EFFECTIVE PRACTICE
IN WRITING AT
KEY STAGE 2
Essential Extras
Graham Frater
Contents
Preface
1
Acknowledgements
2
Summary and main findings
3
Introduction
6
Well led and managed
10
The NLS: adopting, adapting, and extending
13
Feeding minds and language
19
Sustaining children’s writing
30
Conclusion
44
References
46
Annex 1
Participating schools
48
Annex 2
Some of writing’s challenges
49
Preface
Those of us who are frequent visitors to primary schools are only too
aware of the commitment and dedication of our primary school
teachers. It is the enthusiasm and creativity of our teachers which is at
the heart of the best practice in our schools. The literacy and numeracy
initiatives will not succeed without this well of creativity.
Graham Frater’s booklet draws upon the good practice which takes
place in schools. It provides teachers with an accessible source of
information about practice in the classroom. The findings from his
survey are testimony to the rich variety of learning opportunities
essential for effective writing. The findings are also testimony to the
inspirational writing that takes place in many of our schools.
The survey was conducted in schools in England in order to explore
the ways in which schools have responded to the need to close the gap
between standards of reading and writing. What are the ‘essential
extras’ which make the difference when schools respond to the
challenge to improve children’s writing?
Although the survey was conducted in English schools, and looked
specifically at the teaching and learning of English, the findings are
relevant to Wales and to the teaching of Welsh as well as to the teaching
of English. Many colleagues in Wales will recognise the strategies
adopted by teachers in England and will welcome the exemplars of
good practice identified.
Reports produced by ESTYN, such as Raising Standards of Writing in
Primary Schools (ESTYN, 2000), into the quality of reading and writing
in schools in Wales, are complemented by the findings in Graham’s
booklet. It is hoped that this publication will sit alongside the ESTYN
publications and other publications in Wales, not only in supporting
their drive to raise standards, but also as a celebration of the excellence
witnessed in so many of our primary schools.
Alan Wells
Director, The Basic Skills Agency
•
•
•
•
•
Raising Standards of Literacy in Primary Schools (Welsh Office/OHMCI 1998)
Standards and Quality in Primary Schools: Welsh (OHMCI 1999)
Standards in English in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 (OHMCI 1998)
Raising Standards of Reading in Primary Schools (Estyn 1999)
Raising Standards of Writing in Primary Schools (Estyn 2000)
1
Acknowledgements
The evidence for this survey was gathered from visits to a core of 17
primary schools, supplemented by two further visits that were carried
out while the report was in draft. The schools were identified by their
local authorities. The Agency is most grateful to the English advisers and
Language Consultants of:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Birmingham
The London Borough of Brent
Calderdale
Hereford
Hertfordshire
the joint advisory service of Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin
Warwickshire
West Sussex
It is particularly grateful for the co-operation and help given by the
head teachers and staffs of the participating schools; the names of all
the schools are listed in Annex 1.
The Agency would like to thank staff and students of Regents Park
School, Birmingham, for their assistance with the photography for this
report.
© The Basic Skills Agency, Commonwealth House, 1-19 New Oxford Street,
London WC1A 1NU. Tel: 020 7405 4017. Fax: 020 7440 6626.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, recorded or
otherwise reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means without prior permission of the copyright
owner.
ISBN 1 85990 217 0
Design: Studio 21
Published: March 2002
2
Summary and main findings
Context
Children’s achievements in writing lag behind their reading. While
writing probably is harder than reading, the gap between the
numbers achieving the target of Level 4 or above in reading, and
those who achieve it in writing in the national Key Stage 2 tests, is
stark (28 percentage points in 2000). This meant that in
September 2000, an encouraging 83% of new Y7 pupils entered
secondary school ready to meet their schools’ new reading
requirements, but only 55% were well placed to meet new
demands upon their writing.
The survey schools
The survey schools had an average writing gap of nine percentage points
in 2000, some three times better than the national average for that year.
The survey schools were drawn from a wide range of localities; they
were chosen because they had faced various challenges in raising or
maintaining their high standards of writing. The survey was undertaken
over two terms in 2001; it sought to find out what successful schools
were doing to achieve their high standards.
The findings
The survey schools were well led and well managed.
•
Three were Beacon schools.
•
They matched OFSTED’s criteria for effective management.
•
They were consultative and inclusive in their management styles.
•
All were punctilious in maintaining a firm emphasis on a number
of detailed day-to-day organisational practices.
•
They offered rigorously planned assessment and target-setting
systems which:
– directly involved the pupils;
– identified and addressed the needs of children who were
underachieving and ‘coasting’.
•
Some of these practices related directly to writing.
3
The survey schools were professionally self-confident in adopting,
adapting, and extending the National Literacy Strategy. In particular,
they did much more than it requires.
•
They often followed its suggestions in their own ways; these
included:
– re-shaping the literacy hour (especially its suggested timings);
– finding more time for shared and extended writing;
– giving the clear priority to text level activities both when
planning and in class;
– emphasising and providing purposes for writing;
– in the service of text level objectives, handling word and
sentence level study rigorously and explicitly.
•
Two schools gave extensive responsibilities to their literacy coordinators, and granted them the resources (including the time
and freedom) to fulfil these substantial obligations for
leadership, planning, and monitoring.
4
The schools took great care to ensure that children’s writing was
supported by providing them with well planned, rich and sustaining
experiences, especially of literature. In particular they:
•
provided plentiful occasions for reading, and for being read to;
•
offered well-chosen resources for private reading;
•
ensured that all pupils had substantial experiences of literature of
quality;
•
ensured that classes were not confined to extracts, but studied
whole texts of some length;
•
found that rich texts with clear conventions and predictable
structures were specially helpful for writing development;
•
made close links between literature and writing assignments;
•
made close links between the approaches to writing that they used
in English and other subjects;
•
provided a wide range of additional curricular and extracurricular experiences that could lead to writing, including
residential visits, theatre and museum visits, visits to the school
by writers, and well-planned book-weeks.
The survey schools undertook a range of further
initiatives that supported children’s writing; these
included:
•
the use of writing frames and graphical
techniques for generating ideas, recording and
note-taking, and for planning and shaping
written work;
•
literacy walls;
•
the involvement of parents and other adults.
5
Introduction
• (Writing) initiated what print and computers only continue . . .
• Writing . . . is the most momentous of all human technological
inventions. (Ong, 1982, p.85)
• Analysis shows spoken and written English to be systematically
distinct. (Halliday, 1994, p.70)
• Writing involves a whole set of different skills from reading.
(Barton, 1994, p.101)
• Actually, writing is never easy: in case anyone doesn’t know, it’s
the hardest work around. (Capote, 1987, p.565)
The writing gap
Children’s achievements in writing lag behind their reading. In one
sense, this might be expected: adults usually find writing harder too.
Some of the reasons why we might expect a gap between achievements
in reading and writing are discussed further in annex 2. However, what
is causing a clear measure of current national concern is the extent of
the writing gap in the national Key Stage tests, and the fact that boys
seem often to lag far behind girls.
HMI have reported that in Key Stage 2, the
focus of this survey, the gap between the
numbers of pupils achieving Level 4 and
above in the national tests of reading, and of
those who achieved it in writing, widened a
little between 1999 and 2000 (by 4
percentage points). At the same time, overall
achievements in reading rose by 4.5 points,
in writing by one point. Taking both sexes
together, the writing gap for those achieving
Level 4 and above in reading and in writing
in 2000 stood at 28 percentage points. For
boys, the gap was wider (32 points); for girls
it was 23 points. If the achievement of at
least Level 4 can be said to signal a child’s
preparedness for secondary education,
HMI’s figures suggest that an encouraging
83% of Y7 pupils entered secondary
6
education in 2000 ready to meet their new schools’ reading
requirements. By contrast, only 55% were ready to meet new demands
upon their writing skills (OFSTED, 2000, p.5).
The survey schools
This survey investigated 17 core schools that were highly successful in
developing children’s writing. Following a pilot exercise in West Sussex,
the majority were visited in the summer term 2001. Two further visits
were carried out for a related purpose when this report was in draft; they
contributed additional examples of good practice. However, though the
two schools’ writing achievements were high (average writing gap 11.5
points), they do not feature in the survey’s overall statistics. Each visit
lasted for a day: two literacy lessons were usually observed, both in Key
Stage 2 (Y6 and one other), a structured sample of writing was scrutinised
from the classes visited, and discussions were held with the head, often
with the language co-ordinator, and sometimes with the SENCO; the
latter conversations depended upon availability, and sometimes on cover.
As the list of schools (Annex 1) will show, they were drawn from rural
and urban localities in London, the South East, the Midlands and the
North of England. The schools selected had either done better than
average in the national Key Stage 2 tests in 2000, or had made
significant progress in writing. In particular, their writing gaps at Level
7
4+ were commonly narrower than the average. Usually too, they were
schools containing significant numbers of disadvantaged pupils.
Figures for free school meals tend to under-report socio-economic
disadvantage; nonetheless, the provision of free meals in the survey
schools ranged from 52% of all pupils on roll to 2.2%, and the average
stood at 15.3%. It could not be inferred that providing few free meals
might eliminate the need for help with literacy: the school with one of
the lowest free meals allocations (4%) had the highest percentage of
pupils with special needs in the survey (35%); it was located within a
rural Education Action Zone (EAZ). The school has rightly acquired a
reputation for effectiveness, and attracts struggling pupils from out of
catchment. The lowest proportion of special needs within the sample
was 8.4%, and the average 22.1%.
Few survey schools contained significant numbers of pupils with
English as an additional language (EAL), but there was a core where
EAL pupils were either the majority, or a highly significant minority.
Though clustered chiefly in three urban schools, EAL pupils amounted
to 23% of all the children in the survey. Their first languages, or
dialects, included: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Brawa, Fanta, French,
Gaa, Gujerati, Henko, Hindi, Ibo, Italian, Malay, Mirpuri, Nyanja,
Punjabi, Pushto, Putwari, Silheti, Singhalla, Somali, Spanish, Swahili,
Tagalog, Luganda, Vietnamese, and Urdu. Among these schools, the
highest proportion of EAL speakers was 87%, another had 84%, and a
third 47%; only one other school reached 10%. Two of the survey’s
three Beacon Schools were in this core; neither regards EAL as a
disadvantage, and their achievements in English are striking:
School
NoR
FSM
SEN
EAL
L4+R L4+Wr
Gap
A
274
52%
29%
87%
90%
81%
9 points
B
238
28%
25%
47%
90%
80%
10 points
NoR= number of pupils on roll
FSM = free school meals
SEN = pupils on the special educational needs
register (all levels)
EAL = pupils speaking English as an additional
language
L4+R = numbers achieving Level 4 and above
in reading in the national Key Stage 2
tests in 2000
L4+Wr =as above, in writing
8
The survey schools’ achievements in reading and writing at
Key Stage 2
Of the 17 core schools, all but one exceeded the national average for
achievements at Level 4 and above in reading in 2000; indeed, in six
of the 17 no pupils fell below Level 4 in reading. In one school all
pupils achieved L4+ in both reading and writing; 19% of its pupils
were on the SEN register at the time of the visit. A further nine schools
had writing gaps of ten percentage points or below; these too were
striking achievements. The school where reading was below the
national average, exceeded the average for writing by 5 points, to
achieve a writing gap of four points; it was an improving school. Two
further improving schools were included in the survey: they had made
gains of 45 and 21 points in writing in one year; another school had
steadily gained 24 points in three years. The average writing gap across
the survey schools was 9.1 percentage points; this contrasts sharply
with the average gap between reading and writing at L4+, of 28 points
nationally (OFSTED, 2000, p.5).
Plainly, these schools were getting something right. With their
variously challenging contexts, they delivered high achievements, or
sharp improvements in writing – or both. What they were doing is
worth bottling; it provides the substance of this report. However, it can
be said at the outset that none of their strengths or gains was achieved
overnight; even the two schools that made gains of 20+ points in a
short period drew upon long-term investments in policy, planning,
practice, resources and training.
In particular, though it certainly helped, the
achievements of the survey schools cannot be
seen as the instant dividends of the National
Literacy Strategy (NLS). If they had been – since
the Strategy is universally applied in England –
the survey schools would not have been
exceptional, and we should have few anxieties
about a national writing gap. As will emerge,
still less can the survey schools’ achievements
be attributed to their adhering exclusively, or
even always closely, to the NLS’s recommendations. All these schools did much more than the
NLS prescribes, and they sometimes did it
differently. As one head teacher put it to me:
‘It’s all the add-ons that make the difference,’
hence the title of this report.
9
Well led and managed
Some over-arching features
There are no snap-on tools for literacy, still less for the challenging and
laborious business of writing. In none of the survey schools was literacy
an isolated achievement. High standards were the products of wholeschool cultures painstakingly created by clear-sighted heads and
energetic teams of teachers. This was not a general survey of effective
management. However, before venturing into the more specific matter
of literacy, it is important to record that these well-led schools were also
well managed; it is not an inevitable pairing. Unsurprisingly, they
matched most of OFSTED’s criteria for effective school management.
The characteristics of their overall leadership and management also
bore striking similarities with the findings of the Agency’s two surveys
of effective practice with boys’ literacy, in primary and secondary
schools (Frater, 1997 & 2000a).
Reflecting on their own work, as the survey discussions invited them to
do, heads and staff identified the following as some of the strengths
that their organisation and management had contributed to their
pupils’ achievements in writing:
•
a consultative management style (‘It takes a lot longer, but it’s
worthwhile’ was one comment);
•
rigorous, readily managed, extensive,
and inclusive assessment schemes (of
which more later);
•
a ‘raising standards team’ that is
permanent, and has the power to get
things done;
•
an emphasis on system and orderliness
that was all pervasive;
•
explicitly shared goals and targets;
•
responsibilities clearly assigned, with
post-holders given the time, the
resources and the trust to get on with
the job.
10
A point of insistent emphasis
In addition to what they identified for themselves, it
was also clear that each of these effective schools
gave a prominent, consistent, even insistent
emphasis to an aspect of organisation or practice
that, consciously or not, pupils responded to
positively. At an apparently minor level, it was often
a point of presentation (dating written work, using
fountain pens); the high quality of displayed work,
well mounted and regularly updated, was a
widespread and powerfully benign obsession too.
Engaging pupils in self-assessment routines, where
they shared in monitoring their own targets, was
another issue on which a number of schools were
similarly punctilious.
More directly related to written composition was
the school where a regular practice for all but the
youngest infants, was the re-telling in writing of
stories that the teacher had read to and discussed
with the class. It was a school where 95% achieved
L4+ in reading, and where writing was no more
than 5 points behind. The school with 100% of pupils achieving L4+
in reading and writing – no writing gap! – regularly tests all Key Stage
2 pupils on their spelling by dictating a passage of interesting or
humorous prose that uses the words they have been learning. A third
school (100% L4+ in reading, 90% in writing) made a similarly strong
point of requiring all pupils in Key Stage 2 to prepare regular book
reviews: these could take a variety of forms, including tableaux and
artefacts, as well as the written word, and they were always celebrated.
There was no simple cause and effect: it would be a mistake for a school
whose staff might read this to imitate any one of these practices out of
desperation, or to rush into it on Monday. That would be to shortcircuit the underlying processes for which the outward practice is
iconic. Each of these benign obsessions signals the school’s concern
with regularity, order, routine, security, high expectations, and often
too a concern with presentation, self-respect and responsibility.
As for the story re-telling, the dictated prose spelling tests, and the
regular book reviews, as the old song said: ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the
way that you do it’. The mere doing of them is unlikely in itself to be
effective; in some hands too, they could even become oppressive. Yet it
is easy enough to see what benefits they might carry when done with
panache and conviction: in each case, the reading feeds the writing.
11
Each is also a process of modelling and imitation; they are, in effect,
scaffolded learning processes. In each, encounters with the ways of prose
are inescapable; they are done too with a regularity, frequency and
enthusiasm that gives every chance for the skills to become
internalised. And the spellings, demonstrably, have a context and a
purpose. To have ensured such consistency, and such positive
outcomes, is a tribute to the leadership of all three schools.
Many layers
Plainly, none of the frequent and regular practices noted above was
isolated, or was sufficient alone to deliver high standards, or sharp
improvements in writing. What was striking about the survey schools
was that they approached language development in so many
complementary ways, and from so many angles; in particular, they:
•
adopted, adapted and extended the provisions of the National
Literacy Strategy (NLS);
•
fed children’s minds with literature and with rich planned
experiences;
•
managed the contexts for their learning rigorously and
unobtrusively;
•
provided skilled teaching.
12
The NLS: adopting,
adapting, and extending
Professional confidence
These were schools with heads and senior staff who were often
professionally self-confident; they possessed clear convictions both
about the importance of high achievements in writing, and how they
are best brought about. They welcomed and adopted the National
Literacy Strategy. In particular, they took clear account of its termly
planning schedules. Equally aware of the challenges that writing
presents to many of their pupils, they promptly adapted the Strategy to
ensure that their schools did much more. In particular, they:
•
discarded the literacy hour’s clock (i.e. its recommended
partitioning of lesson time), but retained its emphasis on pace;
•
ensured that extended time for extended writing was frequently
and regularly available;
•
commonly gave text level work the clear priority in their plans and
lessons alike.
13
Extended time for extended writing
It is not always clear what everyone means by ‘extended writing’.
I usually ask. Some teachers, with more logic than I shall apply here,
think of it as the work of several weeks of class and homework, divided
into chapters, and frequently biographical or autobiographical.
Worthwhile though that certainly is, such projects are often confined
to the latter stages of Key Stage 2; they hardly form the staple of writing
instruction.
With less logic, but closer to common practice, extended writing is, for
the purpose of this discussion, a composition, usually longer than the
single paragraph, and a page or more in length. In an earlier survey
(reported in Frater, 2000b), I found a number of primary schools where
writing was not thriving, and where, on this modest definition, the
pages of extended writing in children’s books and folders (Key Stage 2)
were outnumbered over a year by pages of word and sentence level
exercises, (on ratios of 7:3 and 6:4). That was plainly not the case
among this survey’s schools: they commonly gave the priority, not to
the discrete rehearsal of language skills, but to writing for a purpose. In
short, they developed writing by doing it. The survey schools that had
further to travel in this direction were usually those whose writing
achievements also left most room for additional gains.
In particular, the survey schools usually found more time for extended
writing – and especially for the teaching of writing – than the literacy
hour (LH), in unadjusted form, permits. Several schools taught four
LHs in a week, devoting the fifth to extended writing. It was a pity
when this fifth session was reserved until end-of-week exhaustion had
set in. Several further schools found two or more extra hours a week
for English, and devoted them chiefly to composition.
From field notes (each bullet signals a different school).
•
•
•
More time for writing, up to two hours p.w.
•
Writing is a school priority, and is reflected in cross-curricular
approaches too; the LEA’s recent literacy conference reinforced the
importance of finding time for writing.
•
1hr p.w. for extended writing, in subjects other than English.
TIME: at least an extra hour p.w. for writing in English.
Emphasis on finding time for writing (at least 2 LHs for writing) every
week; the school has not adopted the carousel, and this has left more
room for guided and shared writing.
14
One school was experimenting with a fortnightly planning cycle for
English, dedicating the second week to composition. This had the clear
strength of providing more time for extended writing. However, the first
week’s word and sentence level work did not always keep the second
week’s purposeful task sufficiently clearly in view.
A number of survey schools had also seen the importance of extending
LH techniques and approaches to writing outside English. In
particular, they had seen the virtue of using writing frames, and
providing similar means of support, for the challenging business of
non-chronological writing. In taking this direction, they had the benefit
of applying their techniques for the palpable purposes of their pupils’
studies in history, geography, science, and so on. A church school
found it useful to apply these approaches to RE too. And the children
often did well.
Adjusted lesson formats
Time to teach and support writing was frequently found by adjusting
the LH format. ‘Shared writing’ and ‘guided writing’ are terms of art
that have accompanied the introduction of the NLS. In effect, ‘shared’
is whole-class teaching, and ‘guided’ is group teaching. Their other
differences are well set out in Grammar for Writing, (DfEE, 2000,
p.12ff.). Good practice was found in both. However, something of a
hybrid was also developing in the survey schools: a strong emphasis
was given to the whole-class teaching of composition, with individual
texts being produced by each child, and sometimes by a group, (rather
than a joint class text). Such lessons readily lasted, not for a part, but
for the whole literacy hour, and often carried over to a second session.
Though set aside, the lessons of the LH clock were not ignored:
typically, pace, interest and flexibility were well maintained, and a cycle
(whole-class introductory teaching; quiet drafting; whole-class review;
individual intervention) was skilfully managed. The sense of a
corporate and purposeful enterprise could make them exciting
occasions to observe.
Purposes for writing
Schools suffer the curious paradox that writing, a highly purposeful
process in the world outside their gates, is apt to be somewhat artificial
within them. In English in particular, we ask children to write less to
fulfil a real purpose, than for the circular purpose of learning to write.
The survey schools took special care to combat this structural
difficulty: they made tasks interesting, emphasised purpose, and
helped their pupils to think about audiences; on occasions too, they
offered real readerships to respond to.
15
Stamps were put on letters to authors whose work the class had
enjoyed; encouraging replies were often received too. In one case, a
long-running correspondence, has been maintained; the child and her
family now feature in one of the writer’s most popular books. Y6 pupils
wrote to their parents to set out the details of their forthcoming day trip
(they modelled their letters on the one the Head had sent to Y2
parents). Key Stage 2 pupils wrote stories for the infant classes; they
researched them carefully, read them to the younger children when
completed, and evaluated their effectiveness. Information tasks were
produced in booklet format. Letters written to Father Christmas by YR
and Y1 classes were answered in role, by KS2 pupils. Display provided
further readerships; so did assemblies. And, according the same
Case Study 1
ment.
Y4 lesson: preparation for writing an argu
room display:
Notice above a relevant and supportive class
ts.
This week we are looking at argumen
Come and see . . .
Teaching
foods ensures that the children see
• An initial discussion about snackissue
s that they can identify with; at
the relevance of arguing, and of
to relevant connectives
the same time, the teacher refers explicitly
and to argument structure.
to write the first paragraph of an
• The class’s follow up task will beshou
ld be retained; this follows up
argument about whether zoos
mbling points for and
work the class has done recently in asse
against zoos, in 2 columns.
olded by several layers of support
• The writing task has been well scaff
.
with planning, organisation and written style
bullet points as some of the ideas
• Effective board work and use ofhave
discussed before are rehearsed
and arguments that the children
again.
effectively.
• A well-conceived writing frame is used
ren as they settle down to the
• A word bank is offered to some child
task, (differentiation well applied).
mpromising language is well
• In the review stage, some uncouse of such phrases as ‘a cost
modelled by the teacher’s own
effective way’ etc.
16
attention and approaches to the writing done in science as that given
to English aided credibility too, especially perhaps for boys. Similarly,
the characteristics of appropriate genres were made specific and, when
relevant to the task in hand, metalinguistic terminology (technical
language for talking about language) was used unstintingly. However,
the potential of the Internet to provide opportunities for purposeful
writing, to known and unknown readerships, though found, remains
to be fully explored.
A sequence for learning
Perhaps the most decisive adaptation of the NLS, common to most of
the survey schools, was that they gave priority to text level work in their
thinking, planning, and allocations of time. They did this both when
devising units of work, and when presenting lessons. For example, two
schools, planning their literacy work in the extended units (e.g. three
weeks) recommended by their LEA, gave their major emphasis, and
most of their time, to composition (text level). At the start of each unit
they signalled the nature and purpose of the extended writing activity
that would be its principal focus; their word and sentence work,
distributed over three weeks (but not in every lesson, and seldom as the
first activity), always served the purposes of the nominated writing
tasks. Such approaches seemed to ensure that the technicalities of
word and sentence level study made positive contributions to the
development of the writing. Technicalities were enlisted for a purpose,
17
an extended writing task that the class knew about,
and which the children were often in the process of
drafting. In short, word and sentence activities were
not permitted to be free-standing or discrete; they
were not studied for their own sake, and did not
become abstractions. They were manifestly relevant,
applicable, and practical.
The case study lesson (1.) was exciting, tightlypaced, and engaged all the pupils present. They all
drafted in pairs on white boards, until the review
stage. The week’s work to date had led up to that
day’s initial drafting of an opening paragraph –
writing takes time. And this too was a lesson where
the whole hour was given to writing. The teacher’s
lesson notes listed her intentions clearly, starting
with the text level.
• To present a point of view in writing, linking points, and
selecting style and vocabulary (T23)
• To summarise in writing the key ideas from an argument (T24)
• To use connectives to structure an argument (S4)
Note:
T = text level
S = sentence level
Her numbered objectives are drawn from the NILS.
My reason for emphasising this planning and delivery sequence is not
only because it was clearly effective, but because it is not the order in
which the levels are listed either in the NLS framework, or in the
Strategy’s more recent guidance paper Grammar for Writing. Adopting
a different order from the officially published sequence required
courage. Most of this survey’s schools showed similar courage: they
followed the same order, used similar approaches and had similar
successes.
Those schools (reported in Frater 2000b), which had followed the
recommended sequence (word ➔ sentence ➔ text), exactly as listed in
the NLS’s papers, had an average writing gap of 39 percentage points
(compare this survey’s 9.1 points). Though hardly the sole factor, a
connection seems likely.
18
Feeding minds and
language
Reading and writing
Writing needs reading, but reading can do without writing . . .
(emphasis added, Smith, 1982, p.177).
Another likely connection between policy, practice and achievements in
writing in the survey’s schools lies in the strong emphasis they gave to
reading. Though, as Barton notes (1994, p.101), reading and writing
require different skills, the skills are related; both processes make use of
the same codes and systems, the same black marks on a page. The
challenge for writers is not only to respond to the marks as readers, but
actively and accurately to deploy – two of the different skills – the same
systems for themselves. And it is not a matter of controlling word and
sentence level features alone. Halliday finds (1994, p.70), that the
grammars of speaking and writing are also ‘systematically distinct’.
Young writers then, must express themselves in the distinct and
complex ways in which written texts differ from the complexities of
spontaneous speech. Indeed, one measure of children’s progress in
writing lies in the speed and extent to which
their compositions lose their initial similarities
with speech.
Implicitly, Halliday’s findings point to the
importance of reading as a support for writing.
The evidence summarised by Sylva and Hurry
(1995, p.2), suggests something of the sheer
quantity of reading that might need to occur
during primary schooling. Poor readers in their
middle primary years – and we may infer that
it is much the same for poor writers – seem to
be vulnerable on a school reading diet of
100,000 words a year. Average readers, at the
same stage, are likely to be processing around
ten times more words of text during their
school work. And the best readers may be
encountering a further ten times more, and
then reading more again for pleasure at home.
19
Occasions for reading
The survey schools supported and promoted reading with unusual
energy. Many felt that they could not always rely on their pupils’ homes
and families to have, or to supply books, nor to reinforce reading
habits, (though several took initiatives here too). The schools were
often resourceful. Among their measures to promote the reading habit,
and to ensure that plenty of encounters with texts occurred for all
pupils, they undertook a range of courses, including:
•
a daily half hour of quiet reading for all pupils;
•
a story read to all classes every day;
•
ensuring that reading books are taken home regularly;
•
encouraging children to keep and share reading journals;
•
attractive book corners in every classroom;
•
book weeks, book fairs and book clubs which are held regularly
and to which parents are invited;
•
in one case the school timetable is suspended for the whole of the
book week, and teachers swap classes and share their favourite texts;
•
regular book purchasing schemes which are organised by the school;
•
school visits by authors and drama companies;
•
using paired reading widely;
•
‘the library stock has been reviewed and updated, and the library now
plays a central role in the work and life of the school’ (Field notes);
•
teaching assistants, parents and other adults listening regularly
to children’s reading in KS1.
The use of adults, recorded in the last bullet above, was undertaken in a
combined infant and junior school that was keen to continue to offer
frequent and regular individual attention to each infant’s reading
development. The head had found that the NLS’s recommended ways of
working hinder her class teachers from continuing to hear all children
read with what she felt was sufficient frequency to lay firm foundations.
Another school, similarly clear about its policies, preferred not to reserve
time for silent reading during the school day (bullet one above); feeling
that the time might be better used, it promoted regular group and paired
reading activities instead. This was one of two schools that had extended
paired reading approaches to all pupils; it did not confine them to
faltering or underachieving readers alone.
20
Case Study 2
In one school, structured daily reading
activities (1.30-2pm) include,
in rotation:
•
•
•
•
story reading with teachers
reading aloud in pairs and small groups
use of ICT including the Internet
group work on:
– information texts
– genre-grouped texts (e.g. myths and lege
nds)
– library – choosing and changing
– poetry books
– using big books together
– using picture and pop-up books together
too
– composing book reports
– preparing reports, sometimes on compute
rs, after researching in
information books
In addition to maintaining the longstanding tradition of pupils taking
their reading books home, several of the survey schools deployed
additional ways of promoting reading at home. In one school, the teacher
of a combined Y5/6 class regularly runs group reading activities at the end
of a lesson; she rounds these off with a target-setting (and monitoring)
session for the class’s home reading. This was a school where free meals
were taken by 19% of children on roll, and where 30% were on the special
needs register (the second highest in the survey); her
class responded positively to her expectations, her
encouragement, and to the often demanding books
that she was careful to make available in attractive
book boxes. Another school was one of a group
which, intent on boosting voluntary reading, had
assembled and published reviews by pupils and
teachers (Anderson et al, 1999).
A junior and infant school in a post-war new town
makes a strong point of linking early reading with
writing, and drawing parents in as partners. In the
infant classes it uses an idea from the Breakthrough
to Literacy scheme that was developed in the 1970s.
This is the simple slider (a similar principle to that
used in Scrabble™) into which small cards printed
21
with letters, syllables, digraphs, or whole words can be slotted, and
arranged into simple sentences. A parental briefing is offered, a
guidance leaflet distributed, and a simple homework task using the
scheme is set on a child’s first day in school. Parents are regularly invited
into school to help with reading, and to see how the system works.
A further school had undertaken a family literacy initiative, in which
parents whose own literacy may be vulnerable can be tempted to seek
help through their desire to support their children’s learning. Such
schemes attempt to break the vicious circle by which the children of
parents whose own literacy is vulnerable tend also to be poor readers
and writers (Bynner and Parsons, 1997). There is substantial evidence
(Brooks et al, 1996), to suggest that family literacy schemes can offer
widespread benefits, to parents and children alike. With the
forthcoming extension of the Agency’s Keeping up with the Children
initiative, more schools can be expected to be well placed to take
advantage of similar literacy and numeracy schemes.
Feeding minds
Quantity in reading, though essential, is unlikely to be enough, nor does
it explain everything that the survey schools were doing, through
reading, to support writing. In particular, they made a point of sharing
literature of quality with their children. It is easy to see how the monthly
book review regime that was mentioned earlier, fits in here too: the
books were well chosen, and the reviews practically guaranteed that
regular and pleasurable reading occurred outside the timetable, and was
rewarded. Reading journals worked in much the same way.
Within the timetable, it was plain from classroom displays (all
related to a class’s activities) that literature of quality had been shared
with Key Stage 2 pupils. Among the displays seen, the following stood
out:
•
Wordsworth’s Prelude;
•
Samuel Pepys’s diary (children’s imitative writing);
•
Oscar Wilde’s ‘Selfish Giant’ (children’s art work: the giant’s
garden);
•
Coleridge;
•
Shakespeare (Y6’s attempts at blank verse).
22
Case Study 3
•
Lively display related to story writing: litera
ture texts attractively
displayed on draped fabric; pupils’ stories
well mounted; display of
story-writing prompts (sample story and com
mentary, connectives,
and codes of practice for independent work
).
•
Display of examples of different types of
writing (‘A Tub of Texts’:
newspaper sports report, ads, cereal pack
ets, instructions)
The class’s recent art work and writing also
on display.
•
•
Good dictionary collection (adult and junio
r).
Extracts and whole texts
All the survey schools made extensive use of non-literary and literary
extracts, short stories and lyric poetry in their classwork. The use of
such manageable pieces as can be displayed in a ‘big book,’ or on a
large single sheet, and discussed in the opening phase of a literacy
hour, is encouraged by the NLS. By these means, children experience a
wide range of stimulating reading, and types of text.
Nonetheless, many of the survey schools were discovering the
limitations of extracts; they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with
the tacit messages that, inadvertently, an exclusive, or predominant diet
of incomplete texts is apt to convey. High among these dangers is the
impression that a text might be read, or even written, more for what it
illustrates about techniques or form, than for its content, purpose,
meaning or pleasure. Similar inversions occur when, entirely owing to
the repeated explanations their differences seem to require, similes and
metaphors, for example, are given undue
emphasis. It is only a short step to suggesting
– unconsciously no doubt, but widely
observable – that figurative language is an
automatic and inevitable source of quality
and interest, to be applied liberally in the
children’s own writing.
The survey schools are not alone in noting
such dangers; those in Barrs and Cork’s
study of the contributions of literature to
children’s writing development (2001,
pp.63-4) had reached similar conclusions.
23
Both sets of schools pursued similar
remedies: they sought to retain the wholeclass study of complete texts, including texts
of some length – novels, linked story
collections, and occasionally too, long
poems. The pressures upon time that derive
from the NLS’s termly schedules seem to
make this hard to achieve or maintain.
Nonetheless, as so often, the survey schools
did more than required.
They were determined and ingenious in
finding opportunities for studying whole
texts, though they also argued that they
generally read them less now than
previously. In recognition of these pressures,
one school has given a high priority to
seeking out and using short complete texts,
instead of extracts; it finds valuable materials
in fables, traditional stories, including
classical myths, English and European folk
tales, and poetry.
Among the novels studied by whole classes in the survey schools were
the Harry Potter books, The Silver Sword, Carrie’s War, The Secret
Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Midnight Fox, Jan Mark’s short
stories, Pigeon Summer, and Children in Winter. In some schools, the
novels were linked with themes that they were tackling in history, for
example the Second World War, or the Victorians. One school also
used an edited version of the Odyssey, and a collection of writing from
a range of cultures edited by Madhur Jaffrey. Another school has
established the tradition of an annual Shakespeare production: a
rehearsal was observed during the survey visit, and it was clear that Key
Stage 2 pupils, of both sexes, were keen to have parts; they performed
expressively too. The texts were skilfully edited and abridged; it was an
attractively painless way for the pupils, not only to handle demanding
materials, but to be induced to memorise them too.
In order to handle whole texts of some length with a whole class,
teachers adopted interesting strategies. The key problems, as they see
them, are of finding time, maintaining a smart and even pace, and
ensuring that the tedium of unrehearsed reading aloud around the class
is avoided. Together, they deployed a range of strategies:
24
•
readings by the teacher;
•
the use of video recordings;
•
group readings;
•
rehearsed book-in-hand performances of key scenes;
•
reading homeworks;
•
hot-seating.
Intertextuality
No writing is truly original, because it relies on the ideas, language and
literary styles of others. All writing is productive and creative, because
we recursively build a complete work out of a series of fragments.
(Sharples, 1999, p.111)
Close familiarity with literary texts, and their sustained study skilfully
managed, seemed to contribute directly to children’s writing development.
By using a number of quantitative measures (syntactical, lexical and
organisational), Barrs and Cork (above) demonstrate
the positive influence of literature upon writing. That
kind of detail was not possible in a survey of 17-19
days. Nonetheless, gains were clearly observable.
Especially clear were the benefits of traditional tales,
particularly folk tales of the Indo-European and
African-Caribbean traditions (Cinderella, Anansi,
and so on). As a support for children’s writing, in
addition to their inherent fascination, some of the
strengths of the oral tradition lie in its stock phrases,
shared motifs, and interchangeable story elements.
Its readily recognisable patterns are also a great help
for young writers (three brothers, wishes, and so on,
helpers and hinderers; ingenious puzzles wittily
resolved, evil punished, virtue rewarded). Some of
these strengths emerged in children’s own stories,
especially in the turns of phrase that they had
borrowed for the beginnings and ends of their
stories (once upon a time . . . once there was . . . and
they all lived happily ever after. . . ).
25
Case Study 4 (Lizzie Y6)
Foxeleana
t. Birds, insects, lizards
e surrounded by a lushous, deep green fores
castl
tiful
beau
a
was
there
time
a
upon
Once
of the Forest was a
nery. A couple of yards north from the north
and foxes lived in the habitat of the deep gree
ess Foxeleano. Their
a Queen. They had a daughter named princ
beautiful castle. In that castle lived a king and
The King died.
an awful, horrible disaster entered the land.
land was a peaceful, perfect place until we day
news spread as fast,
They did not leave the castle at all and yet the
The Queen and princess were heart broken.
bang, bang, bang.
ing, as fast as time. One day . . . Bang, bang,
as fast as a speeding bird, as fast as a frog leap
ered the door.
er’s favourite number. Princess Foxeleana answ
Five bangs was always the Queen’s step moth
reaching we metre
er, and she was here! She had one big wart
‘Yes miss,’ said Foxeleana. It was the step-moth
her nose, and her hair, can’t say!
in front of her, her bottom tip came far up to
n Weekininess.
y. The step-mother walked through to the Quee
‘Come in,’ Princess Foxeleana said not happ
up the marble stairs
heard a blood curdling scream. Foxeleana ran
A couple of breaths later, princess Foxeleana
the Queen was being
med again and the Foxeleana knew where
and they had both gone... The Queen screa
the tower.
castle and the Queen Weekininess tied up in
taken. The princess ran and reached the evil
could turn into a
ess. The princess remembered her magic. She
princ
the
eled
sque
’
back
n
Quee
the
get
t
mus
‘I
ran up the weeds
into the forest. The fox reached the castle and
fox!. Quickly she turned into a fox, and ran
n tied up. The fox
Queen was. She jumped in and saw the Quee
until she reached the top window were the
ess and the Queen
weeds down, then they ran. Scloopch! The Princ
the
ed
climb
both
they
and
rope
the
ed
chew
ages until . . .
fell into a trap. They screamed for clear life for
d them on his horse
prince and pulled them both out and carrie
‘I’ll come and save you!’ said the handsome
asked the prince to
the prince and loved the prince soo much she
back to the loving castle. The princess liked
marry her and he said
‘Yes!’
ry. I think this is your best yet.
Wow! What a stunningly written sto
language to entertain. 1 step up the
You really know how to manipulate
ladder. Stamp.
There is so much that Lizzie has learnt from the folk tales she has read
or heard. At word and sentence level there are:
Once upon a time . . .
they had a daughter named . . .
in that castle lived a . . .
north from the north of the forest . . .
and yet the news spread . . .
the queen and princess were heart broken . . .
26
Very good
Even her oddities (‘in the habitat of the deep greenery’), hint at texts she
has heard or read, though probably not folk tales. At the level of story
convention there is the structure of situation-complication-resolution;
there is also the three part rhetorical structure of the oral tradition (‘as
fast as a bird/frog/time’), the magical transformation, and a handsome
prince. Whether conscious or not, a feminist twist can also be found, a
play upon traditional expectations: it is the princess who proposes
marriage to the helpful prince. Lizzie manages a measure of authorial
commentary too; it suggests that she is just beginning to be able to stand
back, aware of her audience, and reflect on what she is doing:
Their land was a peaceful, perfect place until . . .
It was the step-mother, and she was here!
However, there was also a warning to be heeded too. Some teachers
moved too quickly to matters of ‘story grammar’ as a prompt for
composing narrative; they neglected to read enough stories in the genre
with their classes. When this occurred, and especially when it was overprompted by the schematic analyses of a publisher’s workbook, pupils
found it hard to get going, and the writing soon faltered. Story
grammars need to be kept in perspective: they were extrapolated from
texts by scholars when the oral tradition was fading, or had already
died out. They are most unlikely ever to have been articulated by
traditional tellers, ballad singers, or by epic singers like Homer (Lord,
1960; Buchan, 1972). Traditional performers internalised the
grammars; by repeatedly hearing and performing stories, they were
able to extend their repertoires. Though formal
analysis – a product of the technology of writing –
reveals the underlying structures, it was far from
essential for their creation. Indeed, in a primary oral
culture, such analyses may well have been
inconceivable (Ong, 1982).
Other children were supported by similar strongly
conventional story genres, including in particular
Kipling’s Just So Stories; their roots lie in fable, but
they have their own sharply individual humour,
moral codes, and prominent stylistic features
(including, the refrain ‘O Best Beloved,’ Kipling’s
direct address to his child reader). Mixing
newspapers and literature (‘Bloodbath at Fife
Castle,’ Humpty Dumpty as a press report . . . ) was
a means of combining a literary source with another
attractive and clearly conventional structure, that of
27
newspapers; it was also a way re-modelling chronological material nonchronologically. And Hugh’s teacher, signalling her high expectations,
had read some of T.S. Eliot’s adult poetry with her Y4 class:
Dusk
People walking their dogs
And a mouth watering waft
Of fish and chips in the air
The rubbish in the canal stripped bear,
The people come, the people go
Night
The city comes alive at night and gives
The stalking cats a dreadful fright
Thievery arrives at dark,
In the morning the people will hark, hark, hark!
The people come, the people go.
Dawn/day
In the light of dawn if begins to rain.
The factory pipes start up again,
The smoke-filled air is musty
And inside the houses its dusty.
The people come, the people go.
(Hugh – you paint a brilliant, vivid picture with words. I
can really imagine this place. 2HP.)
There are echoes both of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and of ‘The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Just as with Lizzie, such echoes –
which the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin called intertextuality – have
fed both the ideas and the language of Hugh, of Lizzie, and all the other
children whose teachers gave sustained attention to the pleasures of
their texts. In short, reading and discussing their literature as literature
– and not as a bran-tub of bolt-on skills – has fed and enriched their
writing. It has led the children to internalise and give meaning to word,
sentence and text level features, and with a new force of their own.
Visits and outings: experience and writing
Plainly, literature provided pupils with enriching experiences, whose
benefits included the development of their writing. So too did the
outings and visits that teachers planned for their pupils. The
anticipation of a visit prompted research and investigation tasks; the
28
visits themselves could lead to recording, report writing, story-telling,
argument, poetry and much else. School visits helped to give purpose
and relevance to children’s writing, and they often provided vivid and
memorable experiences that made them worth shaping in the mind,
recording, and building upon.
Field notes:
•
Residential visits once for every year group as it goes through the
school. The Isle of Wight is frequently used: Carisbrooke Castle and
Osborne House in particular. Other visits have included: The Globe
Theatre, The Tate Modern, The Chichester Festival Theatre. Visiting
theatre groups come to the school too.
•
Planning for forthcoming visit to Castle Bromwich Hall and Gardens. All
pupils, teachers and helpers will wear period costume; led by the
centre’s staff, they will all be in role for the day. Extensive opportunities
for lively written work.
•
Regular external school visits, include a residential visit to Marr Hall,
(the county’s centre in Wales) and Osborne House IoW. Other recent
visits have also included the British Museum, Cadbury World, and
Edgbaston cricket ground.
•
Extensive classroom display includes examples of lively written and art
work arising from a recent visit to slate caverns in Wales.
Similarly, a rural school blessed
with attractive and spacious
grounds regularly used them as
supports for language and
investigation work: the polytunnel was used, among other
things, for measuring and
reporting on controlled experiments with plant growth.
The school kept animals, and the
grounds had been arranged to
provide a range of stimuli, with a
wild area, an adventure
playground, quiet areas, play
areas, and a rope trail through
dense foliage. In a variety of ways
they could all be woven into
pupils’ writing at some time.
29
Sustaining children’s
writing
This last section will be more miscellaneous. It records a variety of
positive practices found in the survey schools; it is necessarily a
selection. However, it begins with a detailed account of a piece of
writing whose production summarises much that has emerged so far.
Alex’s first draft (Y6)
Alex provides a good example of what the survey schools’ positive
approaches could yield in the classroom. The assignment was
composed while his lesson was being observed; it is an unrevised first
draft. Following recent work on Carrie’s War, the class was asked to
write a story that focussed on an imagined reminiscence about a
wartime childhood; all pupils were also invited to make explicit use of
two narrative techniques: flashback and flashforward in time (analepsis
and prolepsis). Alex chose a first-person narrator writing about a return
journey to the big house where he had spent the War as a childhood
evacuee. While travelling there once again, the narrator’s mind drifts
back to his first journey to the Sussex countryside, from ‘the grotty
streets in London,’ to the happy times spent in unfamiliar
surroundings. Alex manages the time-switching with skill:
I could feel excitement welling up inside me. It had been such a long time.
‘Neoww, BANG! Are we there yet dad?’
‘Not yet son. In my day we didn’t have cars to take us where we wanted.
We had to go by trains’.
I sighed wistfully remembering those wonderful times that Harry and I
had. The church singing out it’s magnificent song when the clock struck,
the wild bushes and trees grabbing at us with their prickly fingers, the
birds flying away in horror when we used them for target practice.
His story frame is complex too. His narrator is handling two phases of
time: the time of the reminiscence (itself in the past), and the earlier
wartime experiences on which those memories are focussed. (As he
revises his story, Alex has one organisational matter to resolve: he needs
to make it a little clearer that the narrator (’I’), the dad who is addressed
above, and the second speaker, are one and the same person).
30
Scaffolded by his teacher, Alex has developed a descriptive language
that matches his theme and is apt in tone: ‘wistfully remembering;’ a
well-judged personification (‘grabbing at us with their prickly fingers’);
and what a teacher in another school called a ‘powerful verb’ is well
used too (‘jerked out of my memory’). His vocabulary is varied and
suits his theme; it is chiefly formal – as his story requires – but he
experiments effectively with a scattering of more colloquial words
(grabbing and grotty), and his sentence patterns are varied, not for
display, but to serve his story; in particular, they lead the reader
forward, and arouse expectations:
I gave a silent laugh remembering the good times we had together. And
the bad times.
At the surface level, Alex spells accurately, controls the conventions of
dialogue securely, and makes his dialogue seem convincingly speechlike. He distinguishes correctly between practice and practise, though –
like many adults – he has yet to grasp the difference between its and
it’s, and he uses lower case for dad when upper case (Dad) would be
better. Both minor errors are with conventions that may be eroding in
the wider world. The apostrophe is so widely mistaken that its misuse
has long had a nickname: ‘the greengrocer’s apostrophe.’ (McArthur,
1992). Alex could do with a comma after laugh, but uses commas to
excellent rhetorical effect in a touching passage where he captures the
moment of his evacuee’s original reception in Sussex:
Around me was a warm circle of love and I was
a pale, sickly boy from London right in the
middle of it. I smiled, the first smile since my
parents died.
None of this happened by chance. The
background to Alex’s lesson encapsulates
many of the strengths that this report has
highlighted (Case Study 5).
Non chronological writing
With the influence of genre theory from
Australia, combined with the Exeter
Extending Literacy (EXEL) project’s writing
frames (both of which have been given
additional impetus by the NLS), schools are
31
Case Study 5
text
Alex’s first draft: some matters of con
the close study of a literary
The class’s writing assignment arose from
•
text.
which Alex’s teacher has
The specific task was one of several in
s of story text. Recent
helped her pupils to explore different type
included stories with two
experiments with narrative form have
ts of view. Other recent
narrators, and a tale of contrasting poin
ic tales.
narratives have included mysteries and com
•
•
•
•
•
•
n over to writing – on the
The whole of the lesson’s time was give
above.
hybrid model of shared writing described
eded the drafting. The
Modelling and close textual discussion prec
composition as a part of
teacher shared a narrative text of her own
her lead-in to the task.
Objectives were explored and made explicit.
d: they were handled
Word and sentence level issues were raise
purpose of the text level
explicitly and with skill; they served the
selves the chief objectives
task, and arose from it, but were not them
of the assignment.
ks covering a period of
An examination of the class’s English boo
seven months shows that they have done:
ng, including a research
– prodigious amounts of extended writi
composed biographies
folder in which most of the class have
r;
of some 55 pages of closely written A4 pape
level exercises, but the
– few discrete word and sentence
has covered a wider
writing in the class’s ‘language books’
the NLS in the period
range of writing genres than required by
specified.
increasingly confident in finding ways forward with non-chronological
writing. Also deriving from the NLS’s planning schedules, there seems
to be a sharp increase in the amount of such writing that primary
schools now tackle willingly. Even when discrete language study seems
excessive – seldom a problem in the survey schools – the range, if not
always the amount of extended writing, is commonly secure.
32
Bridges into non-chronological writing were skilfully devised. They often
began with literature, as when a Y6 class was asked to make a comparison
between the book and film versions of The Secret Garden. Using writing
frames in subjects other than English helped too, as did ensuring that the
topics were interesting, sometimes even sensational (recount work on
tornadoes). Argument, in particular, was often well tackled; without being
patronising, the topics chosen had immediate relevance. Care was also
taken to feed debates with plentiful sources of evidence.
In addition to writing frames, which were widely adopted, pupils were
helped at the planning stage with the extensive use of graphical
approaches to generating and shaping ideas: mind maps; columns to
assemble comparisons, or to assist with the for and against elements of
an argument; grids; highlighting; storyboards; flow charts; ideas maps
(reformulating texts in diagrammatic form), and so on. In one school,
grids were used to help Y6 pupils to meet the challenge of making
comparative evaluations of two literary texts. The Birmingham schools
were strongly helped in this regard by the city’s Moving On Up
initiative, a co-operative project where the emphasis is on the reading
and composition of non-chronological texts as a bridge into secondary
education. The materials, devised together by primary and secondary
school teachers in the City, feature local issues and landmarks; their
well-conceived scheme has recently been revised in the light of further
experience and curriculum developments.
Case Study 6
Same but different: notemaking frame for
group work on a literary text; a comparison
of
Ruby
Word
character traits.
Emma
Evidence
Word
33
Evidence
Assessment, target-setting and planning
The teachers’ comments attached to the finished work of Lizzie and
Hugh are warm and appreciative; they are characteristic of much of the
good marking practice that was widely observed among the survey
schools. The award of a house point (HP), or the rubber stamped ‘very
good,’ were parts of a system of assessment, rewards, and targetsetting. Another school displayed an ‘excellence book’ in the foyer to
record examples of good work or progress.
Case Study 7
clear and have used
Very good Alice. You’ve made the story
ences by using connectives.
descriptive details. Try to extend your sent
• Wonderful description of the owl.
ription used. Well done.
• Excellent similes and some lovely desc
ng Zoe. Try to learn ‘everyone’
• This is very pleasing independent writi
and ‘little’.
4a Excellent (rubber stamp with
• P+O 4. Punc 4. Style 4. Spelling 4.n – this is a sound Level 4 story.
rosette). A really super effort Calla
Try to develop the ending.
3. Lots of full-stops missed out.
• P+O 3. Lively writing. PunctuationComplex conjunctions. Spelling 4.
Style 4. Expanded noun phrases.
•
There were some highly developed systems in the survey schools, and
the head teachers were emphatic that their systems had played an
important part in achieving, or maintaining high standards of writing.
The school assessment systems generally included several clear strands:
•
marking
•
record keeping
•
target-setting
•
reviews of targets and achievement
•
the direct involvement of the children.
At their most fully developed, the school assessment systems also
included elements of evaluation, in some cases, this involved the senior
management team in carrying out regular classroom visits. Termly
planning routines that were adjusted in the light of assessments and
34
evaluations were also a feature of these well-developed systems. Two
assessment practices that seemed to have a special relevance to the
improvement of writing were related: ‘evidence books’ and sets of
criteria that pupils were invited to apply when identifying their own
targets and progress.
Evidence books were used by three schools, two in Birmingham, and one
other West Midland school. They are exercise books that are reserved for
a writing assignment that is regularly and formally assessed against
National Curriculum criteria, commonly once every half term. In one
case, the books are A4 in format, and carried forward from year to year;
they provide a clear and attractively simple map of individual progress.
In every case, it is extended writing that is kept in the books, and in one
instance it is school policy that the writing sample shall always be a story.
The books are regularly used in discussions with each pupil, as part of
the schools’ cyclical review and target-setting procedures. They are often
to hand on parents’ evenings too. It was also clear that the pupils valued
and took good care of them; the books were seldom in poor condition.
Similar approaches, using different terms for the cumulative books of
work, were found in other schools too.
Case Study 8
What Progress Have I made in English
?
(Regent’s Park Primary School, Birmingh
am).
English
35
Case Study 9
Half term
Group Literacy Targets for the
same throughout a
• Keep the tense and subject the
piece of writing.
sentences
• Organise work correctly into
Tick when
achieved
My literacy targets
✓ ✓
ary
Use question marks when necess
s, not
Try to use a range of connective
just ‘and’ and ‘but’
ir
Learn the difference between the
and there
Criteria that could be used by pupils for monitoring their own progress
extended well beyond the three evidence book schools, so too did
stickers and inserts in children’s writing books with targets for the
forthcoming review period. It was plain that pupils were well aware of
their targets; and the teachers noted that their pupils were keen for
their progress to be noticed.
However, when their targets were selfselected, there was sometimes room for
helping pupils to give more attention to the
text level features in their own work.
Prompts that pointed in this direction were
also found. The list in Case Study 11 was
used for evaluating writing samples in a
classroom discussion. It is only a small step
to applying it to one’s own work.
Literacy walls
The value of display as reward, as
celebration, and especially as a means of
providing a readership for writing, has
already been noted. In several survey
schools there was also a growth of literacy
walls; they were often changed regularly,
36
Case Study 10
WRITING TARGETS
Name
Class
Term
Working towards Level 5
•
My planning shows that I understand why
I am writing and who I
am writing for.
•
My planning shows that I know how the
writing should be laid out
on the page.
• My planning shows that I am choosing a genre type for my story.
• My writing develops a theme as well as a plot.
• My writing shows I can use paragraphs correctly.
• I understand how to use metaphors, similes and imagery.
• I can use different and interesting story openings and endings,
introductions and conclusions.
• I can interweave speech, actions and description in my stories.
• I can describe the thoughts and feelings of my characters.
• I can start sentences in interesting and varied ways.
• I can use simple and complex sentences to create effects.
• The vocabulary I use is chosen for effect.
• I remember who I am writing for and sometimes ‘talk to them’.
• I know how to use a greater range of punctuation and correctly use
it in my writing (commas for clauses
and brackets for aside
comments).
•
I have experimented with a non-linear time
-line and can confidently
use one in my writing.
to match the NLS’s termly schedules. Though they were frequently
associated with attractive stimuli (pictures, artefacts, new book
displays), they were not the same thing. They supplemented
and reinforced the class’s explicit literacy teaching. What they
provided were hints, tips, reminders, new words and key spellings,
advice about routines, and help with ways forward, especially with
writing. They were broader in compass than the word walls that
primary schools have long used, and which are starting to prove
helpful in secondary schools too. Many were ingenious and attractive.
37
The topics and points of focus of literacy walls varied widely and
included:
•
the forms and language of advertising;
•
synonyms for ‘said’: suggestions from the class written in their
own handwriting;
•
alternatives for ‘and’, similarly treated;
• newspaper story form analysed, with sample texts, arrows and labels;
•
the simile man;
• a writing prompts poster (before you start...; if it’s a story. . . ; if it’s nonfiction. . . ; while you are writing. . . ; when you have finished writing. . . ) ;
•
in one classroom the wall displayed:
– proof-reading marks
– handy hints for drafting and editing
– key features of persuasive writing
– model letter writing frame with balloon commentary
– story boards showing stages of narrative (opening paragraph,
setting and character, 2nd paragraph build-up and speech, 3rd
paragraph, problem; meanwhile, solving the problem; an
ending)
– homophones
– this week’s spellings
– spelling list – commonly mis-spelt words
– story writing connective idioms (later that day; within
moments; that night; after that)
– connectives for discussion and argument (one view is; Also,
some people think; in addition . . . )
– reminders of rules for singulars and plurals.
Trusting the Co-ordinator
In two schools the Language Co-ordinators not only carried the same
extensive responsibilities as all their colleagues in other schools, they
were accorded an unusual degree of trust, time and freedom to plan
and implement their language and literacy policies. Both were in newly
designated Beacon schools. In one, EAL speakers were in the majority,
in the other they were a small minority.
38
Case Study 11
ARE YOU LEVEL-HEADED?
•
•
•
Does the writing make good sense?
Is there a story being told?
Does the beginning have a description of
the setting and an introduction to the characters?
• Are there some interesting or exciting events in the middle?
• Is there some speech? – But not too much?
• Does the story end in a satisfactory way?
• Are the characters thoughts and feelings described?
• Is there lots of description?
• Does the length of the sentences vary?
• Has the writer used a variety of punctuation correctly?
Tick if you have spotted these:
paragraph indents _____ connectives ___
__ commas _____
colon _____ semi-colon _____ exclamati
on mark _____
Case Study 12
the children when formal
Story marking sheet that is shared with
assessments are applied
Character
Setting
Story
Punctuation
Marks
Purpose and organisation
Style
Punctuation
Style
Story
39
/35
Level:
/2l
/7
/7
Case Study 13
ip.
Value of display: reward and readersh
Regent’s Park School, Birmingham.
40
One of the two co-ordinators did not have a form of her own, or fixed
responsibilities for a given class. Her teaching duties were linked with
her monitoring: she taught the underachieving pupils in a range of
classes, in rotation, and according to her assessment evidence; pupils
with special needs were helped under different arrangements by other
staff. She had non-contact time for curriculum planning, and for
monitoring and record keeping. In the other school, the Co-ordinator
had similarly weighty responsibilities, including for the appointment of
new staff: she short-listed; she also observed the literacy teaching of
candidates in their own schools before appointment, and assisted at
their interviews. She had evaluation duties that entailed visiting other
English classrooms, and she co-ordinated the team-teaching that the
school uses extensively for English in Key Stage 2.
Both schools had writing gaps of 10 points or less at the end of Key
Stage 2. In particular, planning was thorough and planned programmes
were coherently delivered in all classes. And in both, the English
programme was lively, innovative and effective. Among their English
teaching practices, were the following:
•
inventive ways of finding and suggesting readerships for pupils’
writing;
•
a strong emphasis on team teaching in Key Stage 2 (plans and
materials shared);
•
a growing emphasis on the use of drama as a prelude to writing;
•
explicit attention to children’s different learning styles;
•
high standards of display;
•
well chosen multi-cultural texts;
•
the auditing of all first languages spoken by new pupils;
•
regularly re-appraising the school’s library and language
resourcing;
•
ensuring that children play an explicit role in tracking their own
progress in English;
•
rigorous statistical analyses identifying
– children’s targets
– ‘coasting’ and underachieving pupils.
41
Case Study 14
From a Literacy Wall
Standard English
and you need to use it for most
Is good for speaking in formal situations,
of your writing.
• I came
• We were
• I did
• You were
• I wrote . . .
• They were
Crawley Dialect
with friends in the playground.
Is good for speaking to your family, and
make your characters use it.
When you are writing a story, you can also
t they are like.
This helps the reader to get a feel for wha
• She/he was
• I done my homework
• They was
• You done
• Wicked!
• We done
• Can you think of any more?
• I writ it
• You writ
It would be easy to go on. It was plain, that the head teachers of both
schools had appreciated the value of appointing well and trusting
their judgments.
An approach to EAL
This school has always seen bilingualism as an asset, not a problem
This is not a report on the teaching of English as an additional
language, but EAL was a significant issue for 23% of the survey’s
pupils. A number of strands of practice appeared especially supportive
of EAL pupils, and of their writing; they were particularly clear in the
practice of the Beacon School from which the chief evidence for this
paragraph is drawn. They could not be investigated in detail, but the
strands are worth sharing in outline.
Perhaps the most important strand concerned attitudes: it is well
sounded in the statement shown above, which was prominently
displayed. It was an attitude that was both reflected in and supported
by the presence of a number of EAL speakers on the staff, including an
Advanced Skills teacher.
The school was similarly clear and explicit in seeing talk as the key to
progress in English and in literacy. Talk was given a prominent place in
42
all classwork, and this included talk in the children’s first languages.
Literacy lessons that began with whole class work in English developed
and confirmed pupils’ understandings by encouraging them to discuss
and carry their work forward through group talk in their home
languages. And within each class, pupils were grouped by their first
languages for just such consolidating talk. The concluding plenary
sessions of a literacy lesson were conducted, once again, in English,
and the written work that was produced was in English too.
Reading materials were attractive and well chosen. In addition to the
range that is common in most British classrooms, dual language texts
were made available, and appropriate speakers were often available to
read them. Care was taken to provide and display texts from a wide and
relevant range of languages and cultures. In short, pupils’ first
languages were both valued and respected, and used as bridges into
written work in English.
Parents
With direct involvement (as with the Breakthrough approaches above),
and indirect, parents were often skilfully brought on board to support
writing. One school extends its target-setting arrangements to the
public domain: parents are invited to regular meetings where the
term’s targets for their child’s year group are shared with them. They
are advised on ways in which they can help at home, and attendance
is reported to be good. Another school regularly sends home flowcharts that show the work that will be covered in the forthcoming term.
In pursuit of the writing improvements that OFSTED had called for,
another employs a ‘Quality Homework’ policy; this has few ‘finishingoff’ assignments, and a number of tasks are designed specifically to
involve the parents as resources. Combining this with a range of other
initiatives, the school has gained 24 points in writing in three years.
A school, located in a large and challenging housing estate, but with
writing achievements that are 24 points above the national average
(and a writing gap of no more than three points), has found parental
involvement increasing in recent years. Parents are encouraged to bring
Key Stage 1 children into the classroom in the mornings, and collect
them from there at the end of the day. By this informal means homeschool contacts have increased. This was the school where classes were
writing letters to take home to brief their parents about the
forthcoming outing. Classroom observation also showed that children
were readily helped to take account of parental readerships for their
writing: references to evening presentations, and parents as the
envisaged readers, were an unforced and well-judged element in much
of the teaching that was seen.
43
Conclusion
Explicitness in English teaching
It was characteristic of the survey schools that teaching quality was
high: several had recently had favourable OFSTED inspections, three
had been accorded Beacon School status. Effective classroom
management, planning, pace, resourcing, good order and good
relationships, were widespread.
All the schools had also been helped by the NLS. In particular, the
Strategy’s planning schedules had supported them in covering the
range of the National Curriculum’s content. The NLS had also raised
the profile of the technicalities of language study: the terminology, the
forms and structures of different writing genres (recount, report,
explanation, procedural writing, persuasion, discussion), and so on.
This helped teachers to be unflinchingly explicit, for example, in using
metalanguage. This was reflected in their weekly planners, their day-today practice, their literacy walls, and their pupils’ ready use of
metalanguage for themselves. In the survey schools, this new degree of
specificity usually rested on the secure foundation of many years of
effective practice. It was commonly delivered too in the context of clear
convictions about how children learn best.
They did more
In short, the children in the survey schools
were offered the best of both worlds: an
existing diet of purposeful language use and
rich language experiences – reading in
particular – was further enriched by that
close attention to the overarching structures,
concepts and technical details which the
NLS has helped schools to be more explicit
about.
The thrust of the survey evidence is that
schools that were achieving significantly
higher than average standards in writing –
the most challenging language mode – did
much more than required. It was these
‘extras’ that were specially significant in the
children’s writing achievements. Indeed, it is
44
likely that it was because such aspects of policy and practice were
already secure that these schools were so well placed to handle the
specificites of the NLS. These essential extras are often the most elusive
and challenging to deliver. The survey evidence suggests that they
encompass:
•
effective leadership and management;
•
a passion for language and literature;
•
the professional confidence to:
– place text level work at the centre of language policy and
practice
– provide extended time for extended writing
– ensure that writing activities are always purposeful
– ensure that written work is fed by:
– copious and rich experiences of reading
– the study of whole texts, including novels
– a wide range of enriching curricular and extra-curricular
experiences
– ensure that written work is supported by explicit and
circumspect attention to:
– organisation and structure
– word and sentence level features;
•
effective policies for making links between the approaches and
techniques used in English and the written work required in other
subjects;
•
resourcefulness in developing children’s thinking and planning
skills;
•
rigorous and inclusive systems for assessment, target setting and
monitoring (in which pupils play an active part);
•
the involvement of parents in children’s learning.
45
References
Anderson, B., Bonthrone, D., Neale, D., Van Ryne, F., and
Wallis-Reep, L. (1999), Books Worth Reading, Worthing: Beaver Print
and Publicity.
Barrs, M., and Cork, V. (2001), The Reader in the Writer: The links
between the study of literature and writing development at Key Stage 2,
London: Centre for Language in Primary Education.
Barton, D. (1994), Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written
Language, Oxford: Blackwell.
Brooks, G., Gorman, T., Harman, J., and Wilkin, A. (1996), Family
Literacy Works, London: The Basic Skills Agency.
Buchan, D. (1972), The Ballad and the Folk, East Linton: Tuckwell Press
(1997 reprint).
Bynner, J., and Parsons, S. (1997), It Doesn’t Get Any Better: The Impact
of Poor Basic Skills on the Lives of 37 Year Olds, London: The Basic Skills
Agency.
DfEE, (1998), The National Literacy Strategy: Framework for Teaching,
London: Department for Education and Employment.
DfEE, (2000), Grammar for Writing, London: Department for
Education and Employment.
Eliot,T. (1944), Four Quartets, London: Faber.
Frater, G. (1997), Improving Boys’ Literacy, London: The Basic Skills
Agency.
Frater, G. (2000a), Securing Boys’ Literacy, London: The Basic Skills
Agency.
Frater, G. (2000b), ‘Observed in Practice: English in the National
Literacy Strategy,’ Reading, 34:3,107-112.
Halliday, M., ‘Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning’ in Graddol, D.,
and Boyd Barrett, O. eds. (1994), Media Texts: Authors and Readers,
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Holmes, J. (1992), An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, London:
Longman.
Lord, A., (1960), The Singer of Tales, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press (2000 reprint).
46
McArthur, T. (1992), The Oxford Companion to the English Language,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OFSTED, (2000), The National Literacy Strategy: The Second Year,
London: Office for Standards in Education.
Ong, W. (1982), Orality and Literacy, London: Routledge.
QCA, (1998), Can Do Better: Raising Boys’ Achievements in English,
London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
Sharples, M. (1999), How We Write, London: Routledge.
Smith, F. (1982), Writing and the Writer, London: Heinemann.
Smith, S. ‘Professional Education’ (1809) in The Works of the Reverend
Sydney Smith, (1845), vol 1, London: Longman.
Sylva, K. and Hurry, J. (1995), The Effectiveness of Reading Recovery and
Phonological Training for Children with Reading Problems, London: The
School Curriculum and Assessment Authority.
47
ANNEX 1
Participating schools
Bradshaw Primary School, Calderdale
Braintcroft Primary School, London Borough of Brent
Chivenor Primary School, Birmingham
Fishbourne Primary School, West Sussex
Garway Primary School, Hereford
Harwood Hill Primary School, Hertfordshire
Leechpool Primary School, West Sussex
Northview Primary School, London Borough of Brent*
William Ransom Primary School, Hertfordshire
Regent’s Park Primary School, Birmingham*
St Laurence Primary School, Shropshire
St Margaret’s CE First and Middle School, West Sussex
St Patrick’s RC Primary School, Telford and Wrekin
St Peter’s CE Primary School, Telford and Wrekin
Whitbourne Primary School, Hereford
Tysoe Primary School, Warwickshire
York Meade Primary School, Hertfordshire
Ancillary visits
Estcots Primary School, West Sussex
Vale First and Middle School, West Sussex*
*Beacon Schools
48
ANNEX 2
Some of writing’s challenges
The following is a shortened and revised version of the article ‘Why has
writing become an issue?’ that Graham Frater wrote for the Autumn
2000 issue of Basic Skills, published by the Agency.
Harder than speaking and reading
Deprived of a hearer, of the use of gesture, intonation and facial
expression, the writer must establish topic, context, tone and meaning
on the page (or screen) alone, and must catch and hold our interest.
Except by intention, ambiguity must be avoided, yet no immediate
feedback (‘know what I mean?’) may be sought, or given. Plainly,
writing is much tougher than talking.
Moreover, writing demands much more than
reading’s response to the black marks on a
page. To generate a text, requires a higher
degree of mastery: the codes and systems
that reading and writing share must be
actively deployed and accurately controlled tougher still. These codes and systems
operate at a variety of levels simultaneously.
At word level, they involve the accurate
matching of sounds and letters, the selection
and formation of words, and the control of
spelling conventions. At sentence level,
grammar and punctuation must be
organised accurately. At text level come
matters of overall coherence, and the secure
matching of style and structure to a variety of
genres, contexts, readerships and purposes.
Little wonder that T.S. Eliot described writing as an ‘intolerable wrestle
with words and meanings’, that Walter Ong should see it as
demanding ‘exquisite circumspection’, or that writing should always
require a long apprenticeship. Progress may be measured by the
apprentices’ growing control of word and sentence level features, of the
range of genres they handle with assurance, and in the gradual
elimination from their writing of such entirely normal characteristics of
speech as repetition, redundancy and ellipsis.
49
Standard English
As if that were not enough, standard English intensifies the challenge.
The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) defines standard English as ‘The
language of public communication, distinguished from other forms of
English by its vocabulary and by rules and conventions of grammar,
spelling and punctuation’. This emphasises the written form; it is
written outcomes in standard English that most National Curriculum
subjects require for most of the time.
However, The Oxford Companion to the English Language also shows us
that ‘It is. . . usually agreed that standard English is a minority form’ (my
emphasis). Most children then, must learn to write in a dialect, or
form, that they do not normally use at home. While it may be the
dominant form of public communication, and of writing in particular,
it is not the spoken norm of most people. Standard English is the
spoken norm – and I do not intend to be political – of a privileged
minority; their children inevitably have a headstart in learning to
control the written word.
I do not for a moment dispute the importance standard English has
acquired over time; I suggest only that its dominant but minority status
helps to explain the writing gap. In turn, it serves to illustrate some of
the obligations that all teachers face, not English teachers alone.
The challenge of formality
Standard English may be written both
formally and informally – from legal writ, to
love letter, fax, or e-mail note. However, just
as formal situations may be daunting for any
of us – and they are probably meant to be –
so the formal end of the standard English
spectrum can pose extra challenges for
young writers. It is generally impersonal in
style, its vocabulary is likely to be abstract
and Latinate and its sentences can be long,
complex, and may use passive forms. It is
more formal usages that are often required
for those writing tasks – like argument and
reasoning – that many learners already find
formidable. The more formal the
requirements the higher the hurdles,
especially for habitual users of non-standard
forms. Though argument and reasoning may
50
be effectively conducted in non-standard English, especially in speech,
the repertoire of stylistic and structural features used in formal writing
are parts of a universal currency.
We cannot expect this repertoire to be absorbed incidentally. Its
features need to be explicitly taught by all teachers whose subjects
make use of the formal end of standard English.
Boys
And then there are boys: they seem to contribute disproportionately to
the writing gap. Nature and nurture are both involved. Girls seem to
acquire language more readily and at an earlier age than boys. In
addition, sociolinguists like Janet Holmes tell us that from a young age
in every social class – in Western societies at least – women tend to use
standard forms more than men, and men use more vernacular forms.
It is standard forms, of course, that are favoured by the National
Curriculum’s writing requirements. And QCA evidence confirms
classroom observation: it suggests that the control of written English
poses problems, especially of motivation, for about 50% of boys. Girls,
however, are more disposed to take an interest in the correctness and
presentation of their written work. Plainly, another challenge for
teachers.
Writing in school: a structural problem
This is why pupils ‘who often make a considerable figure at
school, so very often make no figure in the world. . . The test
established in the world is widely different from that established
in a place which is presumed to be a preparation for the world.’
(Smith, 1809, p.184).
Writing is essentially communicative, purposeful, and social (though
hardly sociable). It is generally done to get things done, and the writer
is usually self-motivated. Except, that is, in school. Schools have the
special drawback that, within their walls, writing is largely nonfunctional. In English in particular, we ask children to write for the
circular purpose of learning to write. Stamps are rarely put on
children’s letters, diaries are simulations offered up for marking, stories
are written for teachers, arguments on topical issues are seldom shown
to anyone who is really involved with the problems discussed. This
may be one reason for the special distaste that many boys seem to have
for writing.
51
To overcome this structural difficulty, one of the greatest challenges for
teachers is to invest school writing with a relevance and purpose that
learners can identify with, to invoke contexts that make sense to and
engage pupils. Fortunately, as this report has shown, it is a challenge
that many teachers meet with great success.
52
The Basic Skills Agency is the national development agency for basic
skills in England and Wales funded primarily for the Department for
Education and Skills and the Office of the Welsh Assembly. However,
we are an independent organisation and a company limited by
guarantee and a registered charity. We are a not-for-profit organisation.
Our Patron is Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal and our Chairman
is Garry Hawkes. The Director of the Agency is Alan Wells OBE.
The mission of the Basic Skills Agency is to contribute to:
❛ raising standards of basic skills in England and Wales.❜
We have two main aims.
1. To develop approaches that most effectively improve standards
of basic skills
2. To disseminate good practice
53
For further information contact:
The Basic Skills Agency, Commonwealth House,
1-19 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1NU
Tel: 020 7405 4017 • Fax: 020 7440 6626
email: enquiries@basic-skills.co.uk
www.basic-skills.co.uk
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Admail 524
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A1173
This publication relates to Elements 4,5,6,7,8 and 9 of the
Basic Skills Quality Mark for Primary Schools