Teaching Writing

Effective approaches for the middle years

Tessa Daffern, Noella M Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

In the 21st century, writing is more important than at any other time in human history. Yet much of the emphasis in schooling has been on reading, and after the early years, writing skills have been given less attention. Internationally, too many children are leaving school without the writing skills they need to succeed in life. The evidence indicates that students rarely develop proficiency as writers without effective teacher instruction. Teaching Writing offers a comprehensive approach for the middle years of schooling, when the groundwork should be laid for the demanding writing tasks of senior school and the workplace. Teaching Writing outlines evidence-based principles of writing instruction for upper primary students and young adolescents. It presents strategies that are ready for adoption or adaptation, and exemplars to assist with designing and implementing writing lessons across the middle years of school. It addresses writing from a multimodal perspective while also highlighting the importance of teaching linguistic aspects of text design such as sentence structure, vocabulary and spelling as foundations for meaning-making. Contributors argue that students need to continue to develop their skills in both handwriting and keyboarding. Examples of the teaching of writing across disciplines are presented through a range of vignettes. Strategies for assessing student writing and for supporting students with diverse needs are also explored. With contributions from leading literacy educators, Teaching Writing is an invaluable resource for primary, secondary and pre-service teachers.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to teaching writing in the middle years

Tessa Daffern and Noella M. Mackenzie

All children have the right to develop the skills that will enable them to be literate members of society (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund [UNICEF], 2012). This statement is further supported by the Melbourne Declaration (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008), which identifies literacy as one of the cornerstone skills of schooling for young Australians. So what does it mean to be literate in the current era? The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2004) defines literacy as ‘the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written [and visual] materials associated with varying contexts’ (p. 13). According to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA),

students become literate as they develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to interpret and use language confidently for learning and communicating in and out of school and for participating effectively in society. Literacy involves students listening to, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating oral, print, visual and digital texts, and using and modifying language for different purposes in a range of contexts. (ACARA, 2013, para. 1)

Although a relatively new form of communication when compared with oral communication, writing has become integral to life as we know it. According to Brandt (2015), writing is now possibly ‘eclipsing reading as the literate experience of consequence’ (p. 3.) Writing is used for ‘work, production, output, earning, profit, publicity, practicality, record-keeping, buying, and selling’, and is a ‘product that is bought and sold, as it embodies knowledge, information, invention, service, social relations, news—that is, the products of the new economy’ (Brandt, 2015, p. 16). However, business leaders interviewed by Wagner (2008) complained that young people did not know how to create ‘focus, energy, and passion’ in what they are trying to say, did not know how to access and analyse information and struggle to write with ‘a real voice’ (p. 36). Writing is also an increasingly important way of connecting with family and friends through texting, blogging and social media (Calkins & Ehrenworth, 2016; Gadd, 2017). Being able to write well in the current era is essential for success at, and beyond, school.

Writing allows ideas to be shared and adapted across space and time and has given humans new ways of thinking and learning. This provides a strong argument for prioritising the teaching of writing to students in schools, as the evidence indicates that students rarely develop proficiency as writers at school without effective teacher instruction (Graham, Capizzi, Harris, Hebert, & Morphy, 2014). This is consistent with research into teaching and learning which demonstrates that quality teaching makes a difference to students’ learning opportunities and outcomes (Hattie, 2009).

Graham (2019) posits that, while teaching children to write well is seen as an important goal of schooling, ‘many schools across the world do not achieve this objective, as an inordinate number of students do not acquire the writing skills needed for success in society today’ (p. 277). This, according to Graham (2019), has come about because many students are not receiving the instruction that they ‘need or deserve’ (p. 277). The trends described by Graham are consistent in Australia, with indications of a decline in writing competency over the previous decade. The National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results demonstrate a downward trend in student achievement over the past ten years. For the NAPLAN Writing Test, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to respond to a stimulus such as a topic or image. To date, the text types that students have been tested on include narrative and persuasive writing. The same marking guide is used to assess students’ writing across Years 3 to 9 (see Table 1.1).

Some degree of caution is needed in drawing conclusions from the NAPLAN Writing Test data shown in the following figures because not all differences in mean scale scores are necessarily statistically significant. These data were sourced from https://reports.acara.edu.au/Home/Results. In Figure 1.1, the NAPLAN Writing

Table 1.1 Overview of NAPLAN Writing criteria

Marking criterion	Maximum points	Description
Vocabulary	5	The range and precision of contextually appropriate language choices.
Cohesion	4	The control of multiple threads and relationships across the text, achieved through the use of grammatical elements (referring words, text connectives, conjunctions) and lexical elements (substitutions, repetitions, word associations).
Sentence structure	6	The production of grammatically correct, structurally sound and meaningful sentences.
Punctuation	5	The use of correct and appropriate punctuation to aid the reading of the text.
Spelling	6	The accuracy of spelling and the difficulty of the words used.
Criterion specific to narrative text type	Maximum points	Description
Audience	6	The writer's capacity to orient, engage and affect the reader.
Text structure	4	The organisation of narrative features including orientation, complication and resolution into an appropriate and effective text structure.
Paragraphing	2	The segmenting of text into paragraphs that assists the reader to negotiate the narrative.
Ideas	5	The creation, selection and crafting of ideas for a narrative.
Character and setting	4	The portrayal and development of character; the development of a sense of place, time and atmosphere.
Criterion specific to persuasive text type	Maximum points	Description
Audience	6	The writer's capacity to orient, engage and persuade the reader.
Text structure	4	The organisation of the structural components of a persuasive text (introduction, body and conclusion) into an appropriate and effective text structure.
Criterion specific topersuasive text type	Maximum points	Description
Paragraphing	3	The segmenting of text into paragraphs that assists the reader to follow the line of argument.
Ideas	5	The selection, relevance and elaboration of ideas for a persuasive argument.
Persuasive devices	4	The use of a range of persuasive devices to enhance the writer's position and persuade the reader.

Source: Criteria from ACARA (2016), NAPLAN: Writing. Retrieved from www.nap.edu.au/naplan/ writing

Test results indicate an overall decline in mean scale scores since 2013 as well as an overall pattern of diminished differences in mean scale scores from Year 5 to Year 9 compared to Year 3 to Year 5.

Figure 1.1 Gender differences in NAPLAN Writing achievement (2018), mean (SD) scale scores

The data also reveal gender difference in writing achievement, with girls performing better than boys. Furthermore, this gender gap appears to widen as children progress towards Year 9. For example, in 2018, the mean scale score for girls in Year 3 was 25 points higher than the mean scale score for boys, while the gender difference in Year 9 was 31 points (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Gender differences in NAPLAN Writing achievement (2018), mean (SD) scale scores

A study into the writing development of Australian students in Year 1 (Mackenzie, Scull, & Bowles, 2015) demonstrated that, even at this early stage of schooling, females consistently scored higher on all elements of writing (text structure, sentence structure, vocabulary use, spelling, punctuation use and handwriting), although the mean score for females in their study was also achieved by many males of the same age.

When examining NAPLAN Writing results, the mean scale scores for non-Indigenous students are consistently higher than the mean scale scores for Indigenous students (see Figure 1.3, which shows the scores from the NAPLAN Writing task in 2018).

Figure 1.3 Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, NAPLAN Writing (2018), mean (SD) scale scores

The NAPLAN da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Contributors
• Tables and figures
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction to teaching writing in the middle years
• 2 Theoretical perspectives and strategies for teaching and learning writing
• 3 Teachers as writers
• 4 What is involved in the learning and teaching of writing?
• 5 Supporting meaning-making through text organisation
• 6 Supporting meaning-making through sentence structure and punctuation
• 7 Supporting meaning-making through vocabulary
• 8 Supporting meaning-making through handwriting and keyboarding
• 9 Supporting meaning-making through spelling
• 10 How multimodal text changes the pedagogy of writing
• 11 Supporting EAL/D and Indigenous writers
• 12 Teaching writing across disciplines: The upper primary school years
• 13 Teaching writing across disciplines: The early secondary school years
• 14 Cultivating inclusive writing communities
• 15 Assessing writing: Teacher-led approaches
• 16 Assessing writing: Student-led approaches
• Appendix Graphic organisers and assessment templates
• Index