by Young-Suk Grace Kim
Original article: LINK
Let’s break down the different skills that go into developing a young writer into simple terms:
- Transcription Skills: These are the basic building blocks of writing, like spelling and the ability to handwrite or type quickly and legibly.
- Discourse Oral Language: This is about being able to express your writing ideas verbally. Before you write something down, it’s useful to talk about it. This skill involves being able to organise your ideas.
- Vocabulary: Simply put, this is knowing what words will convey the meanings you want to share. The more words you know, the better you can express yourself in writing.
- Grammatical Knowledge: This refers to understanding the typical conventions of language, like knowing how to structure sentences and use punctuation.
- Genre Knowledge: This is knowing different types of writing and how to structure them. For example, knowing how to write a story is different from writing an information text or a letter.
- Content Knowledge: This is knowing about what you’re writing about. You need to have a good understanding of your subject matter to write about it effectively.
- Higher Order Cognitive Skills and Regulation: These are more advanced thinking skills, like being able to make inferences and understand different readers’ perspectives. It also includes things like knowing your audience and being able to adjust your writing to suit them.
- Reading: Being a good reader often goes hand in hand with being a good writer. Reading helps you learn new words, understand different writing styles, and get ideas for your own writing.
- Socio-emotional Skills: This involves understanding emotions and social situations, which can influence how you write and how your writing is received.
- Domain-general Cognitions: These are general cognitive abilities like memory and attention that are important for writing.
These skills all work together when you’re writing, but they can also be developed individually. For example, practicing spelling and handwriting improves your transcription skills, while reading a lot helps improve your vocabulary and understanding of different writing styles.
Imagine writing ability as a big puzzle with different pieces. Here’s how different model say they can fit together:
- The Simple View of Writing: This model says that how well children can write depends on two main things: coming up with ideas (composition) and then putting those ideas into words (transcription). It’s having a good story in your head and being able to write it down so others can read it.
- Not-So-Simple View: This model adds a couple more pieces to the puzzle. It says that besides having good ideas and being able to get them down on paper, children also need to be able to control their attention, remember things, and regulate their own writing process. It’s not just about having a good story, but also being able to focus when writing it down.
- DIEW Model: This model takes the puzzle even further. It includes more pieces beyond just ideas and writing skills. It adds things like knowing about different topics, being able to think deeply, being a good reader, and even considering how you feel about writing.
As children become more experienced with writing, their focus on different skills changes. For example:
- As children become more experienced, the roles of different skills change. For example, when they first start out, focusing on encoding and forming letters takes up a lot of their mental energy. But as they receive more instruction, write more, and become more experienced, they get better at these skills. They can then put more focus on coming up with great ideas.
- Some skills affect each other in interesting ways. For example, knowing a lot about a topic can make it easier to write about it and the more you write about a topic, the more you learn about it. So, there’s a back-and-forth relationship between knowing stuff and writing about it.
Writing relies heavily on knowing about the topic you’re writing about. Young writers especially depend on what they already know about a topic to write happily and easily. The more you know, the more details you can include, and the easier it is to organise your ideas. Previous studies have shown that students who know more about a topic tend to write better and more coherent pieces. Even after considering things like how long their writing is and how well they can spell, topic knowledge still makes a difference in writing quality.
However, while topic knowledge is important, it’s not the only thing that matters. How well you can express your ideas orally and in writing also affects how much your topic knowledge can shine through in your writing. This might be especially true for beginners who are still getting the hang of speaking and writing well.
So, this study looked at how topic knowledge relates to writing quality compared to other skills, like how well you can talk about a topic, how good you are at spelling, and how well you can remember things.
The findings suggested that oral language and transcription skills play significant roles in mediating the relations of other skills to writing quality, while topic knowledge had a weaker but still noticeable influence on children’s writing quality too.
Educational Implications
- Targeting Multiple Skills: Teaching writing should focus on developing in children a range of skills. This includes oral language and choosing topics they know a lot about.
- Systematic Instruction: Teaching should be systematic, covering skills which lead to writing fluency like handwriting, encoding, and sentence structures. It’s important to start early and keep teaching these skills consistently. Even if some skills seem less important at first, they still need attention because their importance grows later on.