According to The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing, writing is not just putting words on paper — it’s a complex process. We know that writing is something that is both personal and intensely social, both cognitive and emotive. Working memory is central to coordinating these processes.
Understanding working memory itself is complex. Working memory is like a mental storage system where young writers can temporarily hold onto information they want to use as they write. For example, this mental storage system is where writers store ideas in their mind before converting them into text on paper or screen. This underscores the importance of teaching young writers to talk about and draw their ideas before embarking on the writing process. This drawing on paper can be the image the child would otherwise try to hold in their mind. By drawing this mental image, the child need only focus on translating and transcribing that image into text [LINK].
Anything about writing that doesn’t come automatically is undertaken in working memory. Working memory is considered limited as it can only retain a finite amount of new information about writing at any given time. Therefore, young writers must draw upon their long-term memory to access and apply the knowledge they have remembered about writing. It’s almost like a chef who has a shelf of ingredients to draw on as she prepares her dish on her chopping board. The shelf (long-term memory) holds everything the child knows about writing and being a writer. The chopping board is where ingredients are assembled and where the child uses and applies these ingredients to make something new. Working memory could be likened to the chopping board – as there is limited space.
It’s important to remember that a chef’s attitude, motivation, emotions and personality traits will heavily impact how well their ‘dish’ turns out, just as the environment the chef has to work in will affect their performance. The same goes for the young child writer [LINK and LINK].
In teaching, it’s important to recognise how working memory could affect how children write and communicate their ideas effectively. There are several implications for teachers’ practice:
- Encouraging children to talk about their ideas and draw what they want to write about before putting pen to paper can make writing feel less effortful [LINK].
- Implementing strategies that reduce children’s cognitive load during writing time can be beneficial. For example, providing children with planning strategies and graphic organisers can support students in retaining and organising information while writing.
- Inviting children to write about things that are held in their long-term memory has both cognitive and motivational benefits [LINK].
- We can plan our writing units so children only need to focus on one aspect of the writer’s process at a time. This way, we can break the writer’s process down into smaller and more manageable chunks for pupils [LINK]. In addition, teachers can set very specific process goals for individual writing lessons [LINK].
- It’s important that transcription skills (handwriting, encoding and spelling) become automated and fluent as soon as possible [LINK]. Therefore, children need a daily and extended opportunity to engage in meaningful writing. For the youngest of writers, this will mean a daily, extended and meaningful opportunity to engage in mark making and emergent writing [LINK].
- By giving children plenty of time to read as writers prior to writing their own texts can help children store important genre knowledge in their long-term memory.
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If you enjoyed this article, you may like to read our book The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing.
