The different perspectives you can take on teaching early writing

The aim of this article is to share the common perspectives that are held by teachers when teaching the youngest of writers, and to help you think about what your perspective might be. Your view of how best to teach early writers will be shaped by your own past school experiences, how you were trained, how you undertake writing as an adult, your choice of reading on the subject, and of course by school and government policies (Young & Ferguson 2021). The most common perspectives include the following:

• The ‘writing-readiness’ perspective
• The naturalistic perspective
• The structuralist perspective
• The ‘reading-first’ perspective
• The communicative perspective 

Your perspective may be influenced by some or even all of these, though one will usually dominate. In fact, we quite like viewing each perspective as having a dial next to it which you can adjust according to the amount of influence you think each perspective has on your view of teaching the youngest of writers. For example, this is how The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s perspective has developed:

It’s important to say that we didn’t choose where the dials go on our own, but were instead directed by what the research evidence says about early writing development. You can undertake this reading too. We’ve made all the research papers that inform our thinking available in our free-access handbook LINK.

An interesting thing to think about is how the dials can be moved. We are not suggesting they will change from moment to moment, but we might move the dials on certain days, weeks or months that we are teaching, depending on what we think our class needs most at the time. For example, during some weeks, we might want to discuss what we think makes a really great story, so the needle on the structuralist perspective will go up. Or, at the beginning of the year, we will want to really focus on getting children’s handwriting and encoding skills up – so we might turn up the ‘writing readiness’ dial for that time. We might decide we are really interested to see what children are capable of doing when they are writing together without our constant intervention and demands, so we might for a while turn up the dial for the naturalistic orientation. We do, however, expect that the communicative dial will stay largely the same.

It’s important to realise that all these orientations have their strengths and weaknesses, but if taken to extremes, they are likely to cause teachers and pupils problems. Why not read the descriptions below before thinking about how you would set the dials to match your perspective? 

The ‘writing-readiness’ orientation 

The extreme version of this perspective may be referred to as: transcription first, fast and only teaching (Rohloff et al. 2022), the presentational-skills ideology, a skills-based worksheet curriculum (Dahl & Freppon 1995), the ‘not real writing’ approach (Avineri et al. 2015), the fragmented and discontinuous approach (Dunsmuir & Blatchford 2004), mechanics-oriented teaching, didactic-only instruction, the bottom-up perspective, code-based teaching (Quinn & Bingham 2018), drill-and-skill-to-kill-the-will, piecemeal, sequenced and scripted, recite for writing, writing as a cognitive-only matter (Johnston 2019), the dictation orientation (Lancaster 2007), the ‘conceptual, procedural and generative’ knowledge perspective (Puranik & Lonigan 2014), the component skills perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), formula writing (VanNess et al. 2013), the ‘write ‘correctly’ like an adult’ perspective (Daniels 2014), the artificial approach (Thomas 2005), the systematic procedures perspective (Bruyère & Pendergrass 2020), the exercise approach (Håland et al. 2019), the ‘only conventional writing is real writing’ perspective (Bradford & Wyse 2020) or the ‘additive-cumulative’ view of writing (Tolchinsky 2017).

We know that children who don’t master the basic skills of writing early on in their educational journey can go on to underperform and even to experience school failure (Berninger et al. 2002; Abbott et al. 2010; Young & Ferguson 2021). ‘Writing-readiness’ teachers rightly recognise this. However, when taken too far, teachers will focus their attention on getting children to transcribe accurately and  conventionally first before they are allowed to begin making and sharing meaning through book-making and other writing. According to Snyders (2014) and Rowe (2018), this is an instructional mistake. Indeed, such an approach can have a significant and damaging effect on children’s writing development (Kim et al. 2021). It’s suggested that this perspective is ineffective in realising its own aims, and is most commonly used by teachers who lack confidence in teaching the compositional aspects of writing and so resort to teaching what are for them the more comfortable elements of transcription.

The conception of writing and the writer. Taken to its limits, a ‘writing- readiness’ teacher will view writing largely as a set of rules and processes to be followed in order to arrive at a product, a piece of evidence that shows how or whether students are fulfilling the narrow objective of applying and showcasing transcriptional skills with a high degree of accuracy. The meaningful construction of texts by children must be denied, delayed or heavily restricted until they have somehow ‘mastered’ the basic skills of letter formation, handwriting and spelling (Tolchinsky 2017). The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing their pupils build on these basic skills incrementally over time, and from the feeling that they have done their job by ‘opening the door’ to writing for their pupils.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The approach is teacher-centred, with the teacher as the gatekeeper and controller of all knowledge, cognition and skills. Teaching is largely focused on isolated transcribing activities, with little sense of the social or collaborative aspects of writing and meaning making. Students are seen as empty vessels to be filled, coming into school with nothing that would be useful to them in learning how to write and book-make (Smith 1988a; Young et al. 2022). These teachers typically hold the view that for children to learn how to write, they must first recognise that they can’t (Roser et al. 2014). They concentrate largely on what children’s writing looks like rather than what it is trying to share. In this conception, teachers position their pupils as ‘exercise writers’ who must practise specific skills before somehow ‘earning the right to write’ and gaining access to opportunities to make and share meaning with others.

The content of the writing curriculum. The teacher’s priority is the teaching of correct letter formation, letter/sound correspondence, spelling and handwriting. Children don’t spend much time learning about the processes involved in crafting texts through to publication and performance. Instead, when children are eventually allowed to participate in compositional writing, it is typically finished in a single session, and is seen only by the teacher. Students don’t get an opportunity to share their writing with others. In this orientation, the feeling is that children shouldn’t write unless they can talk in ‘full sentences’ and in Standard English. The assumption here is that, if they were allowed to engage in compositional writing, there would be no profitable outcome since they would only make grammatical errors which would subsequently need to be unlearnt (Snell & Andrews 2017).

Teaching strategies. Children spend the majority of their time copying the teacher by writing letters, practising handwriting and writing their names (Hall et al. 2015). Writing is broken down into a set of skills that should be taught and mastered one at a time. Teachers will mostly rely on copying, dictation, ‘hold the sentence’ activities, drills, repetitive exercises, letter formation practice, handwriting practice and letter/sound encoding practice. Children may, on occasion, be given the opportunity to write in response to preprinted sentence starters or picture prompt worksheets. The teacher will model letter formation and possibly even a specific mandated handwriting style. However, they won’t be seen modelling the crafting of real text or how to live the writer’s life.

Limitations:

• When taken to the extreme, this perspective is fundamentally flawed. It fails to understand that writing skills are developed interdependently. They can’t be mastered in isolation (Puranik & Lonigan, 2011; Rowe & Wilson 2015; Kim 2022). This means the perspective is ineffective in achieving its own aims. The withholding, delaying, or restricting of meaningful writing opportunities until basic skills have been mastered also goes against research recommendations (Gerde et al. 2012; Graham et al. 2012; Rowe et al. 2022; Cabell et al. 2023).
• Teachers shouldn’t confuse encoding, spelling and handwriting development with writing development (Tolchinsky 2017). Spelling and encoding represent only a fraction of what we must develop in the youngest of writers (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). In a ‘writing- readiness’ orientation, children only learn about transcribing, yet we know that they can only learn about writing from instruction about all the aspects of writing and being a writer, and through repeated daily meaningful practice (Feldgus & Cardonick 2002). Copying out isolated words and letters is not the same as writing (Ferreiro 1982).
• According to Johnston (2019) and Young & Ferguson (2022a), teachers are right to give their attention and focus to the cognitive dimensions of learning to write, but they may well run the serious risk of failing to see or care that this cognitive development is emotionally and motivationally laden and embedded in social and meaningful practice. It’s not what ‘writing- readiness’ teachers focus on that’s the problem, it’s always what they leave out (Young & Ferguson 2021).
• The possible insistence on children always writing conventional spellings is not developmentally appropriate when working with early writers (Cabel et al. 2023).
• According to Mackenzie & Veresov (2013), ‘writing-readiness’ teachers can disrupt children’s natural text construction processes by underestimating or denying the significance of drawing as part of a child’s writing process. Indeed, ‘writing-readiness’ teachers often place little value on how children’s drawings contribute significantly to their writing development. 
• According to Kim (2022), ‘writing-readiness’ teachers don’t always recognise how important oral language development is for children’s writing development. Children may rarely be asked to  engage in activities which develop their oral language. Instead, the ‘speaking’ is often undertaken on the child’s behalf by the teacher (LINK). 
• Children can often feel as though they are being asked to prepare for something that never actually comes. Their learning is rarely linked to composing writing. For example, Håland et al. (2019 p.70) state that ‘it is unclear whether students understand for what purpose they are exercising’. As a result, children can become uninterested in writing.
• If children are allowed the opportunity to share meaning, ‘writing- readiness’ teachers will often step in and write the message on the child’s behalf by getting them to dictate what it is they want to say. As a result, these children don’t learn how they could write without a teacher present. Indeed, in this conception, teachers can too often assume all cognitive responsibility for the writing activities that take place in the classroom, leaving the children passive and actually learning very little (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).
• These teachers find themselves focusing their attention on, and getting frustrated about, what children can’t do when compared to what experienced adult writers can do. This is in contrast to knowing what is developmentally appropriate for children of that age (Rowe 2018).
• Without an opportunity to participate in crafting meaningful texts for real audiences, children can quickly become owners of a set of arbitrary writing skills that they may not remember because they very rarely use and apply them (Cabel et al. 2023).

The naturalistic orientation

Terms which can be associated with this conception of writing include: the creative perspective (Peterson et al. 2018), intent participation learning (Trevarthen 2011), self-directed learning, child-centred, child-guided, holistic, whole language (Dahl & Freppon 1995), personal growth (Erickson 2018), the open-ended exploration approach, composition centric, language experience, language awareness, the romantic approach, the free-to-be-me approach, the hippie-free-for-all approach, self-discovery, the ‘leave it to chance’ orientation, or, as Berstein (cited in Rose 2008) called it, ‘the invisible approach’. This approach believes that the young writer is sovereign and that a high degree of teacher intervention only ever results in the stifling of their organic processes and compositions. The teacher does not provide a purpose or context for the writing since projects are to be determined by the children through their daily play and discoveries.

Teachers who subscribe to the naturalistic perspective believe that children can learn many things about writing without needing to be taught directly about them (Clay 1975; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Robins & Treiman 2010). Instruction is seen by them to come at too high a price if it puts children off ever wanting to write again. Therefore, at its most extreme, those who hold this view consider that instruction should only ever be given at the invitation of the child. These teachers also recognise, rightly, that the youngest of writers develop at their own pace and acquire skills at different rates and times. As a result, their instruction is responsive and focuses more on children’s individual needs rather than on spending inordinate amounts of time teaching a ‘homogenised collective’ (Rohloff et al. 2022). A successful teacher is seen as one who nurtures children to have the volition and the intrinsic motivation to continue developing themselves as writers.

The conception of writing and the writer. Teachers who support such an approach believe that students must begin their learning about writing and being a writer from the understanding that writing is for expression and communication (Håland et al. 2019). Unlike ‘writing-readiness’ teachers, naturalistic teachers believe children learn that writing is a meaning-sharing device before they are able to produce it conventionally. They do this by using their emergent writing practices (Clay 2001; Feldgus & Cardonick 2002; Ray & Glover 2008; Byington & Kim 2017). According to Tolchinsky (2017 p.149), ‘the principal source of knowledge for understanding writing is writing itself. It is by using writing that children will learn to master it’. Finally, these teachers try to look beyond children’s final texts, and are often more interested in the processes and behaviours children exhibited and developed as they crafted them (Dyson 1988; Glasswell 1999).

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The teacher’s role is to allow children’s learning to evolve naturally as a result of their innate curiosity about writing and being writers. Teachers therefore wait for children to bring their writing interests to them, and then help facilitate the child’s production of a successful and meaningful text. These teachers believe that children should be free to experiment and play with language. Taken to its extreme, any attempt by a teacher to impose or imprint language rules or features of genre onto children is considered an unnecessary ‘roadblock’ to their ability to develop their own unique expressions and voice (Thomas 2005). These teachers instead focus their attention on children’s intentions rather than on their ability to adhere to adult conventions of writing (Rowe 2018). Trevarthen (2011 p.175) suggests that ‘children should be respected for their intuitive abilities, not just trained in skills. They should be given more encouragement for their own creative learning than the regulatory authorities, who concentrate on the goals of educational instruction’. These teachers may well believe that a ‘writing-readiness’ approach is just a daily reminder to children of what they cannot do, only serving to dehumanise them and make them feel shame, inadequacy, anxiety and confusion (Erickson 2018). Naturalistic teachers instead wish to focus on building up children’s confidence, interest and engagement in being a writer, and on creating in them a desire to take up writing as a life-long pursuit.

The content of the writing curriculum. Teachers who are very sympathetic to this concept will regard attainment targets, curriculum objectives and other criteria as adult-created concerns which are imposed too early, resulting in the oppression and restriction of children’s innate abilities to develop themselves as writers. According to Trevarthen (2011 p.176), ‘the obvious conclusion from the new infant psychology is that educational practices that intend to bring all children to the best possible level of competence…must be ones that welcome and support the motives of the child’. Rather than  receiving a predetermined sequence of knowledge and skills, children should be concurrently acquiring many overlapping layers of skills and knowledge through the pursuit of their own personal writing interests (Johnston 2019). Therefore, children choose their own writing ideas to pursue, focusing on their own funds of knowledge, language and identity (Young et al. 2022). This results in instruction being responsive and given largely to individuals. For example, they might be taught how drawing can help with meaning-making, how to give ‘sentimental’ feedback to their friends, and how they can improve the fluency of their transcribing – if they want to.

Teaching strategies. Teachers who subscribe to this view will focus on creating an environment where children can naturally and implicitly pick up skills and knowledge about writing and being a writer from their peers and their teachers (Hall et al. 2015). Children can also learn through participation in self-directed writing activity, for example, by using the writing centre (Byington & Kim 2017). Children will naturally want to learn about transcription, form and other conventions as they craft and make texts in a social environment amongst others, including their writer-teacher (Rowe 2008; Harmey & Wilkinson 2019). Self-expressionist teachers focus their attention on teaching holistically through conversation between themselves and their young writers and by promoting dialogue between peers as they all write together (Quinn & Bingham 2018).

Limitations

• The main limitation is that, as we know, writing doesn’t develop naturally through experience alone. These teachers often fail to see the importance of teaching the cognitive skills and processes involved in crafting writing and so children can run the risk of later underachievement or school failure due to a lack of systematic, explicit and direct instruction (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). 
• The pursuit of self-expression can also be limiting in the sense that children will not be directed towards engaging in a rich range of writing across many genres and for a variety of purposes and audiences (McCarthy 1994).
• The finished writing pieces are not necessarily required to fulfil the standards needed for final publication. In fact, the ‘product’, which may never be formally published, is seen as unimportant when compared to the creative effort which went into the crafting of it.
• Because of the individualistic nature of this orientation, the social consequences of writing and being a writer can be neglected (Smagorinsky 1987). 
• Children who don’t naturally come to writing are left to their own devices. These children will miss out on opportunities to engage in writing. In extreme cases, they won’t write at all. 
• This kind of approach might be considered unrealistic given the demands of modern curricula, or could even be viewed as a potential violation of children’s privacy or as a cultural intrusion (Sudol & Sudol 1991; McCarthy 1994; Dutro & Kazemi 2006; Zacarian et al. 2017). For example, some consider the approach to hold an outdated romantic or elitist view of writing, creating purely hedonistic writers (Lensmire 1998), that it may only suit ‘the brightest middle-class children’ and that a refusal by teachers to actually teach only reinforces the potential for children from the dominant middle classes to succeed in education, with other children ‘supportively encouraged to fail’ (Martin cited in Cremin & Myhill 2012 p.20).

The structuralist orientation 

Terms which are associated with this position include: the genre approach, the forms of writing approach, the semiotic perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), academic socialisation, textual competence, the conformity approach, the recipe approach, painting by numbers (Thomas 2005), the textual police approach (Watkins 1999) or what Dixon (1987) calls the ‘strait-jacket’ approach.

Extreme structuralist orientations insist on children’s mastery of different forms of writing in order to be successful in the world. Genre knowledge is seen as powerful, giving children access to important cultural capital. In contrast to the naturalistic orientation, it maintains that writing products have just as much importance as the processes used in their creation. Genre teaching is seen by some as a social justice issue, giving all children equal access to the highly-valued social practices and purposes of writing (Bazerman et al. 2017).

The conception of writing and the writer. ‘We learn genres as we learn language, and communication would be impossible without them’ (Maybin 2001 p.66). Literacy is seen essentially as a functional social practice as well as an individual one. The writer writes with the understanding that their writing will be socially situated, and that therefore there is a need to regularly consider its purpose and audience (Coffin 2006; Martin & Rose 2008; Halliday 2013). The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing children successfully applying genre conventions and writing in a variety of different forms.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The teacher’s role is dominant. These teachers like to teach features of genre and look for evidence of them in children’s final written products. For example, they will look to cover a range of genres such as story, information, poetry and persuasive pieces, and teach children what should be included to create a successful text (Kenner 2000; Donovan 2001). Pupils have a subordinate role. Their performance is judged by the extent to which they have fulfilled the teacher’s generated criteria for success (Morris & Peterson 2020; Aitken & Halkowski 2023).

The content of the writing curriculum. The focus of a genre-based curriculum is on the transmission from teacher to pupil of knowledge about the structural and linguistic features necessary for effective communication in certain (perhaps privileged or outdated) genres. The view is that genres follow rules which can and should be taught to children (Martin & Rose 2008).

Teaching strategies. These teachers often create contrived tasks in which children are simply there to make products for teacher evaluation. The texts are being created to show what’s been learnt, as opposed to sharing meaning with others out in the wider world. This is one of the main differences between structuralist teachers and their more communicative-based colleagues who we will describe later.

Limitations

• In this perspective, children must write on a topic of the teacher’s choosing. This can limit the quality of some children’s writing, since the best performers under these conditions are often those who share the same knowledge and identities as their teacher (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a; Young et al. 2022; LINK).
• Children’s oral language and their drawings are not always seen by teachers as useful or important in assessing or understanding the child’s writing, despite the fact that multimodality is an important part of genre theory (Halliday 2013). This is another profound difference between a structuralist teacher and their counterparts who subscribe to the communicative orientation. (Quinn & Bingham 2018).
• This view takes little account of the fact that genres do not remain static, that they change over time and according to circumstances, and are often manipulated and hybridised by writers. The idea of ‘genre play’ through experimentation and exploration is not made available to children in this restricted and conventional conception (Freedman 1994; Rosen 2017). Children are simply asked to reproduce the genre in the way their teacher likes it, but not to reimagine it (Young et al. 2022). 
• The prescriptive stance means that children are given no opportunity to create their own genres and are unlikely to be exposed to new and emerging ones such as digital literacies. They only learn to reproduce the given genre-related text structures decided upon by the teacher (Richardson 1998).
• There is often a failure to see that expository (nonfiction) texts can be enhanced when hybridised with more expressive genres and features (Bakhtin cited in Maybin 2001). 
• The genres children are interested in or use outside of the school environment are seen as secondary or irrelevant to the genres the teacher deems as important or socially significant. 
• Writing may be judged as ‘successful’ mainly in terms of the application of ‘genre features’. Judgments will be less concerned with purpose and audience, the quality of content, style, originality and interest. Indeed, the children’s writing rarely achieves a true social purpose but is instead a fake artefact produced solely for the teacher’s evaluation (Rosen 2017; Watkins 1999). 
• It is utterly possible that children know about and can already write successfully and creatively in the dominant genres of society. Lengthy and explicit teaching of linguistic ‘rules’ may therefore contribute little to their development (Schneider 2003). 
• Children may be taught a very large number of genres but not necessarily in depth, with textual features overshadowing purpose. As a result, teachers ‘obscure the forest by planting so many trees’ (Chuy et al. 2011 p.178).
• There can often be little concern for children’s personal growth as writers and for their personal writing projects.

The ‘reading first’ orientation

Also known as the ‘reading readiness philosophy’ (Hall et al. 2015), the focus of this approach is to delay the teaching of writing in favour of teaching early reading (Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Graham & Hebert 2000). 

The conception of writing and the writer. Reading is seen as more important than writing. After learning to read, children are regarded as needing the support of a text to be both a stimulus and a model for writing. Writing is interpreted as the study of a single text, followed by the setting of a host of arbitrary writing tasks related to it, which are to be completed to the teacher’s specification and for the teacher’s evaluation. The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing the children write in response to the writing tasks they, or the scheme-writer, have devised.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. There are many similarities here with the ‘writing readiness’ orientation. The teacher’s priority is to teach the incremental skills of early reading. Only when this is done will they begin to teach children to write. The teacher will be the gatekeeper of what is best in terms of a suitable text to copy, and the pupils will simply receive the teacher’s choice, interpretation and subsequent associated writing tasks. Children aren’t allowed to make a genuine and spontaneous response to the texts they read or love. Instead, they must only respond in the ways their teacher demands.

The content of the writing curriculum. The teacher’s focus is on children’s ability to use sound/letter correspondence and to encode. They will therefore set writing tasks for assessment purposes, to evaluate children’s encoding abilities. The teacher is not really concerned with what it is the child wants to say through writing.

Teaching strategies. Teachers who adopt this approach feel children need to read, chant and learn texts off by heart and internalise common structures before they are able to write for themselves (Harste 2012; Tolchinsky 2017; LINK).

Limitations 

• This orientation not only goes against research recommendations, it’s also developmentally inappropriate. This is because language, reading and writing need to develop concurrently (Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Graham 2020a, 2020b; Graham & Hebert 2011; Graham et al. 2018a; Graham et al 2018b; Graham et al. 2020; Mayer 2007; Young & Ferguson 2023; LINK).
• It’s a little known fact, but early writing is one of the best predictors of children’s later reading success (NELP 2008). For example, writing invented spellings increases children’s reading skills, and the more opportunities children have to write the better their reading becomes (Harste 2012; Jones et al. 2010).  
• Weaknesses in reading often stem from neglect in writing. Students may put more care and attention into their reading when they have had more opportunities to assume the role of writer (Elbow 2004).
• According to Elbow (2004), writing is an easier and more inclusive activity for young children to access. He explains how children are beautifully positioned for writing as they can write all and any words that they can say (if teachers are willing to accept approximations and early marking making as being children’s early writing). In contrast, children can only read the words they have learnt to read or decode – a much smaller pool of lexicon than is available to them in writing. Therefore, it’s perfectly possible, and indeed advantageous, for there to be no delay between learning to read and learning to write.
• Young & Ferguson (2021, 2022a) explain how, through writing, children learn a great deal about reading and being a reader. For example, writing encourages children to comprehend and control texts. Children also come to realise that books are made by people just like themselves – writers. Writers who, like them, are trying to share meaning, connect, and communicate with others. This writerly knowledge helps them become better readers (Young & Ferguson 2023).
• The approach denies children exposure to the very vital compositional processes which are used throughout life. For example: generating and publishing original thoughts, ideas and concepts; reflecting on lived experiences; responding to one’s own reading material; wanting to share something they know a lot about; giving an opinion and wanting to make changes to the world. This is instead done by the teacher or scheme writer. In other words, strategies which could show children how writing can and will relate to their own life are sidelined or even refused (Young et al. 2022).
• Finally, Shanahan (2016) explains it best when he states that early literacy instruction focused disproportionately on reading and phonics is not enough if children are to read and write well.

The communicative orientation 

There are a number of terms associated with this orientation. They are: the community/environmental approach, the integrative approach (Rohloff et al. 2022), an interdependent approach, authoring (Bruyère & Pendergrass 2020), social practice perspective (Mayer 2007; Peterson et al. 2018), the literacy club perspective (Smiths 1988), writing experiences (Rowe 2018), sociocultural orientation (Bradford & Wyse 2020), socio-psycholinguistic perspective (Dahl & Freppon 1995), meaning-making/ meaning-sharing orientation, the Piagetian perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), social connection, social participation, the ‘writing for a reader’ approach (Nystrand 1989), literacy as a social practice, meaningful literacy, relevant literacy, or, the ‘living the writer’s life’ approach (Kaufman 2009).

Teachers who adopt this orientation encourage children to see themselves as writers who proactively engage in writing. They hold the belief that it’s through meaning-sharing in real-life contexts that children acquire the knowledge and skills involved in producing successful texts to be read, enjoyed and, importantly, understood by others (Hall et al. 2015). Therefore, opportunities to share meaning run alongside instruction directed towards mastery of the alphabetic system, spelling, letter-sound relations and letter formation (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). The classroom is seen as a community which has the collective mission of fulfilling different purposes, communicating with different audiences, creating academically successful texts, achieving social goals and contributing to a variety of social groups and contexts (Lensmire 1998; Schultz & Fecho 2000; Bazerman 2016). Teachers recognise that genre and writing cannot be separated (Russell 2023). However, they are also aware that genre-teaching can sometimes become overly prescriptive, insistent upon the inclusion of possibly arbitrary genre features and not reflective of the way writers actually craft texts. They therefore place emphasis on children writing successful texts which match the needs of their audiences (Morris & Peterson 2020; Aitken & Halkowski 2023). 

It’s argued that, if denied the opportunity to participate in crafting meaningful texts for real audiences, children can quickly become owners of a set of arbitrary writing skills that they never get an opportunity to use in a real context. Instead, these skills are left to rust in the metaphorical writing shed at the end of the cognitive garden (Young & Ferguson 2022a).

The conception of writing and the writer. Children will only understand what writing is, what it is for, and what it means to be a writer, if they write everyday in a social and cultural context that matches what writers actually do (Tolentino 2013). James Britton (1972) argued that a child’s writing should be doing ‘work’, be in ‘operation’, and that artificial stimuli are often unnecessary since the world is always ready and waiting for the child to write about it and for it. Young writers are seen as active, discerning, experimenting and engaging in the world through writing (Hymes 1974; Subero et al 2016; Rosen 2017). 

The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing children develop their own writer’s process and the ability to write successful and meaningful texts which fulfil their own intentions, reach genuine audiences, and, in the process, also achieve the requirements of the curriculum.

The relationship between teachers and pupils. Cremin & Myhill (2012) use the word ‘reciprocal’ to describe a relationship of equality between teacher and pupil. The term characterises this approach, where the teacher’s role is to create a community of writers, or a ‘literacy club’ (Smith 1988b) of which all children feel they have membership. Teachers are active participants in the community, working, learning, teaching and writing alongside and amongst their pupils. Children cease being consumers of writing and instead become proactive producers in an environment where differing voices, experiences and texts are published for others (Subero et al. 2016). These teachers believe they need to support the reasons their children are moved to write. They direct their instruction towards giving children all the skills that will help them achieve their aims and desires. 

The content of the writing curriculum. Children are encouraged to use what they learn about letters, words and sentences, to create and share meaning. They acquire knowledge about transcription (spelling, letter formation, handwriting) through being continually invited to use it in purposeful contexts rather than through exercises and worksheets alone (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). It is this balance between explicit and direct instruction and meaningful practice which separates the communicative approach from the laissez-faire stance taken by teachers who subscribe whole-heartedly to a naturalistic orientation.

Teaching strategies. Scholars have long bemoaned the lack of a cohesive approach towards early years writing instruction (Rohloff et al. 2022; Young & Ferguson 2022b). Children need continuous, repeated opportunities to engage in writing and apply what they are learning by producing compositions. This is something children are simply not asked to do with any kind of regularity in, for example,  ‘writing-readiness’ and ‘naturalistic’ classrooms. When children are crafting real texts for real purposes and audiences, they have a natural and important reason to learn the foundational knowledge and skills involved in writing. Instruction in spelling and letter formation are seen as being in the service of helping them make and share meaning that others will want to read and understand (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).

 Limitations

• Children may choose subjects for writing which have the potential to cause tensions or feelings of offence (Collier 2010).
• Children may value some class writing projects more than others. 
• There may be tensions between children expressing themselves and the teacher being required to evaluate the outcome.
• When compared to a naturalistic approach, there is less time devoted to the individual writer’s personal writing projects.

Conclusion

Each of these perspectives contains elements supported by research which, if used thoughtfully and intelligently, can form part of an exceptional early years writing approach (Young & Ferguson 2022b; 2024). According to Erickson (2018), knowledgeable and responsive teachers will adopt an integrated approach, selecting pedagogical practices which best serve the needs of their class (Connor et al. 2006; Young & Ferguson 2021). Indeed, children who write in classrooms which support an integrated approach have better developed writing skills than their peers (Dahl & Freppon 1995; Hall et al. 2003; Dunsmuir & Blatchford 2004; Bingham et al. 2017; Hall 2019a; Barratt-Pugh et al. 2021; Roitisch et al. 2021). 

It seems that the communicative orientation is just such an integrated approach. It is able to bring the ‘writing-readiness’, genre and naturalistic perspectives together because it encourages practitioners to teach skills and genres, to use models and identify criteria, and then facilitate their use in a meaningful way in authentic whole-class writing projects (Young and Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).

With one in four children not achieving the early learning goal for writing (Ofsted 2012, 2022; DfE 2012, 2017), and an increase in young people’s indifference or active dislike for writing (Clark & Teravainen 2017; Clark et al. 2023), we propose an approach which combines rigorous instruction in the processes and craft of writing with principles which contribute significantly to children’s motivation and satisfaction in being writers. An approach which is neither teacher-centred nor child-centred but rather one centred around creating successful writers. We term such a model Writing For Pleasure (Young & Ferguson 2021, 2022a, 2022b), which brings together the very best aspects of all the orientations described in this article to form a rigorous, fresh, holistic, and inclusive philosophy and pedagogy for early writing.

References and further reading

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