Teaching Writing

At my job here in China, we begin with the basics of English—the alphabet, “What’s your name?”, “how old are you?”, “how are you?” “what is your favorite color/animal/food.”  Our curriculum goes pretty quickly, but usually the students learn well and with repetition can answer those questions and recite the alphabet by the time they finish the first two levels.  When they reach the third level, they have a good foundation for beginning to read and write in English.

Once in a while, however, there will be a couple of students that slip beneath the radar, and we discover that they don’t know the alphabet, and can’t answer simple questions.  When this happens, it is difficult to know what to do. We can’t hold them back, because their parents pay a lot of money for these classes. Individual attention is hard to give in these classroom settings. So what do we do?

Harris, Graham, and Mason (2006) address these concerns in their article Improving the Writing, Knowledge, and Motivation of Struggling Young Writers: Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development with and without Peer Support. They admit that “waiting until later grades to address literacy problems that have their origin in the primary grades has not been particularly successful” (p. 296). It is necessary, therefore, to be on constant watch for problems that may arise in the young grades, and especially to be vigilant about 
preventing these problems from arising.

So far in this blog, I have talked about reading and learning to read. This post, however, focuses on the need to write. One of the course questions is as follows:

“What is the difference between writing to communicate and writing to learn? How are both important?”

As I began reading this article, I was made to think of the process of writing to learn, and also learning to write. Much like learning to read, especially within a certain context or subject, learning to write can be a daunting task for young students. Different styles are appropriate for different subjects (think creative writing vs. history, or an academic research paper on Shakespeare vs. a school newspaper article). When students learn to read, they often mimic the style of writing they read, which is useful insofar as it is used correctly and creatively. Practicing copying writing styles is a helpful practice for students to become familiar with different types of writing and find what they are most comfortable with, often combining styles to create their own unique flavor.

Learning to write is one thing, but then we are faced with the idea of writing to learn. To me, this is an easy concept to understand because I have seen it work in my educational career. I studied English in college because that is what I felt most comfortable with. However, I still had to take those damnable General Education classes, consisting of things like biology and physical science. I had a hard time understanding concepts, no matter how vigilant I was at sitting in the front of the class, taking notes, and reading the textbook. It wasn’t until I had to write an essay or short paper that I was able to synthesize the information and it finally made sense. One of my favorite classes I took in college was Bio 100. There were no tests, but weekly article readings and essays. When I had to write about what I was reading, I learned it. I was able to make sense of the information and tell it in a way that made sense to me.


In my next post or two, I will continue to discuss this article, and the way it emphasizes improvements for teaching writing in classrooms.