How should we teach writing in primary schools?

Why are almost a quarter of children unable to write effectively when they leave primary school? It’s worth noting that this ‘quarter’ could well be much more than that, given that writing is teacher-assessed and overwhelmingly not moderated (and in the 25% of cases where it is done poorly).

Beyond our grasp?

In this blog, I want to explore how much of the current rate of failure might be down to how writing is taught in primary schools, and whether there is a better way of approaching the subject.

The following are lessons learned during 7 years of schooling, but some areas of writing are beyond our grasp.

Child B:

According to linguistics researchers Dan Slobin and Thomas Bever, children build up ‘canonical sentence schemas’ as they develop from birth

These schemas are ‘formed on the basis of linguistic experience and are used for recognising utterances as interpretable’
As words and sentences pour in to our consciousness, we become attuned to a variety of sentence forms and build a map in our long-term memories of the rules for putting sentences together

The Problem

Primary schemes of work impose a very high cognitive load on pupils

Most learning journeys, instead of moving from concrete to abstract, work the other way, from the big picture to the smaller details
We send our pupils into infinite outer space with no map and give them a huge shopping list of features that we’d like them to magically return with
Somehow, struggling writers in Year 4 are supposed to master these objectives in SIX LESSONS

Why are some children so much better than others?

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien contains 5,879 sentences

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has 5,179
If you’ve read even 50 similar-length books in your lifetime, that would bring your total to over a quarter of a million different sentences (and that doesn’t include anything outside of these books that you may have read or heard)
Over time, that’s a lot of exposure to the same words and sentence patterns, and a great number of them will have worked their way into your mental schema for sentence structure

How most writing units are structured

The model used in most primary schools is to plan a writing unit based on a particular writing genre, such as newspaper reports or narrative writing. The starting point for these units is very often a huge, abstract idea such as ‘plot development’ or ‘creating characters that the reader can empathize with’.

While novice and struggling writers are trying to wrap their heads around such mysteries, they are also expected to use a whole range of grammatical devices successfully in their writing.