Writing Under Control

Judith Graham, Alison Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135694036
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Now in its third edition and reflecting changes in the Primary National Strategy, this best-selling textbook introduces primary teachers to key issues in the teaching of writing. Strongly rooted in classroom practice, the book includes:

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• the history, theory and practice of teaching writing

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• children writing in and out of school

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• EAL and gender issues in writing

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• the development of writing across the years of the primary school

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• planning classroom routines and organising resources

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• balancing the composition and transcription elements in writing

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• monitoring and assessing writing

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• meeting individual needs

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• managing specific learning difficulties in writing, such as dyslexia

With its companion Reading under Control (also in its third edition), this book provides undergraduate and postgraduate teachers with comprehensive guidance for the teaching of literacy.

Chapter 1

From Copying to Creation: the teaching of writing before the 1980s

Pat Pinsent

TEACHING WRITING BEFORE 1960

Let us look at the experience of an imaginary English teacher – Mary Angell – who was born in the 1930s. Her early schooling, broken up by the Second World War, included such things as making many copies of ‘headlines’ in a copperplate hand. The intention of this (which seldom succeeded) was to inculcate handwriting skills, but the process also provided unwanted and decontextualised information, such as ‘Linseed oil is derived from flax’. The whole process certainly conveyed the lesson that copying from adult models was the way to learn. This was supported by copying passages from books chosen by the teacher and reproducing from memory stories read to the class. Twenty years earlier there had been isolated, more imaginative initiatives such as that quoted by Shayer of a teacher who said, ‘The best way, indeed the only way, to learn to write is to try to write’ (1972: 81) He went on to provide interesting assignments like describing a sea-monster, but if Mary's teachers had heard about these they gave no indication of this in their lessons.

At grammar school, Mary's English education was extended by grammatical exercises and the requirement to write compositions about abstract topics such as ‘Patriotism’ or letters to non-existent recipients about holidays which did not take place. Comprehension, précis and accurate renditions of literary texts selected for examination rounded off the English curriculum. Mary therefore internalised the message that correct set pieces were what mattered.

When she went to college, in September 1953, to be trained as a teacher on a two-year course, Mary received conflicting messages. It was difficult to reconcile the narrow approach of ‘Methods’ (practical teaching approaches) courses with the kind of ‘child-centred’ approach which was beginning to appear in Educational Studies (educational theory). One of her assessed essays had been based on a quotation from Robert Browning:

… To know
rather consists in opening out a way
whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
than in effecting entry for a light
supposed to be without…

(Paracelsus 1835: I)

You may recognise this as a poetic ‘empty vessels’ type of argument!

Mary started work in a secondary modern school with many naive hopes about her career but little firm grasp of how to teach her subject, as what she had learnt at college tended to replicate the way she had been taught herself. The kind of English teaching expected from her gave little credence to her pupils’ bringing with them to school any kind of inner light, or even any kind of knowledge about life or the writing process. The sole audience for writing in school was the teacher, and so little were the results valued that exercise books, once full, landed in the wastepaper basket. Mary felt that if she had been teaching younger children, there might have been more opportunity to liberate her pupils’ ‘imprisoned splendour’. In fact, there were very similar pressures in primary school (with the 11-plus examination) and no greater understanding of children's development as writers.

CREATIVE WRITING

In 1963, Mary, now Mrs Bright, returned to teaching after six years of bringing up her own children. She found herself readily welcomed, despite her secondary background, in the local primary school. Confessing herself out of touch, even in her own subject, she was heartened to read Sybil Marshall's Experiment in Education (1963), which had just been published. Marshall describes teaching in a village school during and after the Second World War. She discovered, while teaching in a cross-curricular way which combined music, art and writing, that the quality of the children's work in all these areas was greatly improved. Mary recognised how the ideals of educational theory which she had found exciting in her Educational Studies initial training, and which had been fortified by her experience with her own young children, could be brought to life in the classroom.

At this period, ‘creative writing’, under various names, was in full swing in primary schools. Over the next few years Mary read and implemented with enthusiasm the recommendations of Margaret Langdon (1961), Boris Ford (1963), Sheila Lane and Marion Kemp (1967) and many others. The title of Alec Clegg's book, The Excitement of Writing (1964), conveyed the enthusiasm these writers brought to their subject, and, as in the other books, it also included a collection of children's own work, showing the immense potential of child writers. David Holbrook's English for the Rejected (1964) gave an account of amazing results achieved with young people who had been written off by society. All the books abounded in ideas of how to foster similar qualities in other young writers. Basil Maybury's Creative Writing for Juniors (1967) advocated working through sense stimuli of touch, sight and taste to encourage writing. He suggested using, for instance, music as a stimulus, blowing bubbles or, more daringly, setting fire to paper.

Behind much of this creative writing was more general theory. Sybil Marshall, who later became Reader in Education at Sussex University, acknowledges in Creative Writing being influenced by Suzanne Langer, on whose work Marshall's definition of creative writing is based. She says creativity is ‘the ability to create one's own symbols of experience: creative writing is the use of written language to conceptualise, explore and record experience in such a way as to create a unique symbolisation of it’ (1974: 10).

Mary sometimes found it difficult to avoid the creative writing lesson falling into a limited pattern like, ‘Listen to this music … what does it make you feel… now write a story … ’. Nor did she feel comfortable criticising writing which clearly came out of the children's feelings. Sometimes the results were not very interesting and she wondered if she really was using the best way of drawing out the children's own experience, let alone building on it. It was difficult for someone not trained in psychoanalysis to be alert to the ‘symbolic meaning’, to how ‘children's creative work symbolises…the quest for integration of the identity…’ (Holbrook, 1967). She knew, too, that she should not neglect the tools of the trade like spelling and handwriting and had to admit that her pupils’ strengths in writing stories and poems might not always help them much in the more subject-based curriculum of the secondary school, nor, indeed, with the practical written demands of life.

LANGUAGE AND LEARNING

It was partly because of feelings of inadequacy in this area, and partly to increase her professional standing, that Mary took advantage of the Open University's scheme to award credit rating for previous study, thus facilitating non-graduate teachers obtaining a degree. Teachers were particularly encouraged to select courses relevant to their professional interests, so Mary chose ‘Language and Learning’. The course reader was entitled Language in Education (Cashdan and Grugeon, 1972) and among the papers included in it were several particularly relevant to the teaching of English. Mary read with interest James Britton's ‘What's the use? A schematic account of language functions’. This article had a practical aim in mind, the classifying of 2000 pieces of writing from pupils aged 11 to 18, and it also was convincingly grounded in the earlier theoretical studies of Harding (1937), Langer (1951) and Moffett (1968). Although Britton's classroom-based research was initially concerned with secondary school pupils, it was not long before its results filtered into primary schools by way of the Bullock Report, A Language for Life (DES, 1975).

The Bullock Report, which appeared in the concluding year of Mary's degree studies, became sacred scripture to Mary and her colleagues. The language functions identified by Britton and his team in 1972 were described thus in Bullock:

The three main categories…are Transactional, Expressive and Poetic. The Expressive is the central one. It is language ‘close to the speaker’, often the language used by intimates in a shared context…it provides the tentative stage through which a pupil's new thinking must pass on its way to the comparative certainty of knowledge.

(p. 165)

The Transactional mode is defined as using language with the intention of getting things done, as in advertisements or regulations, while the Poetic mode, not confined to poetry only, stands back from the subject described. Elsewhere in the Bullock Report, attention is given to the kind of audience for which children are writing (themselves, the teacher or the wider world). The recommendation is also made that pupils should have the opportunity to draft their work before submitting the finished article.

Mary began to incorporate a variety of different forms of writing that were not simply based on the expressive and sometimes poetic functions which she had, up to now, generally been demanding from her pupils. Rules about how to behave in school, advertisements for imaginary or even real products and accounts of events the children had experienced all began to vie with story as outcomes of the English lesson. Her other lessons changed, too. Instead of insisting that her top primary pupils write up scientific work in dictated formulae, she let them use an expressive mode to note what they had actually observed. She created opportunities for her children to write for real audiences. Like other teachers throughout the country, she encouraged her pupils to write to children in other schools, to local newspapers, to suppliers of educational material, as well as recognising the fact that they might well write for themselves alone, in personal journals which she promised she would not even attempt to look at unless invited.

Mary soon discovered that Britton's work was probably the best known out of a body of writing emanating from a number of educationalists influential in both initial and in-service teacher education. An account of the genesis of this movement was to be found in John Dixon's Growth through English, first published in 1967 and reprinted many times. Based on a conference held for teachers of English in America and the UK at Dartmouth, New England, in 1966, it presents the various paradigms of English teaching, the ‘skills’ model and the ‘cultural heritage’ model, before expressing its own endorsement of the ‘personal growth’ model, in which writing should express something that the writer feels is worth saying:

Language is learnt in operation, not by dummy runs. In English, pupils meet to share their encounters with life…in ordering and composing situations that in some way symbolise life as we know it, we bring order and composure to our inner selves.

(p. 13)

Mary and her colleagues were aware that some theorists such as Frank Whitehead (1978) did not welcome the approach of Britton and others to writing, but had she been asked her opinion she would have argued that the different functions had been very useful in extending the kinds of writing of her pupils, and their consciousness that they were writing for someone.

BEGINNING WRITING

Soon after completing her Open University degree in 1975, Mary found herself for the first time teaching a Reception class. At the same time, her taste for study had led her to start work on a master's degree, so it seemed a natural development to look into the writing of these very young children. As someone initially trained for secondary teaching, she had always dreaded having, as she saw it, to impart so much basic knowledge to children who had not even made a start on literacy, so it came as something of a surprise to learn from the researchers, and from her own observations, that children, in fact, brought much more knowledge about writing into school than she had ever given them credit for. Margaret Clark's influential study of 32 children who were literate before going to school, Young Fluent Readers (1976), while focused predominantly on reading abilities, showed that many of these children were interested in writing even before they were four.

Mary was particularly fascinated by Marie Clay's What Did I Write?: Beginning Writing Behaviour (1975), which charts the way in which children's earliest marks can be seen as representing discoveries of ‘real’ writing. These discoveries are only possible when the child sees people writing. Clay says:

The linear scribble that fills the lines of a writing pad has, for the child, all the mystery of an unfamiliar code. It stands for a myriad of [sic] possible things but does not convey a particular message. The child seems to say ‘I hope I've said something important. You must be able to understand what I've said. What did I write?’

(p. 48)

Interpreting the ‘linear scribble’ of the five-year-olds in her class was both challenging and satisfying, but she wished she had known more about children's abilities when her own children had been young.

Mary also began to value the children's inventive attempts at spelling, and she learnt that as early as 1971, the research of Charles Read had explained how children use their awareness of the sounds of letters to enable them to write words without being explicitly taught by a teacher or parent. Carol Chomsky's ‘Write now, read later’ (1971), with its message that children could learn to read by creating their own spellings, was also congenial, particularly because it chimed with her own discovery that young children could be helped towards reading by means of their own writing. An approach that recognised this was the ‘Language Experience’ approach, which was published as Breakthrough to Literacy (McKay et al., 1970). This material comprised plastic ‘Sentence Makers’ and little word cards which children could use to make their own line of writing, based on their own experience and what they said about it. Then they could transcribe it on to paper and draw a picture to go with it. She had seen it in use in other primary classrooms, but had some reservations about the repetitious sentence structures that emerged and the need to put all the little pieces back in the right places in their individual folders.

Mary's research and work with Reception class children had shown her that teaching writing and reading did not mean introducing them to something totally unfamiliar, but was a matter of helping them to build on what they already knew. She wanted her own small-scale research project to examine the nature of children's prior knowledge, so the kind of longitudinal study that Glenda Bissex had made of her own son in GNYS AT WRK: a child learns to write and read (1980), attracted her as a dissertation topic. The most important thing she had learned was never to underestimate young children.

Another revelation was the work of the Russian cognitive psychologist Vygotsky, whose writings had been translated and published from 1962 onwards. On the subject of writing, Vygotsky was both provoking and illuminating. His account of the difficulties which young children face in learning to write made the process of teaching them seem almost impossible. The high level of abstraction required in order to ‘replace words by images of words’, to address ‘an absent or imaginary person’ without any real motivation, and to be aware of the necessary alphabetical symbols to put all this down on paper (1962: 98–9), sounded as if it was well beyond her pupils, and certainly gave her an understanding of why some of them found learning to write problematic. Yet elsewhere Vygotsky's explanation of the ‘zone of proximal development’ gave her more encouragement as it showed how children might, in fact, learn this difficult process. He says, ‘What a child can do with assistance today she will be able to do by herself tomorrow’ (1978: 87). Mary realised that she had often found herself assisting pupils with the beginnings of writing and noticed that they were on the verge of achieving independence but needed just that little extra guidance towards it. The ‘zone of proximal development defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation’ (1978: 86).

CHILDREN'S WRITING DEVELOPMENT

Having worked with the youngest and the oldest pupils in the primary school, Mary Bright was naturally interested in the ways in which children's writing developed, and what might be expected from them at different ages. She found the Crediton research project (1980), directed by Andrew Wilkinson, gave her some information. The team had investigated the writing abilities of children aged 7, 10 and 13, using a framewor...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Dedication
• Half Title
• Related titles
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Copying to Creation: the teaching of writing before the 1980s
• 2 Process, Genre, Strategy, Framework: three decades of development in the teaching of writing
• 3 ‘This Is Different Writing’: the world outside the classroom in children's texts
• 4 The Writing Journey
• 5 Routines and Resources
• 6 Composition
• 7 Transcription: spelling, punctuation and handwriting
• 8 Monitoring and Assessing Writing
• 9 Meeting Individual Needs
• 10  Specific Learning Difficulties in Writing
• References
• Author index
• Subject index