Grammar lessons are about children seeing how grammar is authentically used by writers and being invited to try it for themselves. Grammar lessons like this are essential for showing children the hows of writing. Punctuation and grammar use is a skill to be developed, not simply content to be taught. – Young & Ferguson 2020
The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Grammar Minilessons For 3-11 Year Olds has everything a teacher needs to teach grammar in the writing classroom. Each lesson explains the subject knowledge teachers require before sharing real examples from our own teaching and the teaching that takes place in our affiliate schools.
Children (and teachers) will learn how grammar concepts allow them to elaborate and add detail to their writing. They will know how to focus their attention on the ‘readability’ of their pieces by using a variety of cohesive devices. Their use of grammar will enhance their ability to write with the right voice, including with differing degrees of authority. They will consider the rhythm and intonation they want their writing to be read with. They will also carefully consider their word choices. Finally, they will be writers who adhere to the conventions that their readers come to expect. Rest assured all the grammar related expectations included in the EYFS Framework and the National Curriculum are covered.
What’s special about this book is how each lesson teaches children the whys of grammar concepts and illustrates how writers use them effectively. Children are then invited to independently apply what’s just been taught in a way that is relevant to their writing that day.
Each chapter covers a different grammar category including: Cohesion, Word Choices, Elaboration, Voice, Rhythm & Intonation, and finally Conventions.
New addition to this second edition:
Lessons now cover 3-5 year olds and the grammar expectations of the EYFS Framework and Development Matters.
Every National Curriculum objective has an associated lesson. It’s now a lot easier for teachers to find the grammar lessons they need most.
A table showing how each STA assessment statement has an associated lesson.
Each lesson comes with an example poster taken from lessons taught by us and other teachers in our affiliate schools.
Guidance on how teachers can make their own grammar posters.
Ten new lessons have been added.
Contents
Introduction
Navigating the book by function
Navigating the book by curriculum objective and year group
Cohesion
Simple and multi-clause sentences
Proper nouns
Tense choice
Tense play
Headings and subheadings
Paragraphs
Determiners
Fronted adverbials
Noun and pronouns choice
Cohesive devices
Bullet points
Hyphens
Word Choices
Nouns
Verbs
Irregular verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Synonyms
Elaboration
Expanded noun phrases
Coordinating conjunctions
Subordinating conjunctions
Prepositional phrases
Modifying sentences
Relative clauses
Parenthesis (brackets, dashes and commas)
Voice
Modal verbs
The passive
The subjunctive
Rhythm & Intonation
Full stops
Full stops #2
Question marks
Exclamation marks
End punctuation
Commas
Stop or pause: full stop or comma
Punctuation clues
Speaker tags
Moving speaker-tags
Complex sentences
Dashes
Ellipsis
Semi-colons
Colons
Conventions
Capital letters
Capitalising I
Capitalisation
Apostrophes to show possession
Apostrophes to show contraction
Inverted commas (speech marks)
New speaker? New line
Speech punctuation
Articles
What are the conventions? Use a book
Appendix
STA assessment framework table
Individual license – £5.95
School/Institution license – £29.75
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The Direct And Indirect Effects Model Of Writing (DIEW) is one of the latest models to try and expand our thinking around writing development (Kim & Schatschneider 2017; Kim & Park 2019; Kim 2020; Kim & Graham 2022). DIEW is largely the work of educational psychologist Young-Suk Grace Kim. Kim wanted to better understand the development and processes of six-year-old writers. Unlike The Simple View Of Writing, the DIEW model provides greater focus on how young children develop the compositional elements of their writing and, importantly, their writing ideas.
Kim’s model can be organised as a house. According to Kim, the foundations of writing are built on control mechanisms. In layman’s terms, this means children having the maturity to plan, manage and review their writing. Next comes one of the most interesting aspects of Kim’s model – her focus on idea generation skills. Kim shows us how children draw on skills like inference, perspective taking and theory of mind in order to generate great ideas for writing (Young & Ferguson 2022a).
After laying down their foundations, Kim believes children build their ‘writing house’ using four pillars: foundational language skills, knowledge of the writing processes, children’s affective needs and discourse-level talk.
Foundational language skills includes using their transcriptional skills such as encoding, spelling, handwriting, typing but also their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and their ability to read.
Children need to be knowledgeable of the processes writing goes through including: planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing/performing.
Children’s affective needs must be developed and attended to. This includes attending and developing their sense of: self-efficacy, self-regulation, agency, volition, motivation, writer-identity (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022b; Young et al. 2022). This also includes attending to, and regulating, their emotions (Young & Ferguson 2022c).
Finally, we have discourse-level talk. This is essentially Kim’s phrase for content and genre knowledge.
All of these pillars are required and they all need to be strong if children’s ‘writing houses’ are to stay up. If the house is stable, children can produce writing fluently, accurately, happily and of quality.
Why is Kim’s model useful to us? Well, it highlights the importance of certain cognitive resources which all too often can be overlooked and underdeveloped in schools. Hence, the name direct and indirect effects model of writing. Kim’s calls our attention to:
Explicitly teaching children how to manage themselves as writers and their writing process (Young et al. 2021, Young & Ferguson 2022b).
Explicitly teaching children how to generate quality writing ideas (Young & Ferguson 2022a).
The fact children write better texts when they can draw on content that they are knowledgeable of and passionate to write about (Young & Ferguson 2022c)
The impact children’s reading has on their abilities to write (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022b).
Teachers must attend to children’s emotional and affective needs (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022b, 2022c).
Children draw on their genre knowledge to help them write. This includes making decisions at sentence and grammatical levels (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022, Young & Ferguson 2021b, Young & Ferguson 2022d).
Our hope is that by sharing this model for writing, we can help turn the tide on the pernicious underachievement of writing in schools (Ofsted 2009, 2012; DfE 2012, 2017, 2019, 2021). Indeed, the problem teachers and schools often face is knowing how to develop all these cognitive resources efficiently and effectively in their classrooms (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022b, 2022c).
References
DfE. (2012). What is the Research Evidence on Writing? Education Standards Research Team. London: Department for Education.
DfE. (2017). National Curriculum Assessments at Key Stage 2 in England, 2017 (revised). London: Department for Education
DfE. (2019). National Curriculum Assessments at Key Stage 2 in England, 2019 (revised). London: Department for Education.
DfE. (2021). The reading framework: teaching the foundations of literacy London: Department for Education.
Kim, Y.-S.G. (2020) Structural relations of language and cognitive skills, and topic knowledge to written composition: A test of the direct and indirect effects model of writing, Br J Educ Psychol, 90: 910-932
Kim, Y.-S. G., & Schatschneider, C. (2017) Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing (DIEW), Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 35–50
Kim, YS.G., Park, SH. (2019) Unpacking pathways using the direct and indirect effects model of writing (DIEW) and the contributions of higher order cognitive skills to writing, Read Writ, 32, 1319–1343
Kim, Y.-S. G., Yang, D., Reyes, M., Connor, C. (2021) Writing instruction improves students’ writing skills differentially depending on focal instruction and children: A meta-analysis for primary grade students, Educational Research Review, 34, 100408
Kim, Y.-S.G. (2022) Co-Occurrence of Reading and Writing Difficulties: The Application of the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model, Journal of learning disabilities, doi:10.1177/00222194211060868
Kim, Y.-S. G., & Graham, S. (2022) Expanding the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (DIEW): Reading–writing relations, and dynamic relations as a function of measurement/dimensions of written composition, Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(2), 215–238
Naumann, N. J. (2023). Assessment Measures in Reading that May Be Useful for Writing. In The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Writing (pp. 563-572). Routledge.
Ofsted. (2009). English at the Crossroads. London: Ofsted
Ofsted. (2012). Moving English Forward. London: Ofsted
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2020) Real-World Writers: A Handbook For Teaching Writing With 7-11 Year Olds London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021a) Writing For Pleasure: Theory, Research & Practice London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021b) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Grammar Mini-Lessons For 5-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. Hayden, T., Vasques, M. (2021) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Big Book Of Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022a) No More: I Don’t Know What To Write About. Lessons That Help Children Generate Great Ideas Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022b) Handbook of Research On Developing Young Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022c) The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022d) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Instruction: Lessons That Help Children Find Their Style And Voice Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F., Kaufman, D., Govender, N. (2022) Writing Realities Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
The Standards & Testing Agency, rightly, wants schools to develop independent writers (STA 2018a, 2018b). However, it’s clear that most writing pedagogies being used in schools at the moment aren’t always fit for this purpose. They aren’t orientated towards teaching children to be motivated and independent writers (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022a). As a result, there is pernicious underachievement in writing attainment.
To help, we wanted to share how our Writing For Pleasure affiliate schools ensure that children are writing independently every day.
A culture of independence is built into our whole programme of study (link). For example, in Nursery, children are being encouraged to write independently every day.
Children are taught how to take a germ of an idea and see it through to publication or performance independently (link).
Our schools know that independence starts with children choosing their own topics within the parameters of a class writing project (link, link). Teachers know that they are going to receive 30+ different pieces of writing by the project’s end. No two pieces of writing will look the same.
Teachers’ daily instruction is built on the principles of self-regulation strategy instruction (link). Every day, children apply what’s just been taught in a way that is relevant to their own writing (link, link, link).
Children write meaningfully and for a sustained period every day.
Teachers provide live verbal feedback and responsive individualised instruction daily. Again, the expectation is that children will use and apply, independently, what they’ve just been taught (Ferguson & Young 2021).
Children are taught a whole host of metacognitive and self-regulation writing strategies (Young et al. 2021). Children know what to do when they don’t know what to do.
Children learn to set themselves goals for each writing session (Young et al. 2021; Young & Hayden 2022).
Children are taught a whole host of co-regulation strategies (Young et al. 2021). They know how to help one another.
English language learners are taught how to be independent writers from their very first day (Ferguson & Young 2022).
Children are encouraged to develop their own personal writing projects at school and at home (Young & Ferguson 2021c).
Children know how to extract great craft moves from their reading and use it in their writing (Young & Hayden 2022).
Children develop plans so that they can draft quickly and happily.
Children are taught a whole host of fluency strategies so that they can draft largely independently (Young et al. 2021).
Children learn revision strategies, and they experiment with craft moves on their ‘trying things out pages’ before making the authorial decision as to whether or not to include them in their final composition (Young et al. 2021).
Children learn how to proof-read (Young & Ferguson in press).
Teachers are confident when it comes to moderation and assessment because they know everything that has been written by their class has been written independently. (link).
Importantly, children know that writing independently doesn’t mean writing alone. They live and work every day in a community of writers (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a). They share their developing compositions with one another every day and they engage in writerly conversations with their teacher every day too.
Finally, and most importantly, children have been taught how they can live the writer’s life after they leave school (link).
References
Ferguson, F., Young, R. (2021) A Guide To Pupil-conferencing With 3-11 Year Olds: Powerful Feedback & Responsive Teaching That Changes Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Ferguson, F., Young, R. (2022) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Guide To Writing With Multilingual Children Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2020) Real-World Writers: A Handbook For Teaching Writing With 7-11 Year Olds London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021a) Writing For Pleasure: Theory, Research & Practice London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021b) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Grammar Mini-Lessons For 5-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021c) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Guide To Personal Writing Projects & Writing Clubs For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021d) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Writing Development Scales & Assessment Toolkit Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. Hayden, T., Vasques, M. (2021) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Big Book Of Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022) The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022c) No More: I Don’t Know What To Write About. Lessons That Help Children Generate Great Ideas Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022d) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Instruction: Lessons That Help Children Find Their Style And Voice Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Hayden, T. (2022) Getting Success Criteria Right For Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Writing is not simple. It’s probably the most cognitively demanding thing children have to do while they are at school. It is also incredibly rewarding – both emotionally and socially.
This is the problem with the theoretical framework The Simple View Of Writing (Gough & Tunmer 1986; Berninger et al. 2002). In essence, it tells us that writing is about having some ideas and writing them down. While this is interesting to cognitive psychologists, such a common-sense perspective is possibly bordering on the offensive if shared with teachers. We suspect the model comes as little surprise to anyone who teaches children to write.
Others think so too. This model has been continually revised and expanded upon (see Kim & Schatschneider 2017; Graham 2018; Kim & Park 2019; Kim 2020; Kim et al. 2021; Kim & Graham 2022; Young & Ferguson 2022). Indeed, Berninger & Amtmann (2003) revised the model only a year later, producing their still very limited Not So Simple View Of Writing.
This time, executive function was included to acknowledge that writers have to plan, manage and review their writing as they are crafting it. Again, we suspect this doesn’t surprise you.
The temptation is to say that the Simple & Not So Simple View Of Writing are out-of-date and of little practical use. We wouldn’t go that far. It’s important to know how theoretical models for writing have been developed (see Young & Ferguson 2022 for more details). However, we do think the devil is always in the detail. If details are routinely left out of cognitive models for the purposes of ‘simplicity’ then it can quickly result in bizarre and narrow teaching practices being suggested and used in schools – practices which won’t always align with what children actually need to develop as writers (Harris 2021; Young & Ferguson 2022, 2022b).
The latest understanding around ‘the science of writing’ is that to become great writers, children have to draw on at least 13 cognitive resources simultaneously. This can also be called their writerly knowledge. Our book The Science Of Teaching Primary Writingshares how teachers can develop this writerly knowledge in their classroom and across school.
The 13 cognitive resources children have to draw on to write well (Young & Ferguson 2022)
Our hope is that by sharing a more complete view of writerly development, we can help turn the tide on the pernicious underachievement of writing in schools (Ofsted 2009, 2012; DfE 2012, 2017, 2019, 2021). Indeed, the problem teachers and schools often face is knowing how to develop all these cognitive resources efficiently and effectively (Young & Ferguson 2021, 2022b).
References
Berninger, V. W., Abbot, R.D., Abbot, S. P., Graham, S., RIchards, T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(1), pp 38-56
Berninger, V.W., Amtmann, D. (2003). Preventing written expression disabilities through early and continuing assessment and intervention for handwriting and/or spelling problems: Research into practice. In Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Swanson, H.L., Harris, K.R., and Graham, S. (Eds.) (pp. 345–363). New York: Guilford Press
DfE. (2012). What is the Research Evidence on Writing? Education Standards Research Team. London: Department for Education.
DfE. (2017). National Curriculum Assessments at Key Stage 2 in England, 2017 (revised). London: Department for Education
DfE. (2019). National Curriculum Assessments at Key Stage 2 in England, 2019 (revised). London: Department for Education.
DfE. (2021). The reading framework: teaching the foundations of literacy London: Department for Education.
Gough, P.B. & Tunmer, W.E. (1986) Decoding, reading, and reading disability, Remedial and Special Education, 7, pp.6-10
Graham, S., (2018) A Revised Writer(s)-Within-Community Model of Writing, Educational Psychologist, 53:4, 258-279
Kim, Y.-S.G. (2020) Structural relations of language and cognitive skills, and topic knowledge to written composition: A test of the direct and indirect effects model of writing, Br J Educ Psychol, 90: 910-932
Kim, Y.-S. G., & Schatschneider, C. (2017) Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing (DIEW), Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 35–50
Kim, YS.G., Park, SH. (2019) Unpacking pathways using the direct and indirect effects model of writing (DIEW) and the contributions of higher order cognitive skills to writing, Read Writ, 32, 1319–1343
Kim, Y.-S. G., Yang, D., Reyes, M., Connor, C. (2021) Writing instruction improves students’ writing skills differentially depending on focal instruction and children: A meta-analysis for primary grade students, Educational Research Review, 34, 100408
Kim, Y.-S.G. (2022) Co-Occurrence of Reading and Writing Difficulties: The Application of the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model, Journal of learning disabilities, doi:10.1177/00222194211060868
Kim, Y.-S. G., & Graham, S. (2022) Expanding the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (DIEW): Reading–writing relations, and dynamic relations as a function of measurement/dimensions of written composition, Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(2), 215–238
Ofsted. (2009). English at the Crossroads. London: Ofsted.
Ofsted. (2012). Moving English Forward. London: Ofsted.
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021) Writing for Pleasure: Theory, Research and Practice London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022) The Science of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022b) Handbook of Research on Teaching Young Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
This is the first of a series of blogs, written by a teacher for teachers, aimed at helping you prepare yourself as a Writing For Pleasure practitioner. This particular blog asks you to think about your relationship with writing and being a writer-teacher.
The last half term of the academic year is usually my favourite. Not just because of the upcoming summer holiday, but also because I usually feel exceptionally proud. Proud of myself for getting through the year, no matter what challenge presented itself; proud of the children I have taught, how they’ve grown and learnt new things. And always that little bit anxious; anxious about my new class – having to start the cycle all over again and try my best to teach thirty entirely different children with very different interests and needs.
I imagine that, like me, during the months of June and July, you’ll want to start thinking about what you’re going to be teaching next year and how you’re going to do it. How you’re going to teach your class to write will inevitably form a huge part of that thinking, as well as the children’s writing needs. Perhaps you’re also reading this because you’re not entirely happy with how you’ve been teaching writing so far, or because you are keen to find out more about Writing For Pleasure and what this means for you and your pupils. Either way, I hope that the advice below will enable you to be a better and more confident teacher of writing, and will put you in a good position to introduce Writing For Pleasure from September. The plan is to make this a series of blogs which can each act as a small piece of CPD. Each blog will provide you with a ‘task’, with approximate times for completion (I realise we are all incredibly time-poor as teachers). I want them to be manageable and achievable, and, most importantly, to have the potential to bring about significant change in the way you think, write and teach.
The best place to start is to think about yourself as a writer.
Getting to know yourself as a writer and teacher of writing
Questions to consider: Reflections on yourself as a writer:
The questions below are adapted from the UKLA’s Teachers As Writers project. It was a project conducted by Teresa Cremin and I was extremely fortunate to participate in the project. For more information, see the UKLA’s publication Teaching Writing Effectively: Reviewing Practice.
You can choose to undertake this task privately or with colleagues.
What is your overall feeling or sense of yourself as a writer?
What types of personal writing activities do you carry out regularly at home?
Out of these activities, which gives you the most satisfaction/pleasure – and why do you think that is?
What are your earliest memories of writing? Are they positive/negative – why?
What feedback (positive or negative) had the biggest impact on you and how you felt about writing? Why do you think that is?
Task 1: Create your own writing river.20-30mins. Use the questions above and your own writing memories to create a Writing River. Divide your river into three sections: early and primary years; secondary & university years; and adult life. For each section, consider and write down (i) the different writing tasks that you remember doing that really stick in your mind (for whatever reason, negative or positive); (ii) the type of feedback that you received and from whom; (iii) the purpose of your writing. What do you notice? When you think about your childhood writing experiences, how might this relate to the experiences your pupils have?
When I did this, I remembered that I actually hid a lot of my writing from my teachers when I was at school. I wrote lots of poetry and stories at home that never made it into the classroom. We had a creative writing teacher who banned the word ‘nice’ and told me off for using it once in class. I hated her lessons ever since and would never talk to her about my writing. Thankfully my parents encouraged me to write and provided me with lots of opportunities to celebrate my endeavours. But, what if I hadn’t had that experience at home? I also thought about how controlling I had become in my own teaching and felt terrible about it. I was in danger of becoming just like my old creative writing teacher, even down to banning words from the classroom and being obsessed with checklists of punctuation. Something needed to change in my classroom – the subject I loved (and wanted my pupils to love) was not at all pleasurable to teach or to be a part of.
Questions to consider: Reflections on yourself as a teacher of writing:
Do you and your pupils see you as a writer inside or outside of school?
How regularly do you think out loud and model the different processes of writing?
How often do you write pieces for your pupils to enjoy and learn from?
How often do you discuss the future readers for your writing when you’re teaching?
How often do you explicitly teach about the craft of writing, such as the strategies and techniques that writers might use at different stages of the writing process (Young et al. 2021)?
How often do you write alongside children, taking part in the same class project that they are undertaking?
How regularly are the children given choice over things like purpose, genre, content and audience for their writing?
Don’t let this activity make you feel anxious if you’ve answered ‘no’ or ‘hardly ever’ to these questions. If that’s the case, then great! You’ve got something to work with. Remind yourself that this is the starting point for making a number of positive changes.
By Ellen Counter. Ellen has been a primary teacher for the past 15 years, working in three different London boroughs. She has enjoyed teaching every age group during that time – from Nursery to Year 6. She completed her MA in Children’s Literature in 2013. Ellen is currently the Strategic English Lead in a seven-form primary school in East London.
Eleanor Keegan. Eleanor is a Nursery teacher at Telferscot Primary School in South London. She has been teaching for six years and has been lucky enough to work in all key stages.
She has worked with children all her life, spending 10 years as a swimming teacher and as an assistant teacher in a primary school in Croydon. She has recently completed her masters in Child, Youth & International Development.
I would love to say that the idea of a daily book-making session came from me but it came in fact from my delightful class. In keeping with a Writing For Pleasure approach (Young & Ferguson 2021a, The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022), they started the year already keen to mark-make, so I experimented with lots of different ways to engage them, one of which was having a basket of empty ‘books’ ready for them to fill. I let them explore independently everything I had on offer in the writing area. Book-making became a firm favourite and the children would encourage each other to have a go. Seeing how excited they were to make marks with meaning into a story or information book convinced me that I should foster this enjoyment of book-making and make it grow.
I would always put out a supply of handmade books, each with a bright coloured card front and 4 pages of white paper inside. We knew that children have preferences for different tools, so my team and I put out chunky pens, crayons, pencils, highlighters, biros, chalk and much more. Not all these tools were necessarily out at the same time, but they were close by and my children knew they could help themselves to anything at any time.
Sometimes I just let children know that book-making materials were out on a particular table, and sometimes I would go and sit there myself. I started by not giving too much instruction about how to make a book because I didn’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed. I would just sit and talk out loud about what I was doing, and children would come over and usually end up copying me or doing something similar (Ferguson & Young 2021). However, I would tell confident children that they could do things like putting writing and a picture on every page.
Towards the end of Autumn 2, many children were becoming very independent when book-making, so I decided to dedicate some carpet sessions that week to it (Young et al. 2021). We had an ‘Ideas Party’ where I got children to name their favourite things, and I wrote/drew a mind map.
Here’s an example of Nursery children in Marcela Vasques’ class being invited to have an Ideas Party.
I then said that they could turn their favourite things into a story. That day, I saw a few more children feeling confident enough to give book-making a go and my heart swelled with pride! I sat at the table and asked children to help me with my story because I couldn’t think of an idea. They loved feeling that they had all the knowledge and it encouraged some of the quieter children at the table to ask the same questions of me and their peers. By the end of the week every child in the class had had a go! I made their books very special by putting an ‘About The Author’ page at the back, with a picture of the author and some facts about them. They gave them to their parents as a Christmas present.
Fast forward to today, and we have now made a dedicated Author Table, on which are copies of our book-making checklist (Young & Hayden 2022) and a basket full of empty books. It’s a permanent part of our classroom environment.
Here’s one example of what a book-making checklist poster can look like (Young & Ferguson 2021a).
Here, we were learning about minibeasts, and some children wanted to make a fact book so they could teach their friends about them. They wanted to write accurate names because they are really interested in letters and sounds, so they copied the letters from a friend’s book.
When this book was written we were learning about the Lochness monster. This child decided she wanted to do a fact book (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022) showing the body parts of the monster so people would be able to spot it easily when they visit Scotland! She was really interested in letters and had long moved on from scribble writing. She asked me to write the letters for her, but instead I sounded out the words and let her have a go at writing them independently. As you can see, she was completely successful.
In this story, the child independently wrote his name on the front cover and, because he had spotted that all front covers have a picture, drew a Lochness monster.
This child, having created a front cover, then turned to the first page and did some writing. I asked him what he was writing and he told me that, when you open a book, there is always writing on the first page that isn’t the story, and that sometimes it says who the story is for. I was really impressed by this knowledge, and praised him for thinking to include it.
This child decided on his own to do page numbers as ‘that’s what they have in the books mummy reads to me.’ The story flows, with something different happening on each page.
Book-making has increased the confidence and independence of all the children in my Nursery class. I have made it something they can take ownership of, and where they can showcase their favourite things (Young et al. 2022). We share the books we’ve written at the end of every day. They sit on my chair, just as I do when I read aloud, which helps them feel that what they have written and created is real and important. If they don’t feel confident, I will read it for them.
In conclusion, it is essential to create a safe space for children where they can happily make books without feeling they will be judged. Praise for everything and anything that children achieve is key. For me, one of the stand-out moments since introducing book-making was when one of my children, who was very unconfident and had not yet ventured to the writing table, finally did. He came over and got an empty book and pencil but was still hesitating. I told him to just have a go, perhaps make a book about his favourite ninjas. He started to draw on the front, and a friend next to him said his drawing was amazing. But he was reluctant to write, saying he couldn’t do it. I told him to write however he wanted to, and that he didn’t have to write letters like I do (Byington & Kim 2017; Young & Ferguson 2021b). From that moment on he flew through the book, drawing and writing on every page! I was so very proud of him and he was extremely proud of himself. To see the smile that was on his face when I read out his book during story time was unforgettable. He, like all children of his age, was ready to be an author (Young & Ferguson 2021a).
Writing Realities is a framework which we hope teachers and schools will use to help their pupils feel they can present themselves and others in the writing classroom successfully and meaningfully. After a brief explanation as to why we believe a Writing Realities framework is necessary, we explain how it is currently split into six key principles. These principles include: writer-identity, critical literacies, culturally sustaining pedagogy, multiliteracies, translanguaging and intertextuality. We then provide a whole variety of examples of how principles of Writing Realities have been used and applied in classrooms around the world. Finally, we share the framework in the hope that it will help you or your school develop your own ways of Writing Realities.
Why Writing Realities?
All young people deserve an opportunity to share what they know, think, and care about, demonstrating who they are through their writing. We must see them not only as readers but also as writers who wish to share their meaning with others. With the renewed interest in ensuring that classroom libraries reflect the realities of school children’s lives (Huyck et al. 2019; Ramdarshan Bold 2019; Best et al. 2020), it’s also time to examine the role that we as teachers play in honouring, valuing, and sustaining the realities of children’s lives through writing. It could be said that the objectives of Reflecting Realities (CLPE 2021)cannot and will not be truly realised until we simultaneously attend to the objectives of Writing Realities set forth in this document.
One reason we still do not see many authors from a variety of social positions, including those from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, entering classroom libraries is because young people do not typically receive an apprenticeship in how to be autonomous and confident writers who carry with them a strong personal and collective writer-identity once they leave school. However, if schools can instil the principles laid out in this Writing Realities framework into their writing curriculum,young people will have a chance to take on personal responsibility for their writing and be taught how to harness their own authorial agency. They will also learn how to live, work and represent others within an inclusive, outwardly loving community of writers. At present, we often ask our pupils to leave their own identities, cultural capital, thoughts, opinions and knowledge outside the writing classroom door. Through rigid interpretation of curriculums and published schemes, they are required to take on a monocultural identity that doesn’t honour or take advantage of the richness of their minds or lives.
However, we also see many teachers who are applying innovative practices to support their pupils as they write their realities. In their classrooms, not only does the writing matter, the writers matter, too. This framework will share examples of such exciting practices later in the document and we thank these teachers for the important work they carry out in their classrooms every day.
In a Writing For Pleasure framework, teacher writing—your writing—is essential to success. When we assume identities as writers, actually writing with and for our children, we generate powerful learning. Among the benefits are that we:
model topic finding and idea generation practices (Young & Ferguson 2022),
model important craft moves of writers—strategies and processes (Young et al. 2021),
prove to students that we actually value the activities that we expect them to engage in,
help students take risks and explore, as we do the same,
develop a trusting culture in which students are more willing to engage with you because you’ve shown your respect to them by writing and sharing.
Yes, the benefits are tremendous. But at one time or another we have all also felt that it is hard to actually live that writer’s life on a daily basis (Kaufman 2002, 2009). Some of this may be because of our fear of feeling vulnerable—opening our writing up to others’ gazes. But another excuse that I regularly hear—and have often given, myself—is, “I don’t have time to write!” It’s understandable in today’s school culture, where we are regularly asked to add some new task to our already bloated day or concentrate on the micro-level knowledge that targets standardised test requirements.
I feel your pain deeply. But I have also learned through time that there are several ways to set up your classroom, your schedule, and your life habits that will ensure you can be the epitome of the writer teacher, crafting, sharing, and mentoring daily from the perspective of the practising author (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022). Keep these in mind, and then go in to school tomorrow and start writing!
You Should Write Every Day, But There Is A “However…”
The great Don Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and writing teacher, taped to his typewriter (and later to his computer) the Latin phrase, Nulla Die Sine Linea: “Never a Day Without a Line.” This was his reminder to write every single day of his life. This is important for most writers because it establishes habits, teaches us how to think as writers think, and generates a lot of writing. However, what most people don’t know is that Murray set a goal for himself of generating only 500 original words a day. For a professional writer whose entire day was defined by writing, 500 words is not a lot. Now, we are practising teachers with tremendous multi-tasking responsibilities daily. For us, 500 words is a lot. So, the key is to find a comfortable number we can commit to daily and then stick to it. Not 500? Well, then, maybe 250. Still too much? How about 100? Pushing the boundaries? Then 50 or even 25 original words a day. What we will find is that, over the days, we will reach our limit and then continue on because we are inspired by what we have just written. Murray strove for 500 but actually averaged over 700 a day (yes, he counted). You’ll often write more than 25, but you can always be satisfied once that 25 is accomplished. Here, daily, habitual activity is much more important than volume.
Write every day, committing to a word count that is manageable, even if it seems low
You Don’t Have To Write For Long Stretches At A Time
When we think “writer,” we often envision a quiet room where a patient genius devotedly scratches out prose from a quill pen, enjoying the uninterrupted solitude of the “artist at work.”
This is an impossibility during frenetic classroom days filled with schedule items and constant surprises. However, we don’t need long chunks of time to write, and we can easily carve out smaller chunks during which no one can interrupt us. One of my former students, Sabrina Dziubek, wanting to write during class writing time but frustrated that her second-year pupils interrupted her with their questions and requests, brought in an egg timer to class and announced, “For the first five minutes of writing time, I am going to write for myself. You are not allowed to interrupt me until the bell goes off.” For two days, the students stood and stared at her anxiously, waiting for the bell, but Sabrina refused to look up, and she kept pen to paper. As soon as the bell went off they rushed at her, their own writing in hand, pressing her to read and respond. However, by the third day they got bored waiting. They started conferring with one another, and the precedent was set. Sabrina wrote with easy regularity at the beginning of each session, then went on to confer for the rest of writing time (Whittick 2021).
Another student, Devon Tiani, did something I found both simple and brilliant in her year-one class: when writing time began, she placed her opened writer’s notebook on a table and then went to confer with her pupils. However, in between conferences she would wander over to her notebook, stare at it intently, add or revise a few lines, and then move on to the next child. By the end of each class time, she had done some significant work through several very short sessions.
These are a couple of successful strategies for writing in class with students. At the beginning of the year you might even write for longer stretches of time with the kids in order to model how it should be working for them (Walker 2021; Hayden 2022). Once they have established clearer identities as writers and greater proficiency at sustaining writing through time, you can shorten your own writing times and spend more time conferring with them (Ferguson & Young 2021).
And, of course, you also look through your entire daily agenda, formally scheduling a few minutes of writing into appropriate places. It does not have to be long. You just have to be consistent, sticking to the schedule no matter what other demands present themselves. You will address the demands in a shorter, more efficient amount of time afterward.
Break your daily writing in school into short chunks that can fit into any schedule
You Don’t Have To Produce “Lesson” Writing
We lose time when we force our writing into a topic or a form exclusively to meet a curriculum agenda or scheduled teaching point. Ideas we don’t care about are hard to become invested in (Langer 1984; McCutchen 1996; Ackerman 1991; Benton et al. 1995; Kellogg 2001; Olinghouse et al. 2015; Graham 2018; Young & Ferguson 2022). Yes, we often use our writing to model both strategy and product, but forced writing never feels authentic and is always less effective. Instead, daily, we should be writing about the things that are striking us at the time—ideas with which we care to engage. Some days it will fit the current Class Writing Project, on other days it won’t. On days that it doesn’t, our mentor texts will come from other sources: professional authors’ writing or pupils’ writing. Also know that authentically felt writing will give rise to lessons that you hadn’t dreamed about yet—lessons that are usually better than the ones we originally planned.
Write about things you enjoy and care about, knowing that ideas will come more quickly and smoothly
You Don’t Have To Produce “Good” Writing Or Feel That You Are A Writing “Expert”
When we are first draft perfectionists, we can get very frustrated and waste time, futilely struggling to find just the right word before it escapes our pen or lands on our computer screen. We all sometimes have this tendency, worrying that we will never write anything good again. However, when we remind ourselves that early writing is ugly writing, rarely meeting our final intentions, our writing flows more quickly and more easily. We produce greater volume more quickly, knowing that we can revise over time the way professional authors do.
Of course, there are many teachers who struggle to begin because they think that their writing is never good enough to share—that no matter how much time they put into it, only the naturally gifted can make words come alive. I don’t have an answer that may satisfy you if you currently feel this way except to say that you are wrong (sorry for being harsh). Children are extraordinarily receptive to any teacher writing. They are the kindest readers you’ll ever meet. Further, even if you feel your writing is poor now, as you continue to try to improve it publicly—in front of your children—you are modelling the very processes that will help children who feel uncomfortable about their own writing to become better and more confident. You may even be a better teacher of writing than a confident “good” writer-teacher because your public attempts to overcome big challenges will be the authentic activity that young writers need to see.
Write with shamelessness—don’t worry about initial quality, because you can always revise (the way professional authors do)
“Writing” Doesn’t Always Mean “Drafting”
Getting new, original words down on the page is often the most difficult and time-consuming part of our tasks. Further, we sometimes erroneously count only drafting as the measure of daily success. Yes, we want new words every day, but authors are always doing so much more during their working days: brainstorming and generating new ideas, making lists, reading over previously composed writing, conferring with friends and colleagues, and revising and editing. If you are engaged in any of these practices at home or publicly in the classroom, you are doing what writers do. You are modelling how to be a writer in more comprehensive ways.
Conduct and share all aspects of your writing processes during the school day, with the confidence that it all counts as “writing”
So, in conclusion, cut yourself a break from thinking that your writing day has to look like an eight-hour-a-day job (Billy Bean 2021a, 2021b). You can write in organic, authentic ways that look different than your traditional notions of writing. The important thing is to get in there and do it—enjoying it as a writer, not as a teacher—in the midst of your young writers. The changes you see will be profound.
By Douglas Kaufman
Douglas Kaufman is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education and a University of Connecticut Teaching Fellow. He received his doctorate from the University of New Hampshire, where he worked with distinguished literacy educators Donald Graves, Donald Murray, and Jane Hansen. His publications include Conferences & Conversations: Listening to the Literate Classroom; Beyond the Boundaries: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Learning and Teaching; and several articles and chapters examining the characteristics of exemplary writing teachers and effective writing classrooms. His upcoming book looks at how teachers can move past formulaic instruction and be responsive to young writers. He has served as Co-Lead Editor of the Journal of Literacy Research, and he currently directs an international education program through which students teach and learn in Cape Town, South Africa. His recent work examines connections between writing education and issues of equity and social justice.
On the 23rd of May 2022, Ofsted published its English curriculum research review. It purports to review the latest research and is written to help raise standards in writing.
The mission of The Writing For Pleasure Centre is to help all young people become passionate and successful writers. As a think tank for exploring what world-class writing teaching is and could be, a crucial part of our work is analysing emerging guidance reports such as the one provided by Ofsted. It is therefore important that we issue a review of what this document has to say.
We will review Ofsted’s document against The Science Of Writing and what we presently know about the fourteen principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2022). Our review will highlight both the good things shared by Ofsted and also their oversights, and we will provide further exemplification and suggested reading where we think we can add value.
A summary of our findings
Ofsted’s research review identifies many of the key cognitive resources The Science Of Writing reports as being essential to children’s writing development. This is good. However, the teaching practices which are subsequently recommended don’t routinely align with what the research tells us about effective writing teaching. This is particularly true in relation to their recommendations for early writing instruction, and is the most disappointing aspect of the review. In addition, other essential cognitive and social resources which need to be developed to nurture great writers are either missing or are not given enough attention. Finally, and ironically, their research review is not informed by the latest or the most seminal educational research into writing (Young & Ferguson 2022). Our ‘review’ of Ofsted’s review found that:
Ofsted discuss the importance of oral language development for writing. However, they don’t show a clear understanding of what is meant by developing children’s oral language. For example, when recommending teaching practices which could encourage young writers to use their oral language for writing, their recommendations are limited or confused.
While Ofsted rightly acknowledge that vocabulary is a key cognitive resource children need to draw from to write well, they don’t always acknowledge the sheer amount of language learning children possess before they come to school.
In relation to vocabulary, Ofsted miss an opportunity to share the interesting research around translanguaging.
Ofsted’s review references a good amount of research around the importance of young writers acquiring transcriptional knowledge quickly. However, their interpretation of this research is not sound. As a result, they recommend practices which are in keeping with a ‘presentational skills’ perspective of writing (Young & Ferguson 2021a). Such a perspective not only goes against research recommendations, but is also developmentally unsound.
Ofsted provide an excellent summary of the research on letter formation, handwriting and spelling. However, they fail to share the rich research surrounding ‘emergent writing’ and early writing instruction.
Ofsted provide an excellent summary of the research on grammar, and place particular emphasis on the research surrounding functional grammar teaching.
Again, Ofsted share the promising work being done in relation to sentence-level instruction and its value as an important cognitive resource drawn on by children when writing.
Ofsted’s position on the importance of genre knowledge is unclear. This may be due to the fact that their paper fails to review the research on the subject. However, they highlight the importance of setting product goals in response to reading a variety of mentor texts which should match the type of writing children are trying to produce.
Some findings from key meta-analysis studies are shared within the document, but unfortunately not in any kind of systematic way.
Ofsted’s review highlights the benefits of pursuing a process approach to writing while at the same time making clear that this is only one of the many key principles involved in delivering quality writing instruction.
Ofsted fail to mention how important ‘craft knowledge’ is as a cognitive resource for writing.
Ofsted’s research review recognises self-regulation strategy development instruction as being one of the most effective and validated teaching practices a teacher of writing can employ in the classroom.
Disappointingly, Ofsted focus their attention on only one of the six key affective domains involved in supporting children’s writing development (motivation).
Ofsted highlight the importance of the writing/reading connection and provide good practical suggestions as to how this connection can be strengthened in the writing classroom.
Ofsted note the amount of research supporting the positive impact of formative assessment on pupils’ achievement.
Ofsted’s review fails to adequately explain the purpose of writing, how teachers’ orientations towards writing affect how well they teach it, and how important a clear vision of writing is for school improvement. In addition, they don’t provide a clear understanding of how children’s writing develops over time.
At no point does the review share information about the sort of physical or social environments most conducive to writing, nor does it share how children’s beliefs, emotions, personality traits and psychological states can impact their writerly development. And while the review mentions the importance of students being knowledgeable about their audience, it fails to share the research on how to develop children’s inference, perspective taking and theory of mind for writing.
In relation to the suggestions they make around effective writing teaching, Ofsted fail to explicitly mention the following principles of world-class writing teaching: build a community of writers; treat every child as a writer (there is no advice on how to develop multilingual students’ writing nor is there advice on supporting older inexperienced writers, children with SEND or writers with social and emotional disorders); pursue personal writing projects; balance composition and transcription and be a writer-teacher (Young & Ferguson 2022).
Finally, Ofsted do not use the latest cognitive models (Graham 2018; Kim & Graham 2022) as the basis for their review. Therefore, they fail to capture a complete picture of what is required to develop successful writers.
We conclude that pupils’ underachievement in writing in English schools looks set to continue.
The national context
In 2019, a quarter of children failed to achieve the early learning goal for writing at the end of the early years foundation stage (EYFS).
In 2019, around 3 in 10 children failed to achieve the basic ‘met’ standard at KS1. Only 16% of children at KS1 were able to demonstrate that they could write above the basic ‘met’ standard.
In 2019, only one in five KS2 children in England were able to write above the basic ‘met’ standard. Approximately, one in four children leave primary school failing to meet the standard for writing.
Ofsted and the DfE have repeatedly acknowledged that attainment in writing has been consistently poor in England (Ofsted 2009, 2012; DfE 2012, 2017, 2019, 2021).
Oral language and listening comprehension
How important is the role of oral language in children’s writing development? Case studies of the best performing writing teachers argue that it is transformative (Pressley et al. 1997; Medwell et al. 1998; Langer 2001; Gadd & Parr 2017; Young 2019). A child’s writing and their language development benefit each other when they are invited to craft writing alongside their teacher and peers every single day. Indeed, engaging in daily and meaningful talk and writing is one of the best ways to develop children’s language (Mercer et al. 1999; Rojas-Drummond et al. 2008; Green et al. 2008; Parr et al. 2009; Fisher et al. 2010; Dix 2016; Reedy & Bearne 2021). This is in keeping with The Science Of Writing, and Ofsted rightly acknowledges its importance. The youngest of writers develop their ideas for writing in the same way as they produce their speech (Scardamalia & Bereiter 1987). They draw on what they know about discourse-level talk. For example, how to tell a good story or how to tell others about the things you know in a way that is engaging. This is one reason why a developmentally appropriate writing process, one which involves plenty of talking and sharing, is so important in the early years of writing.
A recommended recursive writing process for the EYFS (Young & Ferguson 2021b)
According to Kim & Schatschneider (2017), an ability and opportunity to tell their writing has the largest direct effect on young children’s writing. Essentially, discourse-level talk involves children being given time and opportunity to talk about their whole text. In the context of the earliest writers, this should involve children in the EYFS and KS1 having an opportunity to talk as they write every day. In addition, children should talk about their drawings as this is another way to engage them in discourse-level talk (Mackenzie 2011). In the older years, this remains true too. For example, children should feel free to talk at the discourse level by sharing and discussing their plans with their peers (Young et al. 2021).
There are a variety of different talking strategies children use as they craft texts. Children talk with one another before they write, as they write and after they write. These interactions occur in different ways and can include:
Idea explaining – Children share what they plan to write about during the session with others.
Idea sharing – Children work in pairs or small ‘clusters’ to co-construct their own texts together.
Idea spreading – One pupil mentions an idea to their group. Children then leapfrog on the idea and create their own texts in response too.
Supplementary ideas – Children hear about a child’s idea, like it, and incorporate it into the text they are already writing.
Communal text rehearsal – Children say out loud what they are about to write – others listen in, comment, offer support or give feedback.
Personal text rehearsal – Children talk to themselves about what they are about to write down. This may include encoding individual words aloud. Other children might listen in, comment, offer support or give feedback.
Text checking – Children tell or read back what they’ve written so far and others listen in, comment, offer support or give feedback.
Performance – Children share their texts with each other as an act of celebration and publication.
Encouraging children to talk and collaborate together during writing time is an evidence-based research recommendation (Graham et al. 2012; Grossman et al. 2013; De Smedt & Van Keer 2014), and the opportunity to talk as they write improves children’s final written outcomes (McQuitty 2014). Children who talk as they write go on to write richer and more sophisticated texts (Wiseman 2003; Vass et al. 2008). This may be because talk gives children more working memory for writing (Latham 2002; Cremin & Myhill 2012; Young & Ferguson 2021a) or because talk between children assists them in deciding what to say and how to encode it (Davidson 2007; Whittick 2020).
A classroom rich in talk, where children are encouraged to tell others about events in their own lives, the knowledge they bring into school, and the imaginative ideas their minds conjure up is the foundation of any high-quality writing program (Lamme et al. 2002; Tolentino 2013; Daniels 2014; Rowe 2018; Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, Young et al. 2022). Your class can have more stories and ideas for writing than you’ll ever know what to do with as long as you’re willing to give time for talking and sharing. Children regularly rely on talk for guidance, a model, expertise, assistance, and instruction (Wohlwend 2008; Kissel 2009). This isn’t a negative thing as it shows children’s commitment to being independent through what’s called co-regulation (Young & Ferguson 2021a).
It’s important for Ofsted to recognize that oral language development in the context of the writing classroom goes beyond simply asking children to ‘rehearse a sentence’ before they write it, though this is one of a number of essential strategies for early writers to internalise (Young et al. 2021). Instead, children’s development as talkers relies on ‘a conversational context’. Children’s language develops when they are given the cognitive responsibility to use it. Ultimately, children must be the ones to construct their own speech and writing, otherwise, as the evidence shows, they learn little (Latham 2002; Timperley & Parr 2009; Chuy et al. 2011; Avineri et al. 2015; Allal 2019). The acquisition of language is a dynamic and creative process, not the passive reciting and copying of someone else’s model. Ofsted’s review rightly acknowledges the profound role spoken language plays in the development of children’s encoding and spelling abilities. Thoughts and ideas have to be encoded into oral language (whether publicly by speaking them aloud, or privately in the mind) before being transcribed into written texts. This is aided by children’s ability to use their listening comprehension skills (Kim 2022). Unfortunately, Ofsted doesn’t show a clear enough understanding of what is meant by developing children’s oral language. We therefore hope that these definitions are useful.
In poorly designed early years classrooms, you’ll see children given many opportunities to practise dictation, reciting and encoding. However, there is a big difference between dictation, reciting and encoding and developing children’s oral language for writing. Unfortunately, ineffective early years classrooms do not typically have a clear programme of study which helps develop children’s oral language alongside composing their own texts (Young & Ferguson 2021b, 2021c; Kim et al. 2021).
Vocabulary knowledge
According to The Science Of Writing, vocabulary knowledge is one of 13 cognitive resources children need to draw on to write well, and the Ofsted review spends a lot of time discussing it. Here is how children’s vocabulary typically develops:
Age
Typical language milestones
Eighteen months old
At eighteen months old, children already have a vocabulary of around fifty words.
Two years old
By two years old, most children produce utterances of two words. These utterances are crafted by the child and are not the parroting back of an adult model. Speech and thought come together by the age of two.
Two and a half
Can utter sentences of three words.
Between three and four years olds
Begin speaking in full sentences. Children can say an infinite number of original sentences – sentences that they’ve never said or heard before.
Five years old
Children are able to use language with a capacity close to that of an adult. For example they use language for the following purposes: to persuade, influence or command others; to share and understand information; to tell stories (both real and imagined) and use language imaginatively and playfully. Children can typically say and write sentences of around five words.
From seven years old
Children usually acquire a full and accurate knowledge of their first language.
(Taken from Halliday 1969; Bancroft 1995; Latham 2002)
As you can see, every child brings a great deal of language learning into the classroom on their very first day of school. This is something Ofsted’s review fails to always appreciate. Indeed, this learning is too often underestimated or overlooked by many who work in education (Avineri et al. 2015; Sperry et al. 2019; Cushing 2020; Burnett et al. 2020). However, research shows that children are more likely to succeed in schools that use and value their existing knowledge and build on it (Johnson 2015; McQuillan 2019).
With this said, there are a number of things teachers can do to further develop children’s vocabulary for writing.
Research suggests that the most efficient and effective way to develop children’s vocabulary is to provide them with ample time in which to read every day (McQuillan 2019).
Daily reading aloud by the teacher can improve children’s sentence construction and the amount of literary techniques they use in their own writing (Sénéchal et al. 2018).
Beyond this, vocabulary instruction should be part of a teacher’s reading programme.
Teachers can actively teach word choice strategies during writing lessons. E.g. the word-level functional grammar lessons (Young & Ferguson 2021d), writing-study lessons devoted to literary techniques (Young et al. 2021) and use of word-choice strategies like Cracking Open Boring Words (Young et al. 2021).
Finally, teachers can set aside specific sessions within a class writing project for children to attend to their vocabulary choices prior to publication (Young & Ferguson 2020).
Standard English
The review points out that pupils should be able to select and use grammar and register for the particular audience and purpose they’ve chosen, or are required, to write for. One such register is Standard English. However, the review places the emphasis on children learning to write in Standard English rather than ensuring they are taught to write in other varieties too. Ofsted miss an opportunity to discuss the interesting research around translanguaging. Translanguaging is about giving students choice over how they decide to use language according to different circumstances and in response to the purpose they have for their writing and their intended audience (García & Li 2014; Makalela 2019; Garcia & Kleifgen 2020). It allows children to be their ‘full linguistic selves’, or use what Ferguson & Young (2022) call their ‘funds of language’. For example, pupils may wish or find it necessary to write in:
Multiple languages.
Different dialects and language varieties.
Different registers.
By valuing the different words and ways of using language that students bring to a classroom, writing becomes more interesting and creative. They might discuss how their purpose and audience influences the register choices they make (e.g. an everyday casual tone or a more formal and authoritative voice). They also might consider the ways in which they might want to use youth varieties of English to create relatable characters in their narratives or to express their identities in non-fiction. Put simply, they draw authentically on their own ‘funds of language’ to say what it is they want to say (Ferguson & Young 2022).
Transcriptional knowledge
Let us be clear. If children do not learn and internalise the essential transcriptional skills involved in crafting writing – spelling, handwriting, and punctuation – then their attempts to share meaning with others may be compromised or even fruitless (Young & Ferguson 2021a). However, it’s important to point out to Ofsted that this doesn’t mean transcriptional skills need be taught in isolation, away from the craft of authoring. Nor should transcription be somehow completely ‘mastered’ before children are invited to develop the other social and cognitive aspects of being a writer (Berninger et al. 2002; Abbott et al. 2010; Rowe 2018; Kim & Schatschneider 2017; Kim 2020; Kim & Graham 2022). Such a perspective not only goes against research recommendations but is also developmentally unsound (Dahl & Freppon 1995; Dunsmuir & Blatchford 2004; Elbow 2004; Thomas 2005; Lancaster 2007; Boyle & Charles 2010; Gerde et al. 2012; Graham et al. 2012; VanNess et al. 2013; Mackenzie & Veresov 2013; Daniels 2014; Puranik & Lonigan 2014; Snyders 2014; Avineri et al. 2015; Hall et al. 2015; Shanahan 2016; Tolchinsky 2017; Snell & Andrews 2017; Quinn & Bingham 2018; Rowe 2018; Johnston 2019; Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Håland et al. 2019; Bruyère & Pendergrass 2020; Bradford & Wyse 2020; Kim et al. 2021; Harris 2022; Young & Ferguson 2022). To pursue the recommendations made by Ofsted would be an instructional mistake.
Letter formation and handwriting
We’re delighted to see that Ofsted listened to the research surrounding handwriting. It’s well known that early writers should focus their efforts on ‘automaticity’ and fluency of handwriting rather than on the adherence to any particular style (Graham et al. 2012; Santangelo & Graham 2016). The main aim at this age is for children to write quickly, accurately and effortlessly. The fact is that children who write with automaticity go on to perform very well in their later years and produce higher-quality pieces (Puranik & AlOtaiba 2012; Malpique et al. 2017, 2020).
We are also pleased that Ofsted highlight the importance of letter formation and handwriting instruction as being absolutely essential, that it needs to occur daily, and that it is best practised in connection with daily phonics instruction (Rowe 2018; Graham et al. 2018; Copp et al. 2019). However, their review ignores how important it is that teachers then invite children to use all that they’ve learnt about encoding during daily writing/book-making time and/or through their daily play in the writing centre.
Encoding
It takes a lot of cognitive energy for children to take the phonemes of their speech and present them as graphemes of written language; otherwise called encoding. Encoding, fluency and automaticity in transcribing can only really come if children are ‘talking aloud to themselves’ and writing meaningfully and for a sustained period every day. Until that happens, as Ofsted rightly point out, children are relying on their working memory which leaves them with little space to consider the more complex compositional and transcriptional aspects of writing. As a result, academic progress can suffer (Louden et al. 2005; Herste 2012; Graham et al. 2012; Ouellette & Sénéchal 2017; Rowe 2018). We want the process of encoding to be stored in children’s long-term memory as quickly as possible. This is why children simply must talk and write every single day in the early years of schooling (Young & Ferguson 2021b, 2021c). It’s only through high-quality instruction and repeated and meaningful daily practice that children will begin to retain more and more knowledge about writing (and being a writer) in their long-term memory (Kellogg et al. 2013; Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a; Kim 2022). This important research recommendation is unfortunately not reiterated in Ofsted’s review. With increased experience and expertise, moments of ‘cognitive overload’ will become less frequent. However, as competent adult writers, we can tell you that these moments never completely disappear!
In the context of writing, phonics instruction should focus on encoding and producing ‘sound spellings’ (also known as invented spellings, temporary spellings, own spellings or approximated spellings) and be orientated towards how the instruction will be relevant and useful to them as writers during their daily writing or ‘book-making time’ (Harste 2012; Graham et al. 2012; Ouellette & Sénéchal 2017; Young & Ferguson 2021b, 2021c). This would be a far healthier and more effective programme than the suggestion made by Ofsted that teachers should simply rely on using dictation activities. For example, children who receive phonics instruction orientated towards producing invented spellings when writing for themselves outperform those not in receipt of such instruction on a whole variety of writing and reading measures (Rowe 2018).
One issue with the Ofsted review is how it insists on children being able to encode before they are allowed to write independently. This suggestion is actually developmentally inappropriate and ultimately reduces young children’s desire to write (Byington & Kim 2017; Gerade et al. 2012). This shouldn’t have been a recommendation made by the Ofsted review. Instead, it should have looked at the research around the stages of ‘emergent writing’. This research helps teachers towards a good understanding of how children can access writing and being a writer before they’ve even learnt to encode (Byington & Kim 2017; Young et al. 2021).
The review fails to mention how children’s letter formation develops through a recursive process of: drawings and scribbles; linear scribbles and mock handwriting and letter-like symbols. This then progresses to: random but real letter strings; letters that represent key sounds learnt; spaces that indicate separation between words; ‘sound spellings’ using phonics knowledge before finally spelling words conventionally. To try and somehow skip these stages would be developmentally inappropriate.
It’s frustrating that there is still a lack of high-quality evidence about how best to teach spelling. However, Ofsted’s research review does support the evidence we do have which points towards spelling being actively taught rather than simply tested. Harold Rosen once famously said to Donald Graves that ‘any idiot can tell a genius they’ve made a spelling mistake’ (Graves 1983). We are sure there are many readers who have experienced ridicule or been made to feel unintelligent simply because they were unable to spell conventionally. Unfortunately, these negative views still persist in society and have serious long-term consequences for an individual’s confidence and desire to write.
Therefore there are a number of ways in which teachers can improve children’s spelling. These include:
Providing prolific opportunities for them to write.
Providing prolific opportunities and time for them to read.
It’s important that teachers explicitly teach spelling. This includes balanced instruction which covers phonology, morphology, orthography and etymology (O’Sullivan 2000).
Explicit instruction in how to proof-read (Young et al. 2021) and giving them many sessions to get their manuscripts ‘reader ready’ prior to publication (Young & Ferguson 2020). Part of proof-reading is obviously attending to your spellings. For example, children can be taught to circle any ‘temporary spellings’ (also known as unsure spellings, invented spellings or ‘sound spellings’) when drafting (Young et al. 2021). This reminds them to look up the conventional spelling when it comes time to proof-read.
Dictionaries are probably one of the worst places to go if you are trying to look up a spelling you don’t know, since their main function is to supply definitions for words. Instead, we can recommend that children use:
Word walls (a list of common words children should know how to spell are up on the wall).
Common word lists (x,10, x100, x1000).
Their friends.
The book they are reading.
Electronic devices (such as computers or tablets) which include speech or autocorrect facilities like Siri or Google.
Electronic spell checkers.
Phonic dictionaries like ACE.
Knowledge of grammar
Ofsted’s research review highlights grammar as one of the key cognitive resources, stated in The Science Of Writing, that children need to draw on to write successfully. Knowledge of purpose, audience and genre inevitably includes knowledge of thegrammatical features writers employ when writing texts. The following are the areas of grammar we recommend teachers develop in their classrooms. This diagram is taken from The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Book Of Grammar Minilessons (Young & Ferguson 2021d):
As Ofsted rightly point out, grammar lessons should focus on the function and application of grammar within the context of writing. Teaching pupils grammar as part of writing lessons, emphasising the connections between linguistic features and the effects they can produce, can have a positive impact on children’s writing.
Knowledge of genre
Ofsted call this a number of different things throughout their research review. This can sometimes make it difficult to know what exactly their position is on the subject of genre knowledge. It’s also referred to as ‘discourse knowledge’, ‘form’ or ‘narrative structure’. For example, Ofsted seems to think that ‘purposes for writing’ can somehow be divorced from genre. Despite this confusion, and according to The Science Of Writing, genre knowledge is an essential knowledge base children need to draw on to write well. Genre knowledge includes the typical compositional, textual, linguistic, literary features genres employ or subvert (Bazerman 1994; Halliday 2013; Martin & Rose 2008; Young & Ferguson 2020).
Famed linguist Michael Halliday (2013) suggests that genres are made up of three interrelated meanings or ‘metafunctions’ which affect the type of language we use in our writing:
Ideational is our interest in expressing a reality or topic (whatever it may be).
Interpersonal is about negotiating this topic with our audience.
Textual is about how to best manage and present what it is we want to share.
These metafunctions can be mediated for children through Halliday’s concept of ‘register’, which is composed of field, tenor, and mode.
Field is about sharing and discussing the type of activity children will be engaging in within the class writing project – the ‘what is going on’ and what ideas and topics are usually discussed or used within the genre. It involves the writer having knowledge, opinion, thoughts, creative artistry, stories, and/or reflections to share.
Tenor is about sharing and discussing with children their role as the writer and how they will relate to and interact with their reader.
Mode is about discussing how best to share their information in terms of structure, visual devices, modality, and organisation, and how best to publish or perform their writing.
Genre theorists argue that each genre has its own register. It’s recommended that teachers use the register features of a genre as a means to help children consider the publishing goal and then the product goals for a class project, and to generate rich conversation and discussion with their classes when reading mentor texts (Young & Hayden 2022). Indeed, this is one of the most effective practices a teacher of writing can employ (Young & Ferguson 2021a). There is a profound link between reading and writing (Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Graham 2020a, 2020b; Graham & Hebert 2011; Graham et al. 2018b, 2018c, 2020; Proctor et al. 2020; Young & Ferguson 2022). Part of this reading/writing connection is giving children enough time and opportunity to read, discuss and study mentor texts which match the kind of writing they are being expected to produce. As part of their study, children and teacher together should formulate a list of ‘product goals’ for their writing. Product goals are a list of things the class believes they will need to do, include or attend to if they are to write a successful and meaningful piece of writing for their identified audience. Product goals should therefore include the typical compositional, textual, linguistic and literary features they could employ (Young & Hayden 2022). For example:
Here you’ll notice writer-teacher Tobias Hayden writes ‘see class poster’ next to some of the goals. This is to tell the children that they’ve already received a lesson on this ‘craft move’ (Young et al. 2021) this year and that there is a poster on display in the classroom which explains how to do it.
Again, this is one of the most effective instructional practices a teacher of writing can employ in the classroom (Young & Ferguson 2021) and it’s good to see Ofsted suggesting such practice to teachers in their review.
Content knowledge
The Science Of Writing identifies content knowledge (what Ofsted call in their review ‘topic knowledge’) as an essential cognitive resource writers need to draw from to write successfully. We know that when children are allowed to choose and access a topic they are familiar with and emotionally connected to, their writing performance improves and they produce higher quality texts (Langer 1984; McCutchen 1996; Ackerman 1991; Benton et al. 1995; Kellogg 2001; Olinghouse et al. 2015; Graham 2018; Young & Ferguson 2022c). This is because they access content which is already stored in their long-term memory, which then allows them to focus on what really matters – crafting the writing (Kellogg 1987). There are a number of ways teachers can help children access rich content knowledge in the writing classroom:
Explicitly teach idea generation techniques in writing lessons (Young & Ferguson 2022c). Idea generation techniques ensure all children are writing using rich and extensive content knowledge.
Invite children to write about their reading in reading lessons (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2022).
Invite children to write about what they are learning during lessons in the wider curriculum (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2022).
Sentence knowledge
Research has shown the benefits of sentence-level instruction (Keen 2004; Limpo & Alves 2013; Myhill 2018; Saddler et al. 2018, Saddler 2019; Walter et al. 2021). This includes explicitly teaching and modelling how to craft many different types of sentences, and is something that is highlighted by Ofsted in their research review too. We suggest that there are three main areas of syntax teachers would do well to focus on in helping children craft sentences. These are: focused sentences, balanced sentences and developed sentences. They are taken from The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Book Of Sentence-Level Minilessons (Young & Ferguson 2022d).
According to The Science Of Writing, it’s important that teachers don’t isolate sentence-level instruction away from the other cognitive resources required for quality writing as this would be an instructional mistake (Kim & Park 2019). Good sentences and good writing are constructed in connection with the writer’s knowledge of genre, their content knowledge, and the purpose and audience they are writing for (Keen 2004; McClutchen 2011; Limpo & Alves 2013; Saddler et al. 2018; Saddler 2019; Walter et al. 2021). To routinely remove these things from your sentence-level instruction would therefore be counter-intuitive (Kim & Graham 2022; Harris 2022).
Process knowledge
Within their research review, Ofsted profitably share some (but not all) of the findings from repeated meta-analyses. For those who might not be familiar with the term, a meta-analysis is where a researcher will group many scientific studies on a particular subject, for example writing teaching, in order to identify recurring patterns. Ofsted include the following findings from the meta-analyses they reviewed:
Using a ‘process approach’ to writing (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022)
Delivering direct instruction about ‘writerly knowledge’ and ensuring targeted contextualised practice (Young et al. 2021).
Encouraging pupils’ self-regulation, such as pupils monitoring their own performance (Young et al. 2021), setting goals for improvement (Young & Hayden 2022) and making self-assessments of their writing.
Opportunities to write frequently (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2022)
Opportunities to work cooperatively on different aspects of writing and stages of the writing process (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a).
Please see Young & Ferguson (2022) for a complete breakdown of meta-analysis findings.
The process approach involves pupils learning to generate ideas, plan, draft, revise, edit and publish their writing, and practising these processes repeatedly. Over time, and with increased experience, this develops pupils’ proficiency so, eventually, they apply their process knowledge independently (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). However, Ofsted rightly point out that focusing on teaching process knowledge alone is not sufficient. The fact is that process knowledge is only one of the 13 cognitive resources teachers need to develop (Young & Ferguson 2022b) and teaching the writing processes is only one of the 14 principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022).
Teachers can support children’s development of writers’ processes by planning class writing projects which further such understanding (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022). These projects should support a writing process which is developmentally appropriate. For example, in the The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Quick Guide To Teaching Writing With 3-5 Year Olds, they recommend using this kind of process:
One cognitive resource Ofsted signally fail to mention in their research review is ‘craft knowledge’ or what might be called ‘writerly knowledge’ (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). With this in mind, teachers will find it useful to consider the lessons we provide as part of our Big Book Of Writing Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds (Young et al. 2021). In this book, we split writerly knowledge into eight distinct craft areas:
Our first category of lessons is Being Writers. These lessons give children essential instruction in the disciplines, behaviours, routines and dispositions of writers. They also focus on the social aspects of being a writer in a writing community, showing ways of talking, thinking, discussing and sharing compositions with others, and presenting writing to a variety of audiences both in and out of school. However, they are also about setting goals and getting things done. For example, how to manage your time, how to regulate yourself and work independently, and how to stay focused and motivated.
Next, we have Generating Ideas. As discussed earlier, lessons in generating ideas are vital. Without them, children don’t find the necessary motivation and desire to write. Idea generation techniques teach children where and how writers begin. Children learn how to mine their thoughts, feelings, experiences, reading, knowledge and imaginative ideas for the rich and fruitful writing topics they want to pursue.
Lessons in Organisation & Structure and Fluency often need to come next. These lessons help children take their ideas and the packages of images and thoughts from their head and get them onto paper (or screen) quickly and happily.
Next, we have mini-lessons which support children to Develop the substance and style of their initial pieces and to consider the Clarity & Accuracy of their written message; reflect on their Word Choices and attend to their Spellings. These mini-lessons help children enhance their compositions and prepare them for accurate publication or performance.
Self-regulation strategy development instruction
It was good to see that Ofsted’s research review recognises the power of self-regulation strategy development instruction (otherwise known as SRSD instruction). This is one of the most effective and the most validated type of instruction a teacher of writing can employ in the classroom (Harris et al. 2006; Graham et al. 2011; McQuitty, 2014; Koster et al. 2015; Sun et al. 2022). That’s why it appears as one of our 14 principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022a, 2022b).
SRSD instruction is about teaching children strategies which enable them to be independent writers by using for themselves what they’ve been taught. All children, but particularly struggling or less experienced writers, need high-quality teaching and explicit instruction if they are to fulfil their potential as writers. This is why SRSD instruction works so well. The concept is simple. Teach your class one writerly technique, process or strategy (what we call a craft move) before inviting them to use the move for themselves in their writing that day. We recommend that teachers deliver instruction in keeping with SRSD when teaching ‘craft knowledge’ (Young et al. 2021), ‘sentence-level strategies’ (Young & Ferguson 2022d) and ‘functional grammar lessons’ (Young & Ferguson 2021d).
SRSD instruction typically goes something like this:
Step One:
Orientate Remind the children of the class writing project you are currently working on. This includes checking they know what they are writing and who they are writing it for.
Step Two:
Discuss Introduce the craft move you want the children to try out in writing time today. Give the craft move a name. For example ‘show don’t tell’.Then be a salesperson. Tell your class why this craft move is so fantastic and how its use could transform their writing.Link the craft move to the class’ success criteria for the writing project (Young & Hayden 2022). For example: ‘show don’t tell’is going to help us achieve‘share your characters’ feelings’, which is on our success criteria.
Step Three:
Share Models or Model Live Share models. Show children examples of where other writers have used this craft move in their writing. There should certainly be an example of where you’ve used the craft move in your own writing. You should also show examples from other recreational or commercial authors and/or from other students’ writing. Invite children to ask you questions. Or Model using the craft move live in front of your class. Share some of the writing you are currently working on and show how you’re going to use the craft move to enhance your writing. Invite children to ask you questions.
Step Four:
Provide Information We always recommend turning your instruction into a poster or resource which the children can refer to throughout writing time. This helps them memorise the craft move and any conventions it might involve. For example, you might make a poster to accompany a lesson on punctuating speech. The poster can almost always be pre-prepared to save time and can remain up in the classroom over many days, weeks or even months. Children will be showing independent, self-regulating behaviour every time they consult the poster.
Step Five:
Invite Invite children to use the technique during that day’s writing time.Monitor children’s use of the craft move during your daily pupil-conferencing (Ferguson & Young 2021).Sometimes you might feel you want your children to practise the strategy prior to using it in their own writing. However, in all honesty, we find this is rarely necessary.
Step Six:
Evaluate You can invite children to share how they used the craft move in their writing during class sharing and Author’s Chair (Young & Ferguson 2020). If you have noticed a student who has used the craft move in a particularly powerful, innovative or sophisticated way during your pupil-conferencing, you should invite that child to share their writing with the class. The class can then discuss their friend’s writing and its impact.
If your teaching of these craft moves is well-planned and, above all, responsive to what your pupils need instruction in most, then, over time, children will internalise these strategies for themselves and so become confident, agentic, personally responsible and independent writers (Young & Ferguson 2020; Young et al. 2021).
It’s important to remember that the stages shared above constitute a good guide. However, teachers should also feel free to experiment with them if they want to. The professional judgement made by a particular teacher might be that a certain stage could be omitted altogether and that another stage might need more time devoted to it. For example, some teachers like children to practise the craft move prior to using it in their own writing, while others find this an unnecessary distraction. Some like to model the craft move live, and create their poster in front of their class, while others like to have made their poster prior to the lesson, or to share writing they have already crafted.
Motivation
Strangely, Ofsted decide to focus on only one aspect of children’s affective needs in their review: motivation. However, The Science Of Writing is clear that children need to be knowledgeable of all the affective needs writers rely on. These needs include: self-efficacy, self-regulation, agency, motivation, volition and writer-identity.
Self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is about the child writer feeling a sense of confidence in their abilities to be successful at producing the writing they want to. They have a strong self-concept and a ‘can do’ attitude. Self-efficacy can be manifested in two prominent ways.
Mastery – developing themselves as writers because they want to become better writers over time.
Performance – developing a good piece of writing because they want to show their competence.
Teachers can help improve children’s sense of self-efficacy by employing the following strategies:
Enacting a ‘mastery through repeated practice’ orientation towards writing progress rather than a high-stakes performance perspective.
Give children regular opportunities to share what they are crafting with their friends.
Establish a publishing goal with the children for class writing projects.
Let children hear the impact their writing has had on their readership.
Set product goals for class writing projects in collaboration with your students (Young & Hayden 2022).
Set a clear process goal for each writing session.
Have a clear daily routine of instruction, writing time and class sharing (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021b, 2021c).
Deliver writing instruction which is in response to your class’ needs. Enact a ‘teach and invite’ routine for instruction (Young et al. 2021).
Undertake daily pupil-conferencing (Ferguson & Young 2021).
Agency. Agency is about young writers feeling a sense of ownership and personal control over the writing they are working on. It’s about feeling they have some agency over what they write about and how they go about writing it. They need to feel they can generate their own ideas for class and personal writing projects and can have some choice over their own writing process.
Teachers can help improve children’s sense of agency by employing the following strategies:
Actively teach children idea generation techniques (Young & Ferguson 2022b).
Invite children to share with you what they feel they need writing instruction in most (Young et al. 2021).
Invite children to come up with the publishing goal for class writing projects (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022).
Provide opportunities for children to pursue their own personal writing projects at home and at school (Young & Ferguson 2021f).
Over time, and as children’s expertise increases, give them agency over their own writing process (Young & Ferguson 2020).
Invite children to participate in setting the product goals for a class writing project (Young & Hayden 2022).
Self-regulation. Self-regulation is about feeling a sense of independence and competence. However, self-regulation shouldn’t be misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that the young writer must somehow work alone or solve any writing problems in isolation. It means children know what to do when they don’t know what to do. For example, this can include seeking out and using the support of resources, the working environment, and their friends (what’s called co-regulation).
Teachers can help improve children’s sense of self-regulation by employing the following strategies:
Create an environment where children can write and talk together.
Make writing resources readily available.
Teach and have on display the typical writing processes writers use to take a germ of an idea through to successful publication or performance (Young & Ferguson 2020).
Teach children self-regulation writing strategies (Young et al. 2021).
Motivation. There are many different types of motivation that can be felt in the classroom. They all involve children knowing the value of writing and of being a writer. They are also about children knowing for themselves why they are crafting the writing they are crafting.
Attainment motivation – feeling a sense of wanting to write the best text they can.
Utility motivation – feeling a sense that learning about writing will be important in the future.
Intrinsic motivation – feeling a sense of personal enjoyment and satisfaction from producing the writing they are working on.
External motivation – feeling a sense of external pressure or punishment if they don’t produce their best writing. Alternatively, knowing a reward will be given for producing the best writing they can.
Situational motivation – feeling a sense of excitement about writing from those around them in class.
Teachers can help improve children’s motivation by employing the following strategies:
Pursue purposeful and authentic class writing projects (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022).
Teach writerly techniques and processes through self-regulation strategy instruction. Ensure you explain why the technique will be useful to children before inviting them to use and apply the technique in the context of their developing composition (Young et al. 2021).
Ensure children have opportunities to pursue their own personal writing projects at home and at school (Young & Ferguson 2021e).
Show enthusiasm for children’s compositions through your daily pupil-conferencing (Ferguson & Young 2021).
Volition. Volition is about having a deep need, desire, urge or internal compulsion to write. Children with a volition to write will use what they’ve learnt about writing in ways that children without volition won’t (Young & Ferguson 2021a).
Teachers can help improve children’s feelings of volition by employing the following strategies:
Establish publishing goals for class writing projects (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022).
Provide children with an opportunity to pursue their own personal writing projects away from the demands of class projects (Young & Ferguson 2021e).
Develop yourself as an enthusiastic writer-teacher (Young & Ferguson 2020).
Writer-identity. Writer-identity is about having belief in yourself as an agentic writer, a writer who carries with them a strong writer’s voice and discipline. A child’s writer-identity is inseparable from their racial and cultural identities. It is also about the identity children share with their teacher and peers as a community of writers who work to create meaningful and successful texts together, texts which can reflect the identities of the classroom and beyond (Young et al. 2022).
Teachers can help improve children’s sense of writer-identity by employing the following strategies:
Invite children to generate their own writing ideas based on their funds of knowledge, funds of identity (Young & Ferguson 2022b; Young et al. 2021) and funds of language (Ferguson & Young 2022).
Help children learn the writer’s discipline by putting in place a reassuringly consistent routine for daily writing (Young & Ferguson 2020; Young & Ferguson 2021b, 2021c).
Teach children about the writer’s life by being a writer yourself. Engage in practices which encourage you to be a writer-teacher (The UKLA 2022).
Teach children techniques which encourage them to engage in intertextuality (Young & Ferguson 2020, Young et al. 2021).
Enact the principles of Writing Realities (Young et al. 2022).
Pupils writing about their reading
It was pleasing to see Ofsted highlight the importance of the writing/reading connection. For example, they share how children should study and discuss ‘the craft of the writer’ (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a; The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022). They suggest that time should be spent discussing why writers write, and why they are moved to write too. Students should look at how writers use or subvert the typical features of common genres (Young & Hayden 2022). Importantly, they explain how students should write in personal response to their reading (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022).
Students should also be routinely invited to ‘leapfrog’ off texts they have read and enjoyed by creating their very own pieces ‘in inspiration’. This concept is called using intertextuality (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022, The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022). What we write is influenced by our reading, our play, the things we watch and listen to, the video games we play and our various life experiences. These texts not only affect what we write but how we write it and who we are as writers (Parry & Taylor 2018; Dobson & Stephenson 2020; Rosen 2017; Taylor & Clarke 2020; Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a). For intertextuality to be successful, it requires classroom libraries to be full of diverse texts, and young people must be able to respond with agency to the texts they read, in both individual and collective ways. Through this process of intertextuality, children can create new texts and push the boundaries of genre in novel ways. This is because, as writers, the texts we read often inspire us to write our own texts in response. In the process, we make new meaning not only for ourselves but, through publication or performance, for others too. For example, a teacher could invite children to create picture books, short stories or poems in response to the picture books, short stories or poems they most like to read. Alternatively, children could each write short stories in personal response to a short story shared as a whole class. Older learners (such as those in secondary schools) might also write for younger learners (such as those in primary schools) in their community, connecting children across age groups and schools as well as across genres. This would result in thirty plus different stories being crafted and then shared, and so children would extend their understanding of the original text in a deeply personal and collective way.
To provide further exemplification, using the work of Scardamalia & Bereiter, Young & Ferguson (2021a) and Young et al. (2022) show how, with increased experience, young writer’s personal responses and intertextual efforts move from ‘knowledge-telling’ to ‘knowledge-crafting’.
In the early stages of their writing development, young writers see themselves at the centre, stating and making a record of all they know, remember or interpret about a topic or book (Bereiter & Scardamalia 1987). However, the writer’s presence is not overtly visible. In the transition from knowledge-telling to knowledge-transforming, the writer writes in their own voice and style, mixing knowledge with a personal response and transforming it into something new, valuable and personally meaningful. Finally, when writers craft their knowledge with readers’ needs in mind, they contribute to the building of their readers’ knowledge and understanding as well. This is what Scardamalia & Bereiter (2003) rightly call creating community knowledge.
Assessment
Formative assessment
Ofsted note the amount of research supporting the positive impact formative assessment has on pupils’ achievement. Writing is no exception (Graham et al. 2015; Young & Ferguson 2021f). Formative assessment is about obtaining valuable information to make your teaching more effective and efficient. Assessment-based instruction is about:
Children finding out what makes a piece of writing successful and meaningful (Young & Hayden 2022).
Children being involved in setting writing goals (Young & Hayden 2022).
Teachers providing daily writing lessons that are responsive to what their class needs instruction in most (Young et al. 2021; Young & Ferguson 2021f).
Teachers providing feedback, through pupil-conferencing, that is responsive to what their pupils need instruction in most (Ferguson & Young 2021).
Children crafting their writing because they have an emotional investment in it being the best it can be (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022).
Taken from Young & Ferguson (2021f), we see how important on-going assessment focused on pupils achieving writing goals is to high-quality writing teaching.
Pupil-conferencing
Pupil-conferencing is a highly effective way of responding to a child’s immediate needs and teaching them exactly what they need to learn at that particular moment, with the crucial understanding that the purpose of the conference is to help children become better writers (Ferguson & Young 2021).
Research specific to the teaching of writing demonstrates that consistently clear, timely and meaningful feedback delivered to individuals, most often through a pupil conference, leads to academic improvement and high attainment on a long-term basis (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). The affective impact on pupils of this kind of feedback is also highlighted in the research, which shows that it contributes in great measure to feelings of confidence and motivation, helps create a positive self-belief and the willingness to persevere, and gives the writer a sense of happiness and well-being.
Research also suggests that verbal feedback given when children are actually engaged in writing is more effective than written marking after the event (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). A teacher conferencing with a pupil is in a unique position to give constructive feedback and relevant instruction based on what the pupil tells them about their goals and intentions for their writing that day.
Product goals
Ofsted highlight the importance of teachers setting clear product and process goals for writing lessons (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). It’s important that children know what they need to do before a writing session is over and, critically, how to do it (Kellogg 2008; Hayden 2021; Boyd et al. 2020, Boyd & Veenis 2021; Maynard & Young 2022; Young & Ferguson; Young & Ferguson 2021f; Young & Hayden 2022).
Ofsted share good research-informed advice on this.
They explain how teachers shouldn’t be generating success criteria for a class writing project away from their pupils who will ultimately have to use and apply them. Instead, teachers should produce success criteria in partnership with their class and only after the class has had an opportunity to read and discuss a variety of mentor texts (Young & Hayden 2022).
Teachers must appreciate that they are the most experienced writer in the room when devising success criteria for a class writing project and must make their own contributions to the success criteria. They also need to ensure that their decisions are informed by needs of the curriculum (Young & Ferguson 2021f; Young & Hayden 2022).
Mentor texts should match the expectations for a class writing project. For example, if the teacher wants their class to write great short stories, they need to ensure they are sharing a variety of great short stories with them. Sharing a novel would, obviously, be inappropriate. The same goes for non-fiction. If the expectation is for children to write great one-page information texts, it’s only right that children should see what great one-page information texts look like.
They explain how it can be unhelpful to give different pupils in the class different success criteria (Young & Ferguson 2021f).
They recognise how skilful a teacher must be to ensure that any success criteria they generate with their class doesn’t become a strait-jacket, resulting in children slavishly ‘writing by numbers’ (Young & Ferguson 2021f; Young & Hayden 2022).
Summative assessment
Unfortunately for assessment designers, writing is a process and not an event (Hoffman 2003; Wohlwend 2009; Au & Gourd 2013; Hansen 2013; Locke 2015; Barrs 2019; Young & Ferguson 2021f; Young & Ferguson 2022). How the DfE decides to assess writing tells you a lot about their views of the craft of writing, and of course their feelings towards apprentice writers. It also has profound effects on the methodology and writing pedagogy of the teaching profession. It influences the way things are taught. Therefore, what is deemed important in assessment will inevitably direct the way teachers teach. This can actually be the strength of any assessment system, but ‘single-shot-perfect-product’ tests that are used with assessment methods such as comparative judgement simply don’t encourage good writing instruction.
The main issue with writing tests is that they are too narrow and insensitive to measure the thirteen cognitive resources identified by The Science Of Writing. For example, writing is a social act of meaning making and meaning sharing. When students are faced with a prompt that has a pseudo-purpose or inauthentic context then their writing simply won’t represent their normal writing output.
Predefined writing stimuli, so common with tests, go against what research says pupils require to write at their best: writing with a focus on their audience and purpose, and being able to construct their texts over time using a variety of recursive writing processes (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2021f, 2022).
Tests force pupils to write on predefined content. If you find yourself lucky enough to know a lot about the content in the prompt (for example, you’ve been fortunate enough to go to a theme park), you are at an advantage over a peer who doesn’t. We know that the amount of content knowledge a student can draw on has a significant and direct impact on their ability to produce quality writing (Langer 1984; McCutchen 1996; Ackerman 1991; Benton et al. 1995; Kellogg 2001; Olinghouse et al. 2015; Graham 2018; Young & Ferguson 2022c). In addition, by generating the idea on a student’s behalf, we are immediately unable to assess their ability to generate ideas. A vital aspect of a writer’s development goes unassessed.
How motivated a pupil is by a prompt will also affect the quality of their writing (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). Beyond this, you also need to consider whether a writing test favours writers who like to write for a single long period, are able to write to one type of writing process, have a higher threshold for stress, and possess a greater level of social maturity (Young & Ferguson 2022).
Under test conditions, children are not given enough time to engage in the recursive and time consuming processes involved in writing (processes which are fundamental to how good writers write) and so their ability to plan, research, revise and proof-read can’t be realistically assessed.
In order to shed light on evaluation within our culture of tests, Townsend and colleagues (1997) studied two students’ writing portfolios. In each case, when the teacher, parent, and child sat down with the child’s portfolio, they saw clear improvement in the compositions, and everyone, especially the children, articulated that they noticed changes in quality, length, and level of enjoyment. Traditional tests or more modern manifestations like comparative judgement can’t provide this amount of quality and depth of information (Hansen & Kissel 2013; Young & Ferguson 2021f).
Writing tests simply tell us that some children are better able to write test answers than others. They don’t tell us how good they are at writing and being writers.
Assessment at its best has what is called ‘consequential validity’. This means the assessment gathers a variety of information, at diverse times, and under differing circumstances (Young & Ferguson 2021f). It establishes connections between assessment, policy and teaching practice. We need an assessment that can adequately assess children’s ability to draw in the thirteen cognitive resources involved in writing and being a writer (Young & Ferguson 2022). Assessment such as this, throughout primary school, would be better than undertaking a writing test because it will give information about a student’s development as a writer and importantly gives teachers plenty of opportunity to act on what is discovered.
Despite educational research stating for a long time that the focus should be on children’s processes and not exclusively on their writing products (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022), it’s supremely ironic that writing tests historically ignore this. It means, through testing, you’re teaching children a misconception about how writing is crafted.
The idea that there is a test that can provide exactly what you need to know, that can guide future teaching, and be easy to administer and interpret, is erroneous. Such a test simply doesn’t exist. The ultimate goal of assessment should always be to improve teaching. The current test prompts provided by such assessment systems as comparative judgement are therefore unsuitable and would only encourage teachers to teach misconceptions about writing. They would not serve the desired purpose of improving children’s learning about the craft of writing (McCann & Knapp 2019; Young & Ferguson 2021f).
Essential aspects of writing development which were omitted or underdeveloped
The orientation that teachers and schools take towards writing development matters (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022; Young 2022) as does having a clear school vision (Graham 2022; Young 2022). In addition, schools need a clear understanding of how children’s writing develops over time (Young & Ferguson 2021f). At no point does the review share information about the sort of physical or social environments most conducive for writing nor does it share how children’s beliefs, emotions, personality traits and psychological states can impact their writerly development (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022, 2022b). While the review mentions the importance of students being knowledgeable about their audience, it fails to share the research on how to develop children’s inference, perspective taking and theory of mind for writing (Kim & Schatschneider 2017; Kim & Park 2019; Kim 2020; Kim & Graham 2022; Young & Ferguson 2022b).
In relation to the suggestions Ofsted make around effective writing teaching, they fail to explicitly mention the following principles of world-class writing teaching:
Build a community of writers
Treat every child as a writer
There is no advice on how to develop multilingual students’ writing (Ferguson & Young 2022)
There is no advice on how to support older inexperienced writers or children with SEND
There is no advice on how to support writers with social and emotional disorders
Pursue personal writing projects
Balance composition and transcription
Be a writer-teacher
For more information see the specific chapters in Young & Ferguson (2022).
Finally, it’s staggering to think that Ofsted have relied so heavily on the cognitive model The Simple View Of Writing (Berninger et al. 2002b) when we have much more contemporary research available and an ever more complete view of the cognitive (and social) resources required for writing and being a writer (Graham 2018; Kim & Graham 2022). The latest research explained in The Science Of Writing shows that what’s shared in Ofsted’s review falls short of being able to develop excellent writers. Writing actually involves utilising and drawing on at least 13 different cognitive resources simultaneously. In Ofsted’s narrow model vital cognitive resources have inevitably been overlooked. The historical writing underachievement of pupils in English schools therefore looks set to continue.
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Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Handbook Of Research On Teaching Young Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022b) The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022c) No More: I Don’t Know What To Write About. Lessons That Help Children Generate Great Ideas Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022d) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Instruction: Lessons That Help Children Find Their Style And Voice Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F., Kaufman, D., Govender, N. (2022) Writing Realities Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Have you heard of SRSD instruction? SRSD stands for self-regulation strategy development. Sounds quite posh and complicated doesn’t it? It’s actually incredibly grounded and easy to understand. SRSD instruction is about teaching children strategies which enable them to be independent writers by using for themselves what they’ve been taught. It’s one of the most validated and effective practices a teacher of writing can employ in their classroom (Harris et al. 2006; Graham et al. 2011; McQuitty, 2014; Koster et al. 2015; Sun et al. 2022). That’s why it appears as one of our 14 principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021a, 2022a, 2022b).
All children, but particularly struggling or less experienced writers, need high-quality teaching and explicit instruction if they are to fulfil their potential as writers. This is why SRSD instruction works so well. The concept is simple. Teach your class one writerly technique, process or strategy (what we call a craft move) before inviting them to use the move for themselves in their writing that day. Case studies show that the most effective writing teachers deliver instruction in keeping with SRSD when teaching ‘craft knowledge’ (Young et al. 2021), ‘sentence-level strategies’ (Young & Ferguson 2022c) and ‘functional grammar lessons’ (Young & Ferguson 2021b).
Their writing instruction typically goes something like this:
Step One: Orientate Remind the children of the class writing project you are currently working on. This includes checking they know what they are writing and who they are writing it for.
Step Two: Discuss – Introduce the craft move you want the children to try out in writing time today. Give the craft move a name. For example ‘show don’t tell’.
– Then be a salesperson. Tell your class why this craft move is so fantastic and how its use could transform their writing.
– Link the craft move to the class’ success criteria for the writing project (Young & Hayden 2022). For example: ‘show don’t tell’ is going to help us achieve ‘share your characters’ feelings’, which is on our success criteria.
Step Three: Share Models or Model Live Share models. Show children examples of where other writers have used this craft move in their writing. There should certainly be an example of where you’ve used the craft move in your own writing. You should also show examples from other recreational or commercial authors and/or from other students’ writing. Invite children to ask you questions.
Or
Model using the craft move live in front of your class. Share some of the writing you are currently working on and show how you’re going to use the craft move to enhance your writing. Invite children to ask you questions.
Step Four: Provide Information We always recommend turning your instruction into a poster or resource which the children can refer to throughout writing time. This helps them memorise the craft move and any conventions it might involve. For example, you might make a poster to accompany a lesson on punctuating speech. The poster can almost always be pre-prepared to save time and can remain up in the classroom over many days, weeks or even months. Children will be showing independent, self-regulating behaviour every time they consult the poster.
Step Five: Invite – Invite children to use the technique during that day’s writing time.
– Monitor children’s use of the craft move during your daily pupil-conferencing (Ferguson & Young 2021).
– Sometimes you might feel you want your children to practise the strategy prior to using it in their own writing. However, in all honesty, we find this is rarely necessary.
Step Six: Evaluate You can invite children to share how they used the craft move in their writing during class sharing and Author’s Chair (Young & Ferguson 2020). If you have noticed a student who has used the craft move in a particularly powerful, innovative or sophisticated way during your pupil-conferencing, you should invite that child to share their writing with the class. The class can then discuss their friend’s writing and its impact.
If your teaching of these craft moves is well planned and, above all, responsive to what your pupils need instruction in most, then, over time, children will internalise these strategies for themselves and so become confident, agentic, personally responsible and independent writers (Young & Ferguson 2020; Young et al. 2021).
It’s important to remember that the stages shared above constitute a good guide. However, teachers should also feel free to experiment with them if they want to. The professional judgement made by a particular teacher might be that a certain stage could be omitted altogether and that another stage might need more time devoted to it. For example, some teachers like children to practise the craft move prior to using it in their own writing, while others find this an unnecessary distraction. Some like to model the craft move live, and create their poster in front of their class, while others like to have made their poster prior to the lesson, or to share writing they have already crafted.
Finally, it’s essential to recognise that this is only one of the principles of world-class writing teaching. The reality is that it works best when interconnected with the other principles (Young & Ferguson 2021a). In particular:
Pursue purposeful and authentic class writing projects (The Writing For Pleasure Centre 2022)
Pupil-conference: meet children where they are (Ferguson & Young 2021)
You can find out more about any of these principles by using this link or by downloading, for free, our Handbook Of Research On Teaching Young Writers (2022a).
Finally, if you’d like to read, see and use real classroom examples of SRSD instruction, you may wish to purchase any of the following publications:
Ferguson, F., Young, R. (2021) A Guide To Pupil-conferencing With 3-11 Year Olds: Powerful Feedback & Responsive Teaching That Changes Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Graham, S., Harris, K., Mason, L. (2011) Self-regulated strategy development for students with writing difficulties, Theory Into Practice, 50(1), 20–27
Harris, K.R., Graham, S., Mason, L. (2006) Improving the writing, knowledge, and motivation of struggling young writers: Effects of self-regulated strategy development with and without peer support, American Educational Research Journal, 43, 295–337
Koster, M., Tribushinina, E., De Jong, P.F., Van de Bergh, B. (2015) Teaching children to write: A meta-analysis of writing intervention research, Journal of Writing Research, 7(2), 249–274
McQuitty, V. (2014) Process-oriented writing instruction in elementary classrooms: Evidence of effective practices from the research literature, Writing & Pedagogy, 6(3), 467–495
Sun, T., Wang, C., Wang, Y. (2022) The effectiveness of self-regulated strategy development on improving English writing: Evidence from the last decade, Reading & Writing
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2020) Real-World Writers London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021a) Writing For Pleasure: Theory, Research & Practice London: Routledge
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021b) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Grammar Mini-Lessons For 5-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021c) A Quick Guide To Teaching Writing In The EYFS Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021d) A Quick Guide To Teaching Writing In KS1 Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. Hayden, T., Vasques, M. (2021) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Big Book Of Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022a) Handbook Of Research On Teaching Young Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022b) The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022c) The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s Sentence-Level Instruction: Lessons That Help Children Find Their Style And Voice Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
Young, R., Hayden, T. (2022) Getting Success Criteria Right For Writing: Helping 3-11 Year Olds Write Their Best Texts Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre
