring to bear an array of reading knowledge and skill. You likely skimmed and scanned the words describing Kolkata, activating lots of essential background knowledge, before considering how to filter the essential information into a few words. Then, understanding intuitively the nature of a clear and complete sentence, you summarised your reading with a rapid distillation into your own words.

When we consider the dizzying array of moves writers make in a matter of moments, we recognise the difficulty faced by so many novice pupils when they are expected to write in the classroom. You may not be functionally illiterate by any measure, but you can still find this task tricky, just as pupils can find writing in the classroom difficult. And so, the subtle, near hidden ‘writing gap’ exists and persists in these countless daily writing tasks for our pupils.

It is no surprise then that the complex act of writing is described as tantamount to a game of chess.³ For most writing tasks in the classroom, a pupil will be thinking about their many ‘moves’: handwriting, word choices, spelling, paragraphing, writing for their audience, activating their prior knowledge, along with considering the purpose and genre of their writing, and more.

Take some time to consider the experience of a sixteen-year-old pupil sitting something like twenty lengthy examinations. Each time they play on a different chess board, in rapid succession, with a different opponent, but in each exam, there is the relentless demand to make their writing moves with speed, skill, and confidence.

Not only is an array of complex moves enacted during all acts of writing, in the typical school day, pupils are expected to undertake many different types of writing. Though many instances of pupils’ writing are in the form of short answers to questions⁴ – or note-making, for older pupils in particular – any given school day can include a range of writing types and teacher approaches, from a story or an essay to a short exam answer.

Consider the moving target of writing at different phases and key stages. In year 2, a pupil could be expected to write an imagined account of the Great Fire of London, quickly followed by a written record of science experiments on materials burning. Fast forward to year 9, with pupils moving from note-taking in science, to essay writing in history, then onto annotation in art, and finally some narrative writing in English. Each act of writing proves subtly different, with different generic features and stylistic devices, along with often radically different approaches to how that writing is taught, planned, drafted, edited, and revised.

Given we can recognise, with some intuition, how to write strong sentences, stories, and more, without a deep understanding of the process, we can be prone to take the teaching of writing for granted. It can mistakenly be viewed as something to be acquired naturally, just like talk. Though reading, or physics, or algebraic equations, may prove hard for pupils of all ages and stages to master, it has been argued that the ability of our pupils to translate their thoughts into writing may be the hardest skill of all to develop.⁵

Teachers observe the difficulties faced by pupils who struggle with writing each day. When writing falters, it offers one of the more visible and tangible ways to understand how well our pupils are, or are not, learning. We observe common pitfalls, such as spelling errors, grammatical slips, arguments without evidence, extended writing that lacks organisation, ideas and impact, and much more.

Concerns about the writing development of pupils occur the world over.⁶ And yet, though a mass of useful practices and research evidence exists, teachers can miss the opportunity to teach pupils critical writing processes, such as planning and revising their writing for success.⁷

In practical terms, pupils are often not expected to write more complex texts longer than a paragraph.⁸ As such, the chess match shrinks to shifting some pawns without too much forethought. Shortened writing can go unstructured, so even the conscious crafting and modelling of sentences can prove uncommon. In narrowing writing across the school curriculum to a succession of short answers, often with exams in mind, we miss the countless opportunities offered by writing to enhance our pupils’ understanding of what they read and hear in the classroom.⁹

The messy, complex, rich and rewarding act of writing can and should be at the heart of best practice in the classroom. The demands of extended academic writing – or ‘school writing’ – can be met over time, and we can close the writing gap, one move at a time.

The teacher writing gap

I am haunted by the ghosts of my teaching past.

Daniel is one such ghost. He was a kind and hard-working young man. Years later, I can still remember his handwriting. His blue biro would press hard against the paper, drumming out his commitment to write well deep into every page. And yet, his earnest, tight-lettered handwriting could not mask his writing struggles, his misspellings, or his missteps.

If it was an essay on Shakespeare, or narrative writing of his own, Daniel would write more and more. With more writing came more mistakes. Despite racing through pages and pages of writing, he would continue to crash into a glass ceiling of awkward expression, limited vocabulary, and gaps in his knowledge. I would daub his writing with feedback and undertake a vocabulary exercise here or there, or try to instruct a common sentence flaw or two, but the hard truth was Daniel’s knowledge of how to write skilfully was insufficient and, crucially, so was mine.

It started with my schooling. I was part of a generation of schoolchildren who were not taught grammar. It was deemed ‘a waste of time’¹⁰ and ‘worth ignoring’¹¹ by educationalists. As a result, a gap in grammar knowledge has compromised the teaching of writing and language for a long time.

In my teacher training, the teaching of writing was limited to offering up some engaging stimulus, a few writing moves to perform as tricks, and some static planning templates. Describing a sherbet lemon (not sub...