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Approaches to Teaching Writing

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Approaches To Teaching Writing


Penmanship approach

Penmanship was primarily concerned with transcription—the actual act of writing—and required creating legible, precise, and sometimes exquisitely shaped letters on the page. Children practiced and imitated models from printed copybooks in order to learn how to write properly. Early learners first practiced single letters, then words, phrases, and finally paragraphs. Some teachers directed their classes to write letters together while giving verbal instructions, such as "Up, down, left curve, rapid" (Thornton, 1996). Even without actually creating letters, kids will occasionally practice writing by pushing and pulling the pencil across the paper. Regardless of the method used to teach handwriting, "writing" lessons focused more on copying than on creating new words.

Penmanship is important in improving students practical skills with writing. Being able to write clearly and accurately is very important for students even in an age where writing is done mainly on a keyboard. What are your thoughts on the penmanship approach?

Rules-Based approach

Children are taught how to write words and sentences correctly as part of rules-based training. It involves tasks like classifying words into parts of speech, locating sentence components like subjects and predicates, learning and using subject-verb agreement and pronoun usage norms, and honing punctuation, capitalization, and spelling skills. Sentence correction is a typical exercise. Teachers provide sentences with language errors and ask children to correct the mistakes. Students may also write original sentences for the purpose of practicing how to use language. Ok I will plea guilty to using this approach more often than I should have. Now that I know better I will definitely do better. Are you guys also guilty of abusing the rules-based approach?

For the process and genre approach I provided two videos that get straight to the point. I believe they will be very helpful in increasing your arsenal when instructing your students.

Process Approach

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zm6jRPf-Gk

Genre Approach

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xzYr6S7lus


Plan + Write Strategy

Highlighted by Ms. Quinn as the best approach to teaching writing and yet again she has provided "cheat codes" to teaching writing. It features the Gradual release of responsibility.

This strategy scaffolds students and builds them towards working on their own.

Here

1.     Pay attention to the prompt (this is to help students to fully consider the prompt – state and underline what they are being asked to write about)

2.     List the main ideas

3.     Add supporting ideas

4.     Number the major points (or ideas)

The second mnemonic, WRITE, helps students to continue the planning process while composing their essay.

1.     Work from your plan to develop your thesis statement 

2.     Remember your goals (goals include maintaining control of the topic, providing clear organization, etc – these goals should be provided to the student and student should select which goal they are working on)

3.     Include transition words (a list of transition words can be provided to the student)

4.     Try to use different kinds of sentences

5.     Exciting, interesting, million-dollar words

Risks:  It is important to remind students that these strategies are guides to help them improve upon their writing. Students must be careful when trying to use exciting, interesting, million-dollar words” to be certain that meaning is not lost.    

What do you guys think about the PLAN + WRITE Strategy?


Comments

  1. Jewel Lewis12:07

    The PLAN WRITE strategy was new to me but I am grateful for the opportunity to learn about it. The more strategies I learn, the more I realize how in depth the teaching of Language is able to go.

    ReplyDelete

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