Author: Damon Thomas

Last time on RWTL…

This is my final post in a series of three on how explicit grammar instruction is part of different ways of teaching writing. I’ve written about self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) and The Writing Revolution (TWR): two approaches that involve teaching grammar for sentence-level writing as a foundation for higher-order writing skills and processes. In these approaches, students receive important but limited explicit grammar instruction to help them write and combine grammatically accurate sentences with increasing fluency, which sets them up to engage in everything else these approaches have to offer. This post focuses on genre-based pedagogy, arguably the default way of teaching writing in Australia, which focuses instead on teaching grammar as choice for writing.

In this post, I’ll introduce genre-based pedagogy, mention how and why it got started in Australia, outline some of its main grammar-related ideas, and suggest how it differs from SRSD and TWR. To help write this post, I’ve drawn on information from my newly edited book (Teaching and learning primary English) and a PETAA short course I’m currently completing designed by Deb Myhill (Going Meta – Enabling rich talk about writing).

What was it like to learn to write in Australia in the 1980s?

In the 1980s, the Australian literacy environment was “basically one in which writing was not taught” (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 7). At that time, teaching practices in many countries, including Australia, were dominated by the whole language movement, which promoted child-centered ways of teaching and learning about writing (Rose, 2009). The teacher’s role was to encourage students’ self-directed learning as they wrote about personal experience. It was believed that teachers shouldn’t explicitly teach text creation processes or the linguistic and structural features of different written genres because learning to write would occur naturally under the right conditions (Derewianka, 2015).

As you might expect, this meant children from middle-class families, whose home literacy practices were similar to those valued at school, could expand on these practices over time to create a variety of written genres and get through school without too many issues. On the other hand, children with less exposure to these valued literate practices at home were stuck writing the same basic texts at school, usually observations and recounts (Rose, 2009). Many of these children went to school in lower socioeconomic areas. Unfortunately for them, the writing demands of secondary school and university require much more than basic observation and recount writing, so these children were unlikely to experience much success at school or to engage in higher education (whether they wanted to or not).

Even if their teachers were keen to offer more explicit guidance, most teachers didn’t have a way of talking about the language in written texts, or a metalanguage, to do so, which meant many students in the 1980s were never taught to write beyond basic texts about everyday experience.

It’s kind of criminal, now that you think about it.

Introducing genre-based pedagogy

In the same way that science of reading and systematic synthetic phonics advocates have spent decades pushing back against whole language on the reading side of the literacy coin, Australian educational linguists have promoted an explicit approach to teaching writing since the 1980s known as genre-based pedagogy.

Back then, Australian educational linguists including Jim Martin, Joan Rothery, and Mary Macken-Horarik used a model of language known as systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to investigate the types of writing done in schools. They discovered that primary school children were only writing a few basic genres and that teachers referred to most written texts as stories (even when these texts were written for different purposes and had many different features) (Martin & Rose, 2008).

Drawing on SFL, the linguists put together descriptions of important written genres that should be mastered throughout the primary school years if students were to meet the writing demands of the school curriculum, including recounts, narratives, descriptions, reports, procedures, explanations, expositions, and more (Derewianka, 2015, Rose & Martin, 2012). These descriptions were mass-produced and distributed to Australian teachers as part of influential projects including The Writing Project (early-mid-1980s), The Language and Social Power Project (mid-to-late-1980s), and The Write it Right Project (1990s), especially in New South Wales.

For the first time, Australian teachers were able to name a wide variety of written genres linked to different social purposes (for example, procedures are written to instruct readers on how to perform a task), as well as the typical stages the genres include (e.g., procedures typically start with an aim, followed by a list of equipment, and a series of steps for readers to follow). Such ideas are commonplace in Australian schools now, but in the 1980s and 1990s, this revolutionised the teaching of writing.

What ideas underpin genre-based pedagogy?

As Deb Myhill explains in the Going meta short course, three main theoretical perspectives on writing are cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic. Approaches based on the cognitive perspective focus on the thinking processes writers engage in while they write (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing). Approaches based on the sociocultural perspective focus on exploring the kinds of writing practices that are valued in different social contexts. And approaches based on the linguistic perspective focus on the mastery of language features in texts. In other words, cognitive approaches are writer-focused, sociocultural approaches are social context-focused, and linguistic approaches are text-focused.

Importantly, most popular ways of teaching writing take ideas from more than one of these perspectives. I have argued, for example, that SRSD and TWR are both sociocognitive, in that they combine ideas from the sociocultural and the cognitive to emphasise cognitive processes AND the writing of different genres that serve many social purposes. What these approaches are missing is a focus on the linguistic features of texts (beyond the select grammatical resources promoted for sentence-level writing).

By contrast, genre-based pedagogy can be described as a sociolinguistic approach. It involves explicitly teaching students about the many grammatical and structural features of written genres, which develops their metalinguistic understanding (i.e., their awareness of how language is used in writing). This means you can show them two pieces of writing and they can explain to you how the authors used different choices to achieve different effects. Want to make a character or a setting in a narrative seem scary? There are choices you can make to achieve this. Want to present logical arguments that build to a climax or arguments that tug at the reader’s heartstrings? There are other choices for that. Want to provide a set of instructions that are easy to follow? There are even more choices for that. In fact, the choices a writer can make in writing are essentially limitless. Teachers who follow genre-based pedagogy aim to explicitly teach their students about these choices so that they can: (1) analyse and understand how other writers achieve different effects in writing, and (2) be intentional about what and how they write.

Key ideas about genre-based pedagogy

In genre-based pedagogy, written genres are clustered into three broad families, referred to as genres that engage (e.g., recounts, narratives), genres that inform (e.g., explanations, reports), and genres that evaluate (e.g., arguments and responses) (Rose & Martin, 2012). Genres are distinguished by their structural and linguistic features, which contribute to meeting their social purposes.

Structural features

The main structural features taught in genre-based pedagogy are text stages and text phases. Briefly, stages are the relatively fixed parts or sections of a text. A basic narrative, for example, includes an orientation stage, then a complication, then a resolution. Phases are the more flexible structural units that make up stages. Within the orientation stage of a narrative, a writer may choose to begin with a characters phase, a settings phase, a foregrounding of the problem phase, or several other options.

To use an argumentative/persuasive writing example, analytical expositions typically begin with a thesis stage, followed by a series of argument stages, and conclude with a reinforcement of the thesis stage. We can zoom further into the text’s structure by looking at the phases that make up these stages. For instance, each argument stage is often made up by phases that make the well-known PEEL acronym (i.e., Point, Elaboration, Evidence, and Linking statement). As an aside, the mnemonics taught through the SRSD approach are often focused on this phase level of genres.

Most Australian primary school teachers have access to genre-based pedagogy resources that make clear the stages and phases of the most important written genres of schooling. Taking this approach involves teachers and students investigating how and why written genres are structured in particular ways as they identify the stages and phases that make up and enable texts to achieve their social purposes (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).

Linguistic features

But that’s enough about structural features; what we’re really here for is learning about the place of grammar in genre-based pedagogy. Space does not permit me to give a full account of the many grammatical features taught through genre-based pedagogy, but I will introduce three ideas that allow you to do quite a lot.

While the model of language that underpins genre-based pedagogy (SFL) allows you to pinpoint the grammatical form and function of any word in a text, it’s often more useful to focus on how words function together in groups to express processes (what’s happening in a clause), participants (who or what is taking part in a process), or circumstances (when, where, how, or why a process occurs). Processes, participants, and circumstances are introduced in the Australian Curriculum: English in Year 1. In the following simple sentence…

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

… we can see examples of a process (jumped), a participant (The quick brown fox), and a circumstance (over the lazy dog). A clause will usually only involve one process, and I know ‘jumped’ is the process in this sentence because it’s the word that functions to tell me ‘the happening’. When pointing this out to children, teachers followed genre-based pedagogy would highlight or write it green (as is the custom in this approach). I know that ‘The quick brown fox’ is a participant because it functions to tell me ‘what’ jumped over the lazy dog, and any ‘who’ or ‘what’ will be a participant. This word group (and any other participant) would be highlighted red. And I know that ‘over the lazy dog’ is a circumstance because it tells me ‘where’ the quick brown fox jumped. Any ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’, or ‘why’ will be a circumstance. This would be highlighted blue.

The great thing about this functional grammar is that it’s based on the meanings contributed by words and word groups in a clause, rather than the arbitrary names of traditional grammatical forms. But the functions also help us to work out grammatical forms when we need to. For instance, every word group that functions as a process will be realised by a verb group. Participants are usually noun groups (as in the above example), but they can also be realised by adjectives (as in, The fox was crafty). And circumstances are almost always realised by either prepositional phrases (if they include a preposition (e.g., over) followed by a noun group (e.g., the lazy dog)) or an adverb (e.g., slowly).

It’s your turn to have a go now with the following example:

The platypus swam in the quiet stream.

The first thing to do is to find the process/verb group at the heart of the clause. We can find it by asking the question, “What word tells me the happening?” As I hope you would agree, the thing that’s happening here is swimming, so I can highlight the word ‘swam’ green.

The platypus swam in the quiet stream.

Next, I can look at the other words and consider what they’re telling me about ‘swam’. If they tell me ‘who’ or ‘what’ swam, they will be a participant. If they tell me ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how’, or ‘why’ this swimming occurred, they will be a circumstance.

Assuming you’ve had a quick go, we can say that ‘The platypus’ tells me ‘what’ swam, so this word group (a noun group) is functioning as a participant and can be highlighted red. Lucky last, ‘in the quiet stream’ tells me ‘where’ the platypus swam, so it’s functioning as a circumstance of place and can be highlighted blue.

The platypus swam in the quiet stream.

Once these word groups have been identified and highlighted, it’s possible to think and talk about the choices that have been made by the writer, in terms of what they’ve included in the word groups and the order or sequence of word groups in the sentence. This is where you should consider what type of text you’re writing and the intended audience. Let’s imagine this is part of a narrative text, which has the social purpose of entertaining readers. To give them more insight into this platypus character, it would be a useful choice to expand the noun group. I might decide to do this by adding two adjectives before the noun, one functioning as an evaluative describer (cheeky) and one as a factual describer (young), like so:

The cheeky young platypus swam in the quiet stream.

This already sounds better to me, but there are still other choices I could make to improve this sentence for the purpose of narrative writing. For instance, I might like to add more circumstantial detail by writing ‘how’ the platypus swam. To achieve this, I could add in an adverb after ‘swam’, functioning as a circumstance of manner:

The cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream.

What else might I want to add to this sentence to more effectively entertain readers? How about telling readers ‘when’ this swimming happened? I could achieve this by adding another prepositional phrase, this time functioning as a circumstance of time. I’ll add it to the start:

After a morning sleep, the cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream.

Depending on the phase and stage of the text I’m writing, it might make sense to write a longer sentence like this, but at other times, I might not want to add in quite so much detail. I might think about whether starting with a prepositional phrase like this is the best choice, or if it might be better in this context to start another way. The sentence could be written several ways:

The cheeky young platypus swam happily / in the quiet stream / after a morning sleep.

In the quiet stream, / after a morning sleep, the cheeky young platypus happily swam.

Happily the cheeky young platypus swam after a morning sleep / in the quiet stream.

None of these choices are necessarily right or wrong but they do achieve slightly different effects, and this should influence whether you make them or not while writing. Importantly, it’s only when the teacher and students have sufficient metalinguistic understanding (i.e., knowledge about how language works) and a shared metalanguage (i.e., a language for talking about language) that these kinds of choices can be talked about, understood, and justified explicitly.

We can also compare the choices made in the platypus sentence above with the following sentence from a completely different written genre: a procedure.

Mix the wet and dry ingredients carefully.

See how this instruction begins with the verb ‘Mix’. This kind of grammatical choice makes good sense in a procedure because the social purpose is to instruct readers to achieve an outcome as efficiently as possible. The most important thing here is for them to know what to do next, so we typically start such instructions with a verb that tells us the action. By contrast, you would rarely see a verb starting a clause in a narrative text because it serves a different social purpose (i.e., entertaining readers). Every written genre taught through genre-based pedagogy has well-defined linguistic features that go far beyond the simple examples presented here.

When taught well, genre-based pedagogy allows teachers and students to investigate the linguistic and structural choices of texts valued in their context (e.g., award-winning picture books and novels, speeches, newspaper articles, etc.). By systematically unpacking how their favourite authors make writing choices that entertain, persuade, and/or inform, students comprehend and compose texts more effectively. Yet despite this promise, it’s important to consider a couple of challenges that have slowed the uptake of genre-based pedagogy in classrooms internationally.

The cost of admission: Personal knowledge about language

While teaching students to make more informed, intentional language choices when writing should sound appealing to any teacher, this requires teachers to have strong personal metalinguistic understandings of linguistic and structural features of whatever genre they wish to teach. As Matruglio (2019) explained, the very large and detailed architecture of language that underpins genre-based pedagogy (SFL) is both a benefit and a problem, since this impacts how accessible the approach is to teachers and students. Many teachers who are expected by curriculum documents like the Australian Curriculum: English to teach genre-based pedagogy have struggled to do so because they themselves never learnt about the many grammatical forms and functions in their own schooling or teacher training.

A number of projects have sought to develop teachers’ and students’ metalinguistic understandings (e.g., Humphrey & Macnaught, 2016; Macken-Horarik et al., 2011; Myhill et al., 2018) with encouraging outcomes. But since teachers come from unique backgrounds and have different preexisting knowledge bases and motivations, some have found it easier than others to pick up the nuances of genre-based pedagogy (Matruglio, 2020).

A further challenge relates to genre pedagogy’s complete lack of attention on cognitive processes (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, etc.). As found by Graham et al. (2018) and many others, the explicit teaching of writing processes is strongly associated with improved learning outcomes and attitudes about writing. Because genre-based pedagogy is a sociolinguistic approach, it is mainly focused with the products of writing that achieve social purposes in different contexts (this is why it’s important for all teachers to know about the three theoretical perspectives on writing and to consider how they underpin the different approaches used in classrooms every day).

There is yet to be a truly integrated, mainstream approach that combines ideas from the cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic perspectives in a relatively equal way. This means teachers need to deal with the limitations of the approaches that are currently available. Fortunately, teachers are very good at this kind of thing.

Comparing how SRSD, TWR, and genre-based pedagogy deal with grammar

	SRSD	TWR	Genre-based pedagogy
Theoretical underpinning	Sociocognitive	Sociocognitive	Sociolinguistic
Focus for grammar	Sentence-level writing	Sentence-level writing	Choice for all writing
Explicitness about grammar	Low (need for greater clarity about the linguistic features to be taught)	Medium (select linguistic features promoted strongly)	High (comprehensive range of linguistic features taught)
Sequencing of grammar and genres	Grammar taught with genres from the start	Grammar taught for sentence writing first. Genres introduced once sentences are mastered	Grammar taught with genres from the start
Prerequisite teacher knowledge about language	Low	Low	High
Compatibility with Australian education policies (e.g., Aus Curric, NAPLAN)	Medium (focus on genres from the start is a good match, but lack of clarity about grammar may be problematic)	Low (singular focus on sentence-level writing in early-middle primary may work against Aus policy docs)	High (Aus policy docs specifically informed by this approach)

In a sense, genre-based pedagogy says, give them the whole language toolkit, every possible grammatical and structural choice, pointing out when different choices help writers achieve the purposes of different genres. TWR replies, “The whole toolkit, are you serious? Don’t confuse the poor children; start at the sentence level and let their oral language skills do all the grammatical lifting without them realising it.” And then SRSD pipes up, “Well, you’re both kind of right and kind of wrong. We should focus on genres from the start, but grammar is only one small part of the writing picture.”

Where to find out more about genre-based pedagogy

When led by teachers who don’t have a strong personal knowledge about language, genre-based pedagogy can be overly formulaic and focused on simple text stages. Fortunately, there are many avenues for learning about grammar and genres in Australia and elsewhere.

As mentioned in a recent Twitter thread, I’m currently completing a short course through PETAA College and delivered by Deb Myhill on metalinguistic understanding. The course explains what is meant by metalinguistic understanding, and how to plan writing lessons that help students learn about language in existing texts and use it in their own writing. PETAA regularly offers similar short courses that can get you started if you wish to know and teach more about how language works in different kinds of written genres.

A chapter in Teaching and learning primary English I wrote with Sally Humphrey is dedicated to written genres. In it, we go over the stages and phases of several important school genres and explain when they should be taught (e.g., early, middle, or upper primary school). Sally and I also wrote another chapter dedicated to the fundamentals of functional and traditional grammar that every Australian primary school teacher is expected to teach from Year 1.

If you really want to take a deep dive into grammar, a great text I’ve used for a few years with pre-service teachers at the University of Tasmania is Grammar and meaning by Humphrey, Droga, and Feez. A similar text that has been popular in Australian schools for many years is Beverly Derwianka’s A new grammar companion, which is also a very useful, practical guide to grammar and genres.

Next time on RWTL

Well, that’s all I’m going to say about grammar for a little while. Next time, I’m going to shift gears quite dramatically to write a post in response to the recent Roaring back speech from Federal Minister for Education and Youth Alan Tudge. And I can promise it will have nothing to do with the draft history curriculum!

How important do you think it is for students and teachers to understand and talk about how grammar works in texts? If a student can write a narrative or persuasive text well, does it matter if they can’t explain why it’s effective, or why another text may be more or less effective? Should students be taught grammar explicitly, as the Australian Curriculum expects teachers to do from Year 1, or might this be an unnecessary part of becoming a writer? Join the discussion about this on Twitter or leave a comment below.

References

Derewianka, B. (2015). The contribution of genre theory to literacy education in Australia. In J. Turbill, G. Barton, & C. Brock (Eds.), Teaching writing in today’s classrooms: Looking back to look forward (69-86). ALEA.

Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2018). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch

Humphrey, S., & Macnaught, L. (2016). Developing teachers’ professional knowledge of language for discipline literacy instruction. In H. de Silva Joyce (Ed.), Language at work in social contexts: Analysing language use in work, educational, medical and museum contexts (pp. 68-87). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. Equinox.

Matruglio, E. (2019). Beating the bamboozle: Literacy pedagogy design and the technicality of SFL. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2018v44n4.1

Matruglio, E. (2020). What two teachers took up: Metalanguage, pedagogy and potentials for long-term change. Language and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2020.1825477

Myhill, D. S., Jones, S. M., & Lines, H. (2018). Supporting less proficient writers through linguistically aware teaching. Language and Education, 32(4), 333-349. https://www.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2018.1438468

Rose, D., & Martin, J. R. (2012). Learning to write, reading to learning: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney School. Equinox.

Rose, D. (2009). Writing as linguistic mastery: The development of genre-based literacy pedagogy. In D. Myhill, D. Beard, M. Nystrand & J. Riley (Eds.), Handbook of writing development (pp. 151-166). Sage.

Last time on RWTL…

In my last post, I introduced self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) as a way to teach writing that’s supported by more than 100 experimental and quasi-experimental studies. A key part of SRSD is teaching children to write and combine grammatically accurate sentences with increasing fluency. Achieving this in the early years of primary school frees up cognitive resources for them to focus on the many higher-order writing skills, mnemonics, and strategies (cognitive, genre, and self-regulation) taught as part of SRSD throughout the school years (Graham et al., 2018). I described this approach to grammar (and writing more widely) as sociocognitive, in that it gives attention to both the cognitive and social elements of writing. The emphasis on grammar in SRSD is important but limited.

Another way to teach writing that has become quite popular lately in Australian schools is Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s (2017) The Writing Revolution (TWR). TWR treats grammar quite similarly to SRSD, in that it recommends teaching a select set of grammatical features explicitly to help children write and combine sentences. There are also some key differences to keep in mind. Before we explore the set of grammatical features taught explicitly in TWR, let’s first look at some key ideas of this approach.

NOTE: Because I couldn’t locate any research that has investigated the effectiveness of TWR, I’ve had to draw directly on the TWR book for the information in this post, as well as the notes I took as I completed a short course in TWR in early 2021. If you value evidence-based practices, it might pay to wait until TWR is evaluated by a decent number of independent empirical studies before using it as your main approach to teaching writing.

What is The Writing Revolution?

Hochman and Wexler describe TWR as a method of teaching content as much as it is a method of teaching writing. They suggest teachers should not have a separate writing block or writing curriculum, but should instead weave the TWR strategies into their existing curriculum and instruction. In the authors’ words, “The Writing revolution aims to break the writing process down into manageable chunks and have students practice those chunks repeatedly, while also learning content” (p. 7). Right away then, this hints at TWR being designed in a slightly different way to other approaches.

The book’s content can be split into three main stages or parts: sentence-level writing, single paragraph writing, and multiple paragraph writing and full compositions. If there’s interest, I’d be happy to unpack the intricacies of each stage of TWR, but in this introductory post, I’ll focus on its approach to sentence-level writing since this is where it includes explicit grammar teaching.

(Image ref: The Hochman Method | The Writing Revolution)

Sentence-level writing in TWR

TWR gives teachers several activities to guide students to write complete sentences, vary their structure, and use complex vocabulary in content area teaching. This comes before other supports for longer forms of writing. Importantly, what students write sentences about and how they write them is determined by the content area, rather than from any notion of genre or text type. This sets TWR apart from SRSD or genre-based pedagogy, which we’ll explore in the next post.

Because of its exclusive focus on sentence-level writing in the first stage of the method, there is a risk that teachers and students may spend longer than necessary (i.e., several years of primary school) going over the same limited set of strategies. For this reason, I’d suggest being mindful of the actual end goal of TWR: assisting students to write a variety of longer-form written genres to suit a variety of social purposes. While the sentence-level strategies are useful to teach and return to recursively over time, don’t stop at sentences, especially in upper primary and secondary school contexts, or you’ll be missing the best of what TWR has to offer.

TWR and the teaching of grammar

Hochman and Wexler (2017) argued that “grammar is best taught in the context of student writing” (p. 8). Proponents of genre-based pedagogy (like Beverly Derewianka, David Rose, Sally Humphrey, and many others) would make the same claim. But the way TWR suggests teaching grammar in context is very different to the genre-based pedagogy approach.

While I can see several obvious grammatical features that are explicitly taught in TWR, Hochman and Wexler stress a number of times that teachers shouldn’t teach developing writers a rich metalanguage (in other words, a language for talking and reasoning about language choices). Instead, they argue that teaching children to combine simple sentences into complex sentences is enough to teach what they consider to be the important parts of grammar. This approach “eliminates the need to devote mental energy to memorizing and remembering grammatical terms” (p. 15). This would include things like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions on the traditional grammar side, or processes, participants, and circumstances on the functional grammar side.

This is a controversial idea, especially in Australia where these grammatical terms are explicitly mentioned in the content descriptions of the Australian Curriculum: English.

TWR’s love hate relationship with grammar

Hochman and Wexler suggest that rather than using technical grammatical terms that may confuse students, teachers should simply give examples of sentences that use these words. But in many places throughout the book, TWR doesn’t ignore all grammatical terms; it includes a range of sentence writing activities that require teachers and students to know the names and uses of quite a few grammatical features. With this in mind, let’s look at a summary of all the sentence-level writing strategies included in TWR and we’ll spot some grammatical features along the way.

Comparing the emphasis on grammar in SRSD and TWR

As I hope this post makes clear, TWR’s take on grammar is similar in some ways to that of SRSD: teach a select range of grammatical features explicitly to strengthen sentence-level writing. Where I think they differ is in explicitness and sequencing.

1. Explicitness about grammatical features

The authors of TWR make it crystal clear which grammatical features they believe matter for writing, what they look like in writing, and the order in which they should be taught. They have produced various classroom resources highlighting these features for both teachers and students, and dedicate many pages of their book to outlining what the teaching of sentence-level writing should look like in practice. Assuming these are actually the grammatical features that matter, it wouldn’t take any primary school teacher long to start teaching grammar for sentence-level writing with TWR.

By contrast, it was less simple to identify foundational grammatical features in the SRSD literature, possibly because grammar is not as strongly foregrounded in SRSD teaching (which has many other things going on). Several times I came across broad suggestions in SRSD papers and reports to teach the text features and syntactical combinations of different genres, and to help students emulate the features of effective writing, but what these features and syntactical combinations are was usually not discussed. This is not to say that SRSD doesn’t have any focus on grammar teaching (see my last post for more on where grammar plays an important role); it’s just not as explicit about grammar as TWR.

2. Sequence of teaching

One of the most unique (and controversial) ideas about TWR is the claim that teachers should only teach children to write sentences when they’re initially learning to write. While the authors do suggest the need for flexibility and teacher judgement in terms of when to move from one stage of TWR to the next, the book broadly suggests that sentence-level writing should be the main focus of writing instruction for students in the early and middle primary years, or up to around Year 4. I haven’t come across any research to suggest students should start with sentences rather than smaller building blocks like grammar or larger genre structures, but Hochman and Wexler (2017) offer the following seemingly reasonable justification for this:

A writer who can’t compose a decent sentence will never produce a decent essay-or even a decent paragraph. And if students are still struggling to write sentences, they have less brain power available to do the careful planning that writing a good paragraph or composition requires. (p. 10)

Hochman and Wexler suggest treating these sentence-level strategies recursively: “You’ll want to keep moving through your curricular sequence, bringing previous strategies into your instruction and using them alongside others as the content becomes more challenging” (p. 219).

Several of these sentence-level activities (e.g., appositives, sentence types, subordinating conjunctions) are drawn on for different effects in more advanced TWR tasks such as creating a multiple-paragraph outline for a full composition. For this reason, Hochman and Wexler argue that all students being introduced to TWR should initially learn the sentence-level strategies and proceed through the sequence in order. This means any teacher interested in using TWR’s strategies in classrooms will require knowledge of the grammatical features listed above.

The idea that you should only focus on sentence-level writing until this is mastered might work against the requirements of curriculum documents like the Australian Curriculum: English (and possibly the Common Core State Standards in the US), which require teachers to introduce students to the purposes and structures of a variety of written genres from the first year of primary school (i.e., Foundation).

A singular focus on sentence-level writing also doesn’t recognise that the choices students make when writing sentences are influenced by several factors (e.g., the genre they are writing, the purpose of writing, for whom they are writing, etc.). The risk here is that children who learn to write with TWR will be very strong at writing sentences in a certain way most suited to informative or factual texts, but may struggle more than the typical student when required to write sentences for other kinds of texts like narratives or procedures.

This is not to say that all children should be tasked with writing long compositions with multiple paragraphs from the very beginning of school, even before they can write a sentence! Rather, I’m suggesting that young children are quite capable of thinking and talking about different reasons for communicating and that people use language (oral, written, visual) for many purposes every day. This is how the Australian Curriculum: English is designed, and it seems to clash slightly with the singular focus on sentence-level writing in the first stage of TWR.

Next time on RWTL…

SRSD and TWR provide two approaches for teaching writing that involve explicitly teaching grammar for sentence-level writing. Next time, we’ll explore genre-based pedagogy, which involves teaching grammar as choice. Grammar plays an important but relatively limited role in SRSD and TWR, a bit like an entree to start a three-course meal. By contrast, grammar is the main course of genre-based pedagogy, as we’ll see next time. Yum yum.

Have you come across TWR before? Perhaps you’ve even had a go at teaching writing with some of the TWR strategies. If so, it would be great to hear how that experience has been for you and your students. Or, perhaps you’d like to learn more about TWR. Personally, I can’t wait for some empirical studies to come out that show the effectiveness of TWR, especially since SRSD is so well-supported by research. Let’s have a conversation about it on Twitter.

If you’d like to purchase the TWR book, and you are in Australia, here’s a link to Booko where you can find the cheapest electronic and printed copies.

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References

Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2017). The writing revolution: A guide to advancing thinking through writing in all subjects and grades. Jossey-Bass.

Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2018). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch

We hear a lot about the need to go back-to-basics with literacy teaching in Australia (and I’m sure elsewhere), which would involve a renewed emphasis on teaching the fundamental elements of writing, such as handwriting, spelling, and the focus of my next three posts: grammar. Every speaker of English knows grammar on an implicit level (Crystal, 2004), even if they aren’t able to name and explain the grammatical forms and patterns that make up their sentences and texts. But as teachers, should we expect our students to rely on implicit knowledge of grammar when they learn to write different kinds of texts? Are there ways of teaching grammar that are proven to promote student writing development? How deep does our knowledge of grammar need to be?

Hold on… I heard somewhere there’s no evidence learning about grammar improves writing.

In the writing instruction literature, it doesn’t take long to come across claims like there’s no point teaching grammar because there’s no evidence it improves student writing. Such claims stem from studies that investigated the teaching of traditional grammatical forms in isolation, which found this makes little difference to student writing outcomes (e.g., Andrews et al., 2006; Braddock et al., 1963). This is, perhaps, unsurprising; how likely is it that knowing simple definitions of grammatical forms would meaningfully help students compose the complex texts of schooling? And yet, several other studies claim that explicit grammar teaching does enable significant gains in writing. In this situation, the ways we define and teach grammar are important considerations.

My posts over the next three weeks will outline three approaches to teaching writing that include an explicit emphasis on grammar. The first two approaches teach grammar for sentence-level writing. With a wealth of experimental and quasi-experimental studies supporting the first of these approaches, I’ve decided to tackle it in the first post. Next time, I’ll look at a second, somewhat similar, somewhat different approach. And in the third post, I’ll write about how teaching grammar as choice offers an equally compelling option, and one that may suit teaching in the Australian context even better.

Grammar for sentence-level writing

Teaching grammar for sentence-level writing is advocated most strongly by researchers in the United States (US) (e.g., Graham et al., 2018). From this view, select grammar resources are seen as the building blocks of sentences, while sentences are seen as the building blocks of texts. Advocates argue that teaching and learning grammar for sentence-level writing in the early and middle primary school years prepares students for the writing demands of upper primary, secondary, and tertiary contexts. Importantly, this view suggests that spending a lot of time understanding all the grammatical forms and functions of words and word groups is unnecessary. But an emphasis on teaching and learning certain grammatical features is still important.

What ideas underpin this view of writing and grammar?

This view of writing and grammar can be described as sociocognitive (Langer, 1991; Olson et al., 2017) in that it combines the cognitive writing processes from the work of Hayes and Flower (1980) with strong attention to the social purposes and genres of writing. This mix allows sociocognitive approaches to avoid the key criticism of process writing: that it’s too concerned with what happens in a person’s mind during writing rather than seeing writing as, fundamentally, a social act (Hyland, 2003). I’d argue that another way to describe sociocognitive approaches is as process-genre approaches (e.g., Badger & White, 2000) in that they take key ideas from both the process and genre traditions of writing instruction.

From a sociocognitive perspective, teaching children about basic grammar ideas helps them write grammatically accurate sentences with fluency, freeing up cognitive resources for other aspects of writing (Smith et al., 2021). Along with key lower-order skills (e.g., spelling, handwriting, keyboarding), this perspective views strong sentence-level writing as a necessary precursor of more complex, higher-order skills such as achieving a strong personal voice in writing and meeting specific communicative purposes for different audiences (Kubina & Yurich, 2012).

Teacher knowledge

Broadly speaking, sociocognitive approaches do not require teachers to have strong personal knowledge of how grammar works at the word-, phrase-, and clause-levels in different written genres. This lowers the bar of entry for teachers substantially. Instead, these approaches suggest that grammar should be taught in a sequence of increasing complexity for the purpose of sentence-level writing. Once students have achieved high levels of accuracy and fluency with writing simple sentences, students engage in sentence combining tasks to form compound and complex sentences. This then leads to their writing of longer and more advanced stretches of text.

OK. Give me some examples

Two sociocognitive approaches include self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) (e.g., Graham et al., 2018) and The Writing Revolution (Hochman & Wexler, 2017). I’ll focus on SRSD in this post and introduce The Writing Revolution next time.

Perhaps the most attractive feature of SRSD is its strong research backing, with more than 100 empirical studies showing its effectiveness in supporting different aspects of writing development. Given the lack of research evidence behind many (most?) popular approaches to teaching writing, this evidence should be enough to make all teachers and researchers take notice. Why not teach in the ways that have been proven to make the most difference? Let’s briefly look at the key features of SRSD.

What exactly is SRSD?

In a nutshell, SRSD involves teaching students cognitive strategies to help them engage in a set of writing processes (e.g., planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing) (Harris & Graham, 1996). Unlike process writing approaches, the strategies in SRSD differ by the genre being written (i.e., there are specific strategies that help students write narratives, arguments, descriptions, and so on). As the name implies, SRSD also teaches students self-regulation processes, such as setting writing goals, monitoring writing progress, and reflecting on their writing performances (Collins et al., 2021). This takes the focus of SRSD beyond the written text and the processes used to write it; SRSD also considers important elements such as the writing environment and student motivation for writing. This makes SRSD quite unique. Writing is a multicomponent literate practice, and SRSD has been designed with this in mind to address the important parts.

How does SRSD work?

SRSD involves six stages that teachers and students work through in an explicit teaching process broadly similar to the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) and other explicit approaches (e.g., Rosenshine, 1995). As explained by Laud and Patel (2008) the six stages of SRSD instruction include:

While these six stages involve several elements not included in other explicit teaching approaches, at its heart, SRSD does follow the typical I do, we do, you do structure, moving from explicit teacher modelling to independent student writing. SRSD differs from other approaches, though, in its unique combined focus on genre-specific strategies, mnemonics, and self-regulation processes.

Grammar instruction as part of SRSD

With such a lot to teach, learn, and manage in SRSD (e.g., writing processes, cognitive strategies specific to different genres, self-regulation processes, peer collaboration, focus on student motivation and the writing environment…) (Peltier et al., 2021), how does grammar fit in SRSD? In short, grammar plays a crucial but limited role in SRSD.

According to world experts in SRSD, Steve Graham and colleagues (2018), teaching about the features of sentences should start in kindergarten, particularly punctuation and capital letters. In the early primary years, students should be taught about breaking down oral language ideas and descriptions into writing as a series of simple sentences. Once students have mastered simple sentence writing, they should be taught about compound and complex sentences through sentence combining strategies. All of this involves a crucial but limited explicit focus on grammar.

Offering more specificity, Smith and colleagues (2021) argued that teachers following the SRSD approach may begin by teaching basic definitions of subjects (i.e., nouns) and verbs, then teach the idea of subject-verb agreement in sentences, then help students convert sentence fragments into simple sentences, and finally help them to develop their simple sentences into longer, more complex sentences (e.g., compound and complex).

While some proponents of SRSD may suggest grammar isn’t a key feature of this approach, here are several grammatical features typically discussed in SRSD publications that should be taught using this method:

To summarise, while the SRSD studies I’ve explored focus more strongly on paragraph- and text-level strategies and mnemonics rather than word- and clause-level grammar, it is important for teachers following this approach to know and teach the basic grammatical forms listed above and how these combine in different kinds of sentences. These sentences are necessary building blocks for the texts composed through the SRSD process. The limited emphasis on grammar in SRSD means there are not too many concepts a teacher new to this approach would need to learn before getting stuck into such teaching.

Where can I learn more about SRSD?

The references mentioned at the bottom of this post offer useful starting points for learning more about SRSD. Given its research backing, SRSD is worth exploring if you value evidence-based practice.

I would also recommend having a look at the thinkSRSD website, which includes a variety of resources and offers online professional development opportunities that (in my view) are inexpensive compared to competing approaches to writing instruction.

Summarising SRSD

Where to from here

In my next post, I’ll introduce you to The Writing Revolution (Hochman & Wexler, 2017), which has become quite popular in Australian schools in the past couple of years. Like SRSD, The Writing Revolution advocates teaching grammar for sentence-level writing, but does so quite differently to SRSD, as we’ll discover next time. Then, I’ll shift my attention to a functional grammar approach that involves teaching and learning grammar as choice.

If you are a teacher, I’d love to hear about your experiences learning grammar at school, in your teacher training, and/or in your professional development in the time since. Do you think students should be taught the grammatical features of texts that are written and unpacked in school classrooms? And what do you think about SRSD? Is this something you’ve heard about before and is it something you’d like to give a go in your own practice? Please feel free to comment below or reach out to me on Twitter.

References

Andrews, R., Torgerson, C., Beverton, S., Freeman, A., Locke, T., Low, G., Robinson, A., & Zhu, D. (2006). The effect of grammar teaching on writing development. British Educational Research Journal, 32(1), 39-55.

Badger, R., & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT journal, 54(2), 153-160.

Braddock, R., Lloyd-Jones, R., & Schoer, L. (1963). Research in written composition. National Council of Teachers of English.

Collins, A. A., Ciullo, S., Graham, S., Sigafoos, L. L., Guerra, S., David, M., & Judd, L. (2021). Writing expository essays from social studies texts: A self‑regulated strategy development study. Reading and Writing, 34, 1623-1651. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10157-2

Crystal, D. (2004). Rediscover grammar. Pearson Education.

Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2018). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch

Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (1996). Making the writing process work: Strategies for composition and self-regulation (2nd ed.). Brookline Books.

Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2018). Self-regulated strategy development: Theoretical bases, critical instructional elements, and future research. In M. Braaksma, K. R. Harris & R. Fidalgo (Eds.), Design principles for teaching effective writing: Theoretical and empirical grounded principles (pp. 119-151). Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004270480_007

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. S. (1980). Identifying the organization of writing processes. In L. Gregg & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing (pp. 3-30). Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2017). The writing revolution: A guide to advancing thinking through writing in all subjects and grades. Jossey-Bass.

Hyland, K. (2003). Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 17– 29.

Kubina, R. M., & Yurich, K. K. L. (2012). The precision teaching book. Greatness Achieved.

Langer, J. A. (1991). Literacy and schooling: A sociocognitive perspective. In E. H. Hebert (Ed.), Literacy for a diverse society: Perspectives, practices and policies (pp. 10-27). New Teachers College Press.

Laud, L. E., & Patel, P. (2008). Teach struggling writers to unite their paragraphs. TEACHING Exceptional Children Plus, 5(1). http://escholarship.bc.edu/education/tecplus/vol5/iss1/art4

Olson, C. B., Matuchniak, T., Chung, H. Q., Stumpf, R., & Farkas, G. (2017). Reducing achievement gaps in academic writing for Latinos and English learners in Grades 7– 12. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(109), 1-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000095

Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8, 317-344

Peltier, C., Garwood, J. D., McKenna, J., Peltier, T., & Sendra, J. (2021). Using the SRSD instructional approach for argumentative writing: A look across the content areas. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. https://www.doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12255

Rosenshine, B. (1995). Advances in research on instruction. The Journal of Educational Research, 88(5), 262-268. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1995.9941309

Smith, R. A., Allen, A. A., Panos, K. L. & Ciullo, S. (2021). Sentence writing intervention for at-risk writers in upper elementary grades. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/ldrp.12266