Original article: LINK
By Rocío Seoane, Jiali Wang & Young-Suk Grace Kim
Our Writing Map highlights the role of oral language in children’s writing development. For example, children’s oral language and writing are strongly interconnected, with oral language skills influencing children’s abilities to generate ideas and translate those ideas into cohesive phrases and sentences.
Implications for schools
- Oral language significantly influences the quality of children’s writing, with effects growing stronger as children get older. Therefore, schools should encourage children to talk before writing, during writing and after writing [see LINK for more details].
- Incorporate discussion of children’s drawings to develop the youngest of writer’s expressive language skills. For example, by using the: make a drawing -> tell your drawing -> write your sentence strategy.
- Have a clear plan for how you plan to offer increasingly complex writing projects to students. These projects should reinforce connections between oral and written expression [see our article Building Up To Extended Writing Projects for more on this].
- Develop children’s writing fluency through handwriting instruction, class writing projects, and opportunities for them to pursue personal writing projects away from the demands of school writing [see our article on Developing Writing Fluency for more details].
- Encourage children to (re)consider their word choices/vocabulary at the revision and proof-reading stage of class writing projects [see our eBook How To Teach Writing for more details].
- Recognise that students with developmental language disorders may struggle with writing. Use explicit writing interventions, like our Writing Club intervention to support both oral and written communication. In addition, provide extra scaffolding, such as sentence starters, graphic organisers and our book-making approach for children who might benefit most [see our eBook Supporting Children With SEND To Be Great Writers for more details].