The release of NAPLAN test results always sparks conversations and debates about the state of education and student performance. The 2023 results are no exception, but this year’s results come with a twist that makes comparisons even more intriguing. With NAPLAN testing shifting to two months earlier in the school year (from May to March), it was expected that student results would be lower than in previous years (when students had two months of additional learning to influence test preparation). Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to compare the test results in 2023 with any of the previous tests (which began in 2008), since we would be comparing ripe apples with slightly less ripe apples. But I decided to go ahead and compare the 2023 results with the 2022 results anyway, just for fun, split up by gender. Some of the findings were definitely unexpected!
Reading and Writing: A Mixed Bag
The 2023 reading results for male and female students in every tested year level (i.e., Years 3, 5, 7, and 9) all showed a downward trend compared to the 2022 results. This can likely be attributed to the earlier testing date, with 2023 students having less time to develop reading skills before the test.
There was a dip in writing results among primary school males and females that mirrored this trend, as was expected. However, in a fascinating twist, writing scores actually improved for male and female students in Year 7 and Year 9. In fact, compared to all NAPLAN writing tests since it was modified in 2011, the 2023 scores were the highest ever for Year 7 males and females and Year 9 males, while for Year 9 females it was their second highest. How is this possible? Could something have changed in the marking process? This is unlikely since nothing like this has been discussed by ACARA. Did secondary school students find the 2023 writing prompt easier to address in the limited test time? This is somewhat plausible. Could secondary school students be feeling more positive about NAPLAN testing in March than in May? Without more information, it’s not possible to know what has driven this marked increase in secondary writing test scores. But it’s certainly odd that students with two fewer months of preparation would perform higher on a test that, for all intents and purposes, seems equivalent to all recent writing tests.
Despite the positive news for secondary students, it should be pointed out that Year 9 males are still performing at a level equivalent to Year 7 females, demonstrating a persistent gender gap that merits further investigation. Year 9 males performed more than two years of equivalent learning behind Year 9 females (i.e., 24.12 months – yikes!).
Spelling and Grammar: Heading Down
Like reading, spelling scores were down for males and females in all tested year levels. Again, this was expected given the shift to earlier testing.
Grammar and punctuation results mostly followed the same downward pattern, with Year 3, Year 5, and Year 9 males and females all achieving lower scores than the 2022 students. Strangely, grammar and punctuation scores for Year 7 students from each gender were higher than Year 7 students who sat the test in 2022.
As a noteworthy point from the data, Year 7 females outperformed Year 9 males for the first time in any NAPLAN grammar and punctuation test (or any NAPLAN literacy test). This can be explained by the considerable (but expected) decline in Year 9 male scores, while Year 7 female performance was somehow largely consistent with recent years, even with the earlier testing.
Numeracy: A Glint of Improvement
In terms of numeracy, all primary school males and females somehow scored higher than their 2022 counterparts (except for Year 5 females whose scores in 2023 were slightly down). Surely the numeracy test and its marking procedures haven’t changed, so it’s unclear why there would be clear improvements. Year 3 males managed to achieve their highest mean score of any previous NAPLAN numeracy test. With two fewer months of class time 🤷♂️
On the other hand, secondary school students, regardless of gender, scored lower than the 2022 students. But again, this was expected, so no alarm bells yet.
Final Thoughts: Beyond the Numbers
While the 2023 NAPLAN results might not be directly comparable to previous years due to the changed testing timeline, they offer valuable insights into the dynamics of education and student performance. The interplay of gender, year levels, and subject areas provides a rich tapestry of information that policymakers, educators, and researchers can draw from to tailor interventions and strategies.
It was kind of shocking to see that in specific areas, the earlier 2023 testing procedure resulted in higher scores (i.e., secondary writing and primary numeracy). That said, all students would clearly benefit from the additional two months of learning about reading, spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
The 2023 results highlight the importance of considering the broader context surrounding NAPLAN test scores. As we move forward with this whole new world of NAPLAN testing, complete with four shiny new proficiency standards that replace the previous bands, it will be as intriguing as ever to see the rise and fall of student results across the country. These broad pictures of student achievement would not be possible without NAPLAN testing.
Recently, I started a new research project with four colleagues to investigate the writing choices made by primary and secondary school students who scored highest of all Queensland students on the three most recent NAPLAN writing tests. I have done this sort of research in the past but always focused on successful persuasive writing across the tested year levels (i.e., 3, 5, 7, and 9). For our new project, named NAPtime, we will investigate the narrative writing choices valued by NAPLAN markers for the first time. The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (caretakers of completed NAPLAN tests up here) granted us access to the 285 highest-scoring Queensland writing samples written for the 2019, 2021, and 2022 NAPLAN tests (i.e., roughly 20-25 samples per year level for the three years of the test). In the next couple of years, my colleagues and I will use a variety of linguistic and rhetorical frameworks to identify patterns in the students’ writing and communicate our findings to the education community.
My first exploration of the successful writing samples will focus on the students’ use of figurative language to entertain their readers. Figurative language choices are often referred to as figurative devices, rhetorical devices, literary devices or figures of speech, and are commonly associated with poetry and argumentation, but high-quality narratives are also overflowing with artful and playful uses of figurative language. In fact, this is often what makes the stories we read so engaging.
Figurative language has been the focus of research and teaching for (literally) thousands of years. The figurative language choices I’ll be looking for in the NAPLAN writing samples were identified first by Aristotle and other rhetoricians way back in Ancient Greece. Aristotle outlined the ins and outs of five canons of classical rhetoric—Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery—which included everything a speaker or writer would need to discover, organise, and communicate compelling ideas through spoken and written texts. Of most relevance to our NAPtime research project is the third canon, Style, which concerns how we put the ideas we have into words that are communicated with others. This is the part of classical rhetoric that dealt with figurative language.
Figurative language in the Australian Curriculum: English.
It’s quite amazing to see just how much emphasis is given to figurative language in the Australian Curriculum: English. Even a cursory glance will show this is one of the most underrated aspects of English teaching. Unlike certain other aspects of English that are only dealt with in niche sub-strands of the curriculum, figurative language can be found across all three strands (i.e., Language, Literature, and Literacy), spread out across a full eight sub-strands! While figurative language is taught from Year 1 to Year 10, it becomes especially prominent in the secondary school years, where it’s mentioned directly in six content descriptions for each secondary year level (i.e., 7, 8, 9, and 10). In this sense, teaching students to interpret and use figurative language is likely a regular part of every secondary English teacher’s day job.
Despite the wide reach of figurative language, this aspect of English is, arguably, treated in a fairly disjointed manner in the Australian Curriculum: English. Figurative language pops up here, there, and everywhere. It is described as serving many varied functions in different types of texts, such as enhancing and building up layers of meaning; shaping how readers interpret and react to texts; influencing audience emotions, opinions, and preferences; evaluating phenomena; and conveying information and ideas. At times, it is described as a stylistic tool of poetry, songs, and chants; at other times it’s a persuasive tool of argumentation; at other times it’s a literary tool of storytelling. All these uses make figurative language feel a bit like sand slipping through your fingers; nothing really ties it together.
The Australian Curriculum: English refers to 14 figurative devices explicitly (i.e., metaphor, simile, personification, onomatopoeia, assonance, alliteration, hyperbole, idiom, allegory, metonymy, ellipses, puns, rhetorical questions, and irony). This might seem like a lot, but more than 200 figurative devices have been identified in the writing of William Shakespeare alone (Joseph, 1947)! It would be interesting to know how and why these 14 figurative devices have been named in the curriculum.
Figurative language in the NAPLAN writing tests
Another place educators come across figurative devices is in the NAPLAN writing marking guides. The persuasive writing version of the test includes a criterion named Persuasive devices, which involves “The use of a range of persuasive devices to enhance the writer’s position and persuade the reader” (ACARA, 2013, p. 6). In the glossary of the persuasive writing marking guide, nine figurative devices are mentioned: alliteration, simile, metaphor, personification, idiom, puns, irony, hyperbole, and rhetorical questions. The guide also includes some descriptions of the effects of other figurative devices (e.g., parallelism, anaphora, epistrophe) without mentioning the technical names (e.g., “Words or phrases at the beginning or end of successive clauses or statements” refers to anaphora and epistrophe).
The NAPLAN narrative writing marking guide (ACARA, 2010) drops the Persuasive devices criterion and replaces it with another named Character and setting, which involves “The portrayal and development of character” and “The development of a sense of place, time and atmosphere” (p. 4). Only metaphor and simile are mentioned in the glossary as part of key vocabulary choices, while ellipsis is mentioned as a key resource for building text cohesion.
What can we take from the emphasis on figurative language in these marking guides? It seems the designers of the NAPLAN writing test are expecting students to use figurative language in both versions, but only really sets markers up to identify the use of specific figurative devices in the persuasive version. There is possibly an assumption here that figurative language is more important in persuasive writing than in narrative writing. When you add the Australian Curriculum’s substantial but disjointed emphasis on figurative language into the mix, it’s quite likely that some Australian teachers would feel unsure about the aspects of figurative language to teach and in which genres.
Our approach in the NAPtime research
Educators and curriculum designers in contemporary settings might get a better grip on figurative devices if we follow the lead of classical rhetoricians who divided them into two categories: schemes and tropes. Both can be described as fundamental to how we put together sentences in written or spoken texts.
Simply put, a scheme (from the Greek word schēma, meaning form or shape) involves changing the usual pattern or arrangement of words in a sentence. A well-known scheme is alliteration, which involves the repetition of initial phonemes in two or more adjacent words, such as when Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter described students as “behaving like a babbling, bumbling band of baboons!”
A trope (from the Greek word tropein, meaning to turn) involves changing the normal meaning of words in a sentence. A well-known trope is metaphor, which involves making a comparison between two different things that have something in common, such as when Mrs Dursley from Harry Potter is compared to a crane (i.e., a longnecked bird): “she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbours”.
Dividing the 14 figurative devices mentioned in the Australian Curriculum: English and the nine in the NAPLAN persuasive writing marking guide into schemes and tropes shows that these documents strongly favour tropes (i.e., nine tropes vs. three schemes in the curriculum and eight tropes vs. one scheme in the NAPLAN marking guide). A key interest of my research into high-scoring NAPLAN narratives will be to determine how the students used schemes and tropes to entertain their readers, and how well these key policy documents reflect the choices valued in the NAPLAN writing context.
I will pay close attention to the following 19 schemes and 17 tropes that are particularly useful in contemporary writing (Corbett & Connors, 1999). Clearly, this is more than double the number mentioned in the curriculum and NAPLAN, and some may not have been used much or at all by the high-scoring students. It’s also possible that some devices were only used in certain year levels, so there is potential for interesting findings here. If we discover that NAPLAN markers rewarded students for using figurative devices that do not even appear in the key policy documents guiding our teachers, there will be fascinating implications for the usefulness, equity, and ongoing enhancement of these documents.
Without further ado, here is a table of the schemes and tropes that I will look for in my first NAPtime article, with pronunciations, definitions, and examples:
Scheme
Definition
Example
Parallelism
Refers to when words, word groups, or clauses in a sequence have a similar structure
He enjoyed studying English, history, and science.
Isocolon (ī-sō-cō’-lon)
A type of parallelism that occurs when parallel elements not only share a similar structure but also have the same length, such as the same number of words or even syllables
In this classroom, minds expand, ideas ignite, and knowledge flourishes.
Climax
Works together with parallelism. Occurs when words, word groups, or clauses are arranged to build up in importance or intensity
By the end of the school year, students will be armed with skills, wisdom, and a burning desire to make their mark on the world.
Antithesis (an-tith’-ə-sis)
A type of parallelism that occurs when contrasting ideas are placed side by side
Despite the rules and routines, the class had wild bursts of creativity. They seemed to value both conformity and rebellion.
Anastrophe (ə-‘na-strə-fē)
When the usual word order of a clause or sentence is inverted
A place of endless possibilities, a school is.
Parenthesis (pə-ren’-thə-sis)
The insertion of a verbal unit that interrupts the normal flow of a sentence’s structure
A school—with students hurrying between classrooms and the sound of slamming lockers—is a vibrant and dynamic place.
Apposition
Placing two elements side by side, where the second element serves an an example or modification of the first
The teacher, a tireless advocate for learning, guides the students with dedication and passion.
Ellipsis
The intentional omission of a word or words that can be easily understood from the context
You can enter the Year 5 classroom down the corridor, and Year 6 up the stairs.
Asyndeton (a-sin’-də-ton)
The purposeful omission of conjunctions between connected clauses
Books, pencils, notebooks, a backpack filled to the brim—all essentials for a day of learning.
Polysyndeton (pol-ē-sin’-də-ton)
The purposeful use of many conjunctions
The young student struggled to carry her books and her pens and her laptop and her calculator and her highlighters to class.
Alliteration
The repeated use of the same sound at the start of several consecutive words
A boisterous banter of students blended with the rhythmic rattle of rolling backpacks.
Assonance
The repeated use of similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables of consecutive words, with different consonant sounds before and after them
The playful students stayed late to engage in debate.
Anaphora (ə-naf’-ə-rə)
The repeated use of the same word or words at the start of several consecutive clauses
In this class we pursue our dreams. In this class we discover our potential. In this class we become who we are meant to be.
Epistrophe (ə-pis’-trō-fē)
The repeated use of the same word or words at the ends of consecutive clauses
In the classroom, we learn. In the hallways, we learn. In the library and the gym, we learn. Everywhere in this school, we learn.
Epanalepsis (ə-pon-ə-lep’-sis)
The repeated use of a word or words at the end of a clause that was used at the beginning of the same clause
Learning to write is the most important part of learning.
Anadiplosis (an-ə-di-plō’-sis)
The repeated use of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the next clause
Education is the key to unlocking doors, and doors lead to endless possibilities for a life lived well.
Antimetabole (an-tē-mə-tab’-ō-lē)
The repeated use of words in successive clauses, but in reverse grammatical order
In this class you will not only learn to read, but you will read to learn.
Chiasmus (kī-əz’-mus)
When the grammatical structure in successive word groups or clauses is reversed
As teachers, we shape our students, but then our students shape us.
Polyptoton (pō-lip’-tə-tahn)
The repeated use of words that are derived from the same root word
The new learnings of the learners helped them learn most of all.
Trope
Definition
Example
Metaphor
The comparison of two different things that by implying a connection between them
Schools are fertile gardens where knowledge takes root and young minds can bloom.
Simile
The comparison of two different things by using ‘like’ or ‘as’ to make the comparison explicit
The children gathered around the teacher, like bees around a hive.
Synecdoche (si-nek’-də-kē)
When a part of something is used to represent the whole thing
Many hands helped make the school fair a success.
Metonymy (mə-tahn’-ə-mē)
The substitution of a word or word group with another that is closely associated or suggestive of intended meaning
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Pun: Antanaclasis (an-ta-nak’-la-sis)
The intentional use of one word in two or more different ways
If you never learn the content, you’ll never learn to be content.
Pun: Paronomasia (par-ə-nō-mā-zha)
The intentional use of words that sound similar but have different meanings
The teacher plainly explained how the plane’s crash was unplanned.
Pun: Syllepsis
The intentional use of a word in a way that modifies two or more other words, but with each of those words understanding the original word differently
The teacher did not raise her voice or her hopes.
Anthimeria
One part of speech is substituted for another
The student papered the hallway with his artistic skills.
Periphrasis (pə-rif’-ə-sis)
The use of a descriptive word or word group instead of a proper noun or the use of a proper noun to refer to a quality or characteristic associated with it
Sarah was crowned the Queen of Knowledge for her amazing academic results.
Personification
Giving human qualities or abilities things that are not human
The library books whispered enticing stories, beckoning the students to embark on magical adventures.
Hyperbole (hī-pur’-bə-lē)
The intentional use of exaggerated terms to emphasis meaning
For maths we were forced to sit and work through a thousand complex equations.
Litotes (lī’-tə-tēz)
The intentional use of understated terms to minimise meaning
Jim’s performance in the science fair was not unimpressive.
Rhetorical question
Posing a question, not to receive an answer, but to express a point indirectly
Can you deny the importance of education in a child’s life?
Irony
The use of words in a way that mean the opposite of their literal meaning
The 50-page maths assignment was every student’s idea of a fun-filled holiday.
Onomatopoeia
The use of a word that imitates the sounds it describes
Over the courtyard she clashed and clattered on the way to the classroom.
Oxymoron
The combination of two terms that are usually contradictory or opposite to each other
The silent cacophony of the empty classroom filled the air.
Paradox
Making a statement that seems contradictory but that holds some truth
The more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know.
I look forward to letting you know what we find. My hypothesis is that figurative language plays a much larger role in high-scoring narratives than the narrative marking guide suggests. If you are a teacher, how do you currently teach students to understand and use figurative devices in their own writing? Do you think it’s important for narrative writing?
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2010). National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy: Narrative writing marking guide. https://www.nap.edu.au/_resources/2010_marking_guide.pdf
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2013). National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy: Persuasive writing marking guide. https://www.nap.edu.au/_resources/amended_2013_persuasive_writing_marking_guide_-with_cover.pdf
Corbett, E. P. J., & Connors, R. J. (1999). Classical rhetoric for the modern student (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Joseph, M. (1947). Shakespeare’s use of the arts of language. Columbia University Press.
Many education stakeholders and social commentators dislike the NAPLAN writing test. They think it (and the whole suite of annual tests) should be scrapped. NAPLAN undeniably influences classroom practices in a large number of Australian schools, and it’s also raised stress levels for at least some groups of students and teachers (Hardy & Lewis, 2018; Gannon, 2019; Ryan et al., 2021). These are valid concerns.
But as Australia’s only large-scale standardised assessment of writing, the test has the potential to provide unique and useful insight into the writing development, strengths, and weaknesses of Australia’s primary and secondary school populations (here’s an example). Added to this, the political value of NAPLAN, and the immense time, energy, and money that’s been poured into the tests since 2008 make it unlikely that the tests will be scrapped anytime soon.
Instead of outright scrapping the tests, or keeping them exactly as they are (warts and all), a third option is to make sure the tests are designed and implemented as well as possible to minimise concerns raised since their introduction in 2008. I’ve given the design of the NAPLAN writing test a great deal of thought over the past decade; I’ve even written a PhD about it (sad but true). In this post, I offer 3 simple fixes ACARA can make to improve the writing test while simultaneously addressing concerns expressed by critics.
1. Fix how the NAPLAN writing test assesses different genres
What’s the problem? At present, the NAPLAN writing test requires students to compose either a narrative or a persuasive text each year, giving them 40 minutes to do so.
Why is this a problem? The singular focus on narrative or persuasive writing is potentially problematic for a test designed to provide valid and reliable comparisons between tests over time. Those who have taught narrative and persuasive writing in classrooms will know these genres require often very different linguistic and structural choices to achieve different social purposes. It’s OK to compare them for some criteria, like spelling, but less so for genre specific criteria. ACARA know this too because the marking criteria and guide for the narrative version of the test (ACARA, 2010) are not the same as those for the persuasive writing version (ACARA, 2013). Even though the marking criteria for both versions are not identical, the results are compared as though all students completed the same writing task each year. There is a risk that randomly shifting between these distinct genres leads us to compare apples and oranges.
Also related to genre is the omission of informative texts (e.g., procedures, reports, explanations, etc.) in NAPLAN testing. Approaches to writing instruction like genre-based pedagogy, The Writing Revolution, and SRSD emphasise the importance of writing to inform. This is warranted by the fact that personal, professional, and social success in the adult world relies on being able to clearly inform and explain things to others. It’s not ideal that the significant time spent developing students’ informative writing skills across the school years is not currently assessed as part of NAPLAN.
What’s the solution? A better approach would be to replicate how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the US deals with genres.
How would this improve NAPLAN? In the NAEP, students write two short texts per test instead of one, with these texts potentially requiring students to persuade (i.e., persuasive), explain (i.e., informative), or convey real or imagined experience (i.e., narrative). The NAEP is administered in Years 4, 8, and 12. Matching the typical development of genre knowledge (Christie & Derewianka, 2008), the Year 4 students are most likely to be asked to write narrative and informative texts, while those in Years 8 and 12 are most likely to write informative and persuasive texts. But students in all tested year levels can still be asked to write to persuade, explain, or convey experience, so knowledge about all the genres is developed in classrooms.
Why couldn’t we do something similar with NAPLAN? Including informative texts in our writing test would incentivise the teaching of a fuller suite of genres in the lead up to NAPLAN each year. Not including informative texts in NAPLAN is a little baffling since a large proportion of student writing in classrooms is informative.
2. Fix the NAPLAN writing prompt design
What’s the problem? At the start of every NAPLAN writing test, students receive a basic prompt that provides general information about the topic. Here’s an example from the 2014 test, which required a persuasive response:
As you can see, some useful information is provided about how children can structure their texts (e.g., Start with an introduction) and the sorts of writing choices they might like to make (e.g., choose your words carefully to convince a reader of your opinion). But how useful is this to a student who doesn’t have a lot of background knowledge about laws and rules?
My younger sister was in Year 5 in 2014 and she completed this writing test. She had previously been on two international school trips, and drew on these (and other) experiences to write an argument about raising Australia’s legal drinking age to 21, as it is in the US, and the many ways this would positively impact our society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my sister achieved at the Year 9 standard for this persuasive text.
Why is this a problem? Compare my sister’s experience with a child from a lower socioeconomic area who had never been out of their local area, let alone Australia. It’s more challenging to suggest how rules or laws in our context should change if you don’t know about how these rules or laws differ in other places. The information provided in the prompt is far less useful if the child does not have adequate background knowledge about the actual topic.
Keeping the topic/prompt secret until the test is meant to make the test fairer for all students, yet differences in children’s life experiences already make a prompt like this one work better for some students than others. As an aside, in 2014 so many primary school students couldn’t answer this prompt that ACARA decided to write separate primary and secondary school prompts from 2015. This changed the test conditions in a considerable way, which might make it harder to reliably compare pre- and post-2014 NAPLAN writing tests, but I digress.
What’s the solution? A fairer approach, particularly for a prompt requiring a persuasive writing response, would be to provide students with select information and evidence for both sides of an issue and give them time to read through these resources. The students could then integrate evidence and expert opinion from their chosen side into their arguments (this is a fascinating process known as discourse synthesis, which I’d like to write about another time). Students could still freely argue whatever they liked about the issue at stake, but this would mean Johnny who never went out of his local area would at least have some information on which to base his ideas. Plus, we could potentially make the whole experience more efficient by making these supporting materials/evidence the same as those used to test students’ reading skills in the NAPLAN reading test.
How would this improve NAPLAN? Supporting information for the persuasive writing test (and the informative writing test if we can add that family of genres) would not need to be long: even just a paragraph of evidence on both sides would offer plenty for students to synthesise into their texts. We know that the test conditions and criteria influence what’s taught in classrooms, so there’s an opportunity to promote writing practices that will set students up for success in upper secondary and (for those interested) higher education contexts.
At the moment, students rarely include any evidence in their NAPLAN writing, even high-scoring students. Introducing some supporting information might help our students to get away from forming arguments based on their gut reactions (the kinds of arguments we encounter on social media).
3. Fix how the writing test positions students to address audiences
What’s the problem? Since 2008, NAPLAN writing prompts have had nothing to say about audience. Nothing in the prompt wording positions students to consider or articulate exactly who their audience is. Despite this, students’ capacity to orient, engage, and affect (for narrative) or persuade (for persuasive) the audience is one of the marking criteria. Put another way, we currently assess students’ ability to address the needs of an audience without the marker (nor perhaps the student) explicitly knowing who that audience is.
Why is this a problem? The lack of a specified audience leads many students to just start writing their narratives or persuasive texts without a clear sense of who will (hypothetically speaking) read their work. This isn’t ideal because the writing choices that make texts entertaining or persuasive are dependent on the audience. This has been acknowledged as a key aspect of writing since at least Aristotle way back in Ancient Greece.
Imagine you have to write a narrative on the topic of climate change. Knowing who you are writing for will influence how you write the text. Is the audience younger or older? Are they male or female? Do they like action, romance, mystery, drama, sports-related stories, funny stories, sad stories, or some other kind of story? What if they have a wide and deep vocabulary or a narrow and shallow vocabulary? There are many other factors you could list here, and all of these would point to the fact that the linguistic and structural choices we make when writing a given genre are influenced by the audience. The current design of NAPLAN writing prompts offers no guidance on what to do with the audience.
Others have noticed that this is a problem. In a recent report about student performance on the NAPLAN writing test, the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) (2022) described the Audience criterion as one of five that should be prioritised in classroom writing instruction. They argued: “To be able to write to a specific audience needs explicit teaching through modelling, and an understanding of what type of language is most appropriate for the audience” (p. 70). How can the marker know if a student’s writing choices are appropriate if an audience isn’t defined?
What’s the solution? A simple fix would be to give the students information about the audience to whom they’re entertaining, persuading, and/or informing. This is, again, how the NAEP in the US handles things, requiring that the “writing task specify or clearly imply an audience” (National Assessment Governing Board, 2010 p. vi). Audiences for the NAEP will be specified by the context of the writing task, age- and grade-appropriate, familiar to students, and consistent with the purpose identified in the writing task (e.g., to entertain) (see here for more). Another fix would be to ask students to select their own audience and record this somewhere above their response to the prompt.
How would this improve NAPLAN? Having more clarity around the intended audience of a written piece would position students to tailor their writing to suit specific reader needs. This would allow markers to make more accurate judgements about a child’s ability to orient the audience. If this isn’t fixed, markers will continue having to guess at who the student was intending to entertain or persuade.
Righting the writing test
Would these changes make the NAPLAN writing test 100% perfect? Well, no. There would still be questions about the weighting of certain criteria, the benefit/cost ratio of publicly available school results through MySchool, and other perceived issues (if anyone out there finds this interesting, I’d like to write about 3 more possible fixes in a future post). But the simple fixes outlined here would address several concerns that have plagued the writing test since 2008. This would influence the teaching of writing in positive ways and make for a more reliable and meaningful national test. The NAPLAN writing test isn’t going anywhere, so let’s act on what we’ve learnt from over a decade of testing (and from writing tests in other countries) to make it the best writing test it can be.
Christie, F., & Derewianka, B. (2008). School discourse. Continuum Publishing Group.
Gannon, S. (2019). Teaching writing in the NAPLAN era: The experiences of secondary English teachers. English in Australia, 54(2), 43-56
Hardy, I., & Lewis, S. (2018). Visibility, invisibility, and visualisation: The danger of school performance data. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 26(2), 233-248. https://www.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1380073
Ryan, M., Khosronejad, M., Barton, G., Kervin, L., & Myhill, D. (2021). A reflexive approach to teaching writing: Enablements and constraints in primary school classrooms. Written Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883211005558
This post provides the key points of a journal article I recently had published in The Australian Educational Researcher, co-written with Belinda Hopwood (UTAS), Vesife Hatisaru (ECU), and David Hicks (UTAS). You can read the whole article here
Girls better at literacy, boys better at numeracy?
In recent years, there has been increased attention on gender gaps in literacy and numeracy achievement. This is due in part to international assessments of students’ reading achievement such as PIRLS and PISA (Lynn & Mikk, 2009) that have found gender differences in reading are universal, with girls from all participating countries significantly and meaningfully outperforming boys. Previous research has shown that girls score higher on reading tests and are more likely to be in advanced reading groups at school (Hek et al., 2019), while those who fall below the minimum standards for reading are more likely to be boys (Reilly et al., 2019). Large-scale assessments of numeracy have seen similarly consistent results, though with boys outperforming girls. So, what’s the situation in Australia?
Recently, three colleagues and I found out what 13 years of NAPLAN reading and numeracy testing might show about boys’ and girls’ performance in the Australian context. Something that has been lacking from international research has been a clear picture of how reading and numeracy gender gaps become wider or more narrow across the primary and secondary school years. To provide this picture, we drew on publicly available NAPLAN results from the NAPLAN website (ACARA, 2021) and The Grattan Institute’s (Goss & Sonnemann, 2018) equivalent year level technique.
Findings: Gender gap in reading
We looked at the average reading performance of boys and girls across the four tested year levels of NAPLAN (i.e., Years 3, 5, 7, and 9) between 2008 and 2021. Girls improved consistently from Year 3 to Year 9, with approximately two years of progress made between each test. Boys progressed to a similar extent between Years 3 and 5, yet they fell behind the girls at a faster rate between Year 5 and Year 7. Specifically, boys made 1.95 years of progress between Year 3 and Year 5 and 1.92 years between Year 7 and Year 9, but only managed 1.73 years of progress between Year 5 and Year 7 (i.e., in the transition between primary and secondary school).
The average gap between boys and girls was wider for each increase in year level, with Year 3 males around 4 months of equivalent learning behind Year 3 females, Year 5 males 5 months behind, Year 7 males 7 months behind, and Year 9 males around 10 months of learning behind Year 9 females. While boys made more progress between Year 7 and Year 9, this was also when girls made most progress. While boys seem to keep up with girls reasonably well in the primary school years, more boys struggle with reading as they transition into secondary school.
Findings: Gender gap in numeracy
The overall picture for numeracy is similar to reading, though with boys outperforming girls and the gender gap increasing across each tested year level. Boys made approximately two years of progress between each numeracy test, while girls consistently made just over 1.8 years of progress between each test, leading to a gender gap that grew wider at a consistent rate over time. Put differently, boys and girls made consistent progress between each numeracy test, though the rate of progress was higher for males, leading to a neatly widening gender gap over time.
What about the writing gender gap?
In 2020, I conducted a similar study that looked into the NAPLAN writing results, finding that on average, boys performed around 8 months of equivalent learning behind girls in Year 3, a full year of learning behind in Year 5, 20 months behind in Year 7, and a little over two years of learning behind in Year 9. Boys fell further behind girls with writing at every tested year level, yet the rate at which girls outperformed boys was greatest between Years 5 and 7. Our study into reading and numeracy has found that similar gaps exist in these domains too, though not to the same extent as writing. For ease of comparison, the following graph shows the extent and development of the gender gaps in numeracy, reading, and writing.
Gender gaps in numeracy, reading, and writing (2008-2021)
Why do more boys struggle with literacy as they transition into secondary school? For most Australian students, Year 7 is when many (most?) will move physically from their primary school campus to a secondary school campus. This physical transition has been shown to impact student reading achievement, particularly for boys (Hopwood et al., 2017). For some students, their reading achievement stalls in this transition, or in serious cases, declines to levels below that of their primary school years (Hanewald, 2013). Some students entering secondary school have failed to acquire the necessary and basic reading skills in primary school required for secondary school learning (Lonsdale & McCurry, 2004) stifling their future reading development (Culican, 2005). The secondary school curriculum is more demanding and students are expected to be independent readers, able to decode and comprehend a range of complex texts (Duke et al., 2011; Hay, 2014). As argued by Heller and Greenleaf (2007), schools cannot settle for a modest level of reading instruction, given the importance of reading for education, work, and civic engagement. We need to know more about why this stage of schooling is difficult for many boys and how they can be better supported.
The analysis of the numeracy gender gap was quite different from both the reading and writing results. While previous international studies have suggested that the gender gap in numeracy only becomes apparent in secondary school (Heyman & Legare, 2004), this study showed that average scores for boys were higher than those of girls on every NAPLAN numeracy test, though to a lesser extent than the other domains. The widest numeracy gender gap of a little over 6 months of learning in Year 9 was smaller than the smallest writing gender gap of 8 months in Year 3.
Implications of gender gaps in literacy and numeracy
The findings suggest links between reading and writing development, in that more boys struggle with both aspects of literacy in the transition from primary to secondary school. While other researchers have looked at the numeracy gap over time using NAPLAN scale scores (e.g., Leder & Forgasz, 2018), by using the equivalent year level values, we’ve been able to show how the gender gap widens gradually from roughly 2 months of learning in Year 3 to 6 months of learning in Year 9. While this supports the general argument that, on average, boys outperform girls in numeracy and girls outperform boys in literacy tests, it also shows how the gaps are not equal.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2021). NAPLAN national report for 2021. https://bit.ly/3q6NaC4
Culican, S. J. (2005). Learning to read: Reading to learn – A middle years literacy intervention research project. Final Report 2003–4. Catholic Education Office.
Goss, P., & Sonnemann, J. (2018). Measuring student progress: A state-by-state report card. https://bit.ly/2UVNxy5
Hanewald, R. (2013). Transition between primary and secondary school: Why it is important and how it can be supported. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(1), 62–74.
Hek, M., Buchman, C., & Kraaykamp, G. (2019). Educational systems and gender differences in reading: A comparative multilevel analysis. European Sociological Review, 35(2), 169-186.
Heller, R. & Greenleaf, C. (2007). Literacy instruction in the content areas: Getting to the core of middle and high school improvement. Alliance for Excellent Education.
Heyman, G. D., & Legare, C. H. (2004). Children’s beliefs about gender differences in the academic and social domains. Sex Roles, 50(3/4), 227-236. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SERS.0000015554.12336.30
Hopwood, B., Hay, I., & Dyment, J. (2017). Students’ reading achievement during the transition from primary to secondary school. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 40(1), 46-58.
Leder, G. C., & Forgasz, H. (2018). Measuring who counts: Gender and mathematics assessment. ZDM, 50, 687–697. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-018-0939-z
Lonsdale, M. & McCurry, D. (2004). Literacy in the new millennium. Australian Government, Department of Education, Science and Training.
Lynn, R., & Mikk, J. (2009). Sex differences in reading achievement. Trames, 13, 3-13.
Reilly, D., Neuman, D., & Andrews, G. (2019). Gender differences in reading and writing achievement: Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). American Psychologist, 74(4), 445-458.
In 2017, Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler published The Writing Revolution (TWR): a book outlining a new way of thinking about and teaching writing. A key feature that sets TWR apart from other approaches is its suggestion that school students should only focus on sentence-level writing until this is mastered (i.e., the purposes and structures of written genres should only be added after a lot of work on sentences).
This is a somewhat controversial idea if you believe that the sentences we write are always influenced by what and why we’re writing. It also introduces the risk that children will spend much of their primary schooling (and even their secondary schooling, depending on when they start) repeating the same set of basic sentence tasks in every subject. But in taking a developmental approach, Hochman and Wexler argue that learning to write is challenging for young learners, and focusing solely on sentences in the beginning greatly reduces the cognitive load. They say you can’t expect a child to write a strong text, let alone a strong paragraph, until they can write strong sentences. A brief document has been published on the TWR website outlining the theoretical ideas that underpin the approach, which you can read about here.
As I mentioned in my last post on TWR, there haven’t been any research studies or reports to verify if teaching the TWR way enables or constrains writing development… until now.
A reader named ‘Rebecca A’ left a comment on that post to say she’d found a report by an independent research and evaluation firm (Metis Associates) into the efficacy of a TWR trial in New York. The firm partnered with TWR in 2017 and spent some years evaluating how it worked with 16 NYC partner schools and their teachers. Partner schools were given curriculum resources, professional development sessions in TWR, and on-site and off-site coaching by TWR staff.
Evaluating TWR
Metis Associates were interested in TWR writing assessment outcomes, outcomes from external standardised writing assessments, and student attendance data. They compared the writing outcomes of students at partner schools with the outcomes of children at other schools. Teacher attitudes were also captured in end-of-year surveys.
This report did not go through a rigorous, peer-reviewed process, but if you are interested to know if TWR works, it’s probably the best that’s currently out there. Also, keep in mind that the partner schools were very well supported by the TWR team with resourcing, PD, and ongoing coaching. In that sense, you might consider this a report of TWR under ideal circumstances.
If you work at a school using TWR or if you’re interested in the approach, I’d recommend reading the full report here. I will summarise the key findings of the report in the rest of this blog post.
Key finding 1: Teacher attitudes
Teachers at partner schools reportedly found the TWR training useful for their teaching and got the most value from the online TWR resource library. School leaders liked being able to reach out to the TWR team for support if necessary. Some teachers wanted more independence from the strict sequence and focus of TWR activities. Most though found the approach had helped them to teach writing more effectively.
Key finding 2: Impact of TWR on student writing outcomes
But what about the development of students’ writing skills? TWR seems to have made a positive difference at the partner schools. TWR instruction helped students in each grade to advance somewhat beyond the usual levels of achievement. It’s not possible to say much more about this since the presentation of results is quite selective and we only see how the partner schools compared with non-partner schools for certain statistics, like graduation rates and grade promotion rates, which are likely influenced by all sorts of factors. The one writing assessment statistic that does include comparison schools is for the 2019 Regents assessment for students in Years 10, 11, and 12. In this case, those at TWR schools did better in Year 10, results between TWR and comparison schools were similar in Year 11, while comparison schools did better in Year 12. So, a mixed result. Being behind other schools is not really an issue if everyone is doing well, but it’s not immediately clear from this report how these results compare with grade-level expectations or previous results at the same schools.
Figure 4 from Ricciardi et al.’s (2020) evaluation of TWR in partner schools
Something that might explain the mixed outcome for senior secondary students is the tendency for teachers at partner schools to favour the basic sentence level strategies over paragraph or whole text/genre strategies in their teaching. Partner schools taught TWR in Year 3 through to Year 12, and 81% of teachers reported teaching the “because, but, so” strategy regularly (i.e., more than 2 times per week). By comparison, evidence-based strategies like sentence combining were far less commonly taught (i.e., regularly taught by 22% of teachers). This suggests that it’s important for schools using TWR to be systematic and intentional about the strategies taught and to ensure that you aren’t spending longer than needed on basic sentence-level activities so you can get the most important of what TWR offers, which I would argue comes with the single and multiple paragraph outlines and genre work.
When only looking at partner school outcomes, the picture looks positive. The report shows percentages of students performing at Beginning, Developing, Proficient, Skilled, and Exceptional levels at the beginning and end of the year. At each partner school, percentages are all heading in the right direction with many more proficient and skilled writers at the end of the evaluation.
Conclusion
To summarise, in offering select outcomes and comparisons only, and in using metrics that aren’t entirely clear, the report highlights the need for rigorous, peer-reviewed studies to better understand how TWR works for different learners and teachers in different contexts. Despite its limitations, the report points to positive outcomes for the new approach to teaching writing. This is good news for the schools out there that have jumped on board the TWR train.
It also suggests that careful attention should be paid to the specific TWR strategies that dominate classroom instruction if students are to get the most out of it. If you are using the TWR approach, my advice would be not to spend a disproportionate amount of time on basic sentence work from the middle primary years, since well-supported approaches like SRSD and genre pedagogy have shown students can (and should?) be writing simple texts that serve different purposes from a young age.
I remain greatly intrigued by TWR. It turns the writing instruction game on its head and has made me question whether other approaches expect too much from beginning writers. Its approach seems to line up nicely with cognitive load theory, in gradually building the complexity and expectation as learners are prepared for it. There’s a lot at stake though if this specific combination of strategies doesn’t actually prepare students for the considerable challenge of genre writing in the upper primary and secondary school years. You could follow its strategies diligently across the school years but inadvertently limit your students’ writing development (in time, more research will tell us if this is the case).
I realise it’s anecdotal, but my 7-year-old son (just finished Year 1) and I have been talking about argumentative/persuasive writing at home for the last few weeks and the discussions we’ve had and the writing he’s done as a result have been incredibly satisfying for both of us. To think that he should be limited to basic sentence writing and not think about and address different purposes of writing (like persuading others about matters of personal significance) for years into his primary schooling wouldn’t sit well with me after seeing what he’s capable of with basic support grounded in a firm knowledge of language and text structures and encouragement.
It’s also possible to see how students who struggle badly with writing could benefit from practice with basic sentence writing before much else. It was in a context filled with struggling writers that TWR was first conceived, and that it may be most useful.
I’m looking forward to additional research being conducted about TWR. If any schools using the approach are able to comment on its usefulness in your context, that might be helpful for others thinking about giving it a go.
References
Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2017). The writing revolution: A guide to advancing thinking through writing in all subjects and grades. Jossey-Bass.
Ricciardi, L., Zacharia, J., & Harnett, S. (2020). Evaluation of The Writing Revolution: Year 2 Report. Metis Associates. https://www.guidestar.org/ViewEdoc.aspx?eDocId=1956692
The full NAPLAN results for 2021 were released by ACARA today. There were concerns that student performance would be negatively impacted by COVID, but my analysis of gender differences suggests there is a LOT to be optimistic about, particularly for primary school leaders, teachers, students, and parents.
(NOTE: To calculate months of equivalent learning, I used the Grattan Institute’s Equivalent Year Levels approach, which you can read about here)
YEAR 3: For reading, Year 3 boys and girls did better than ever on any previous NAPLAN test. The gender gap was also the widest ever at 5.16 months of equivalent learning in favour of girls. For numeracy, the Year 3 gender gap was the widest of any previous test in favour of boys at 2.52 months. For writing, boys and girls did better than any previous NAPLAN test. The gender gap was the same as last year at 7.2 months in favour of girls.
YEAR 5: For reading, boys had their equal best performance on any test and girls did their best ever. The gender gap was the largest ever for reading at 5.76 months in favour of girls. For numeracy, boys had their equal best performance while females were similar to 2019 leading to the widest ever gender gap of 4.68 months in favour of boys. For writing, boys had their best performance since 2010 and females did their best since 2015. The gender gap was the lowest ever at 9.72 months in favour of girls.
YEAR 7: For reading, boys and girls were down slightly from last year. The gender gap was 8.04 months in favour of girls. For numeracy, boys had their equal second-best performance while girls were down slightly. The gender gap was 5.52 months in favour of boys. For writing, boys and girls had their best performance since 2011. The gender gap was the second-lowest at 18.12 months.
YEAR 9: For reading, boys and girls performed lower than in 2019. The gender gap was 9.96 months. For numeracy, boys and girls were down from last year. The gender gap was 5.64 months. For Year 9 writing, males had their best performance since 2011, and females performed higher than in 2018 and 2019. The gender gap was the second-lowest ever at 20.52 months.
READING SUMMARY: Outstanding outcomes for primary students with their best ever performances on any NAPLAN reading test. Secondary reading was down from recent tests. With increased performance, the gender gap appears to be widening at the primary end.
NUMERACY SUMMARY: Primary school boys and girls did reasonably well on the numeracy test. Other than Year 7 males, numeracy performance was down for secondary school students compared to recent tests. The gender gap appears to be widening at the primary end in favour of boys though the gap is still considerably smaller than reading and writing.
WRITING SUMMARY: Outstanding outcomes for primary and secondary males and females with notable improvement over previous tests. The gender gap in favour of girls appears to be closing at all year levels but is still considerably wider than any other NAPLAN test.
Key messages to take from the 2021 NAPLAN tests
Something is clearly working in Australia’s primary schools, particularly when thinking about reading and writing. At the primary end, the gender gaps are widening for reading and numeracy and closing for writing. As has been the case in all NAPLAN tests, girls are ahead on the literacy tests and boys are ahead on the numeracy test. The widest gender gap is still clearly associated with the writing test, with girls performing 7.2 months ahead in Year 3, 9.72 months in Year 5, 18.12 months in Year 7, and (a still concerning) 20.52 months in Year 9! Boys appear to be struggling to keep up with the increased writing demands in the transition from primary to secondary school.
While secondary students’ writing performance was higher than in previous tests, their reading and numeracy performances were down. In this sense, NAPLAN for 2021 might be a cause for celebration in primary schools and a cause for reflection in secondary schools.
Recently, I completed a PETAA short course delivered by Professor Deb Myhill of the University of Exeter named Going Meta: Enabling Rich Talk about Writing. Of all the approaches to writing I’ve come across, Myhill’s is likely the only one that attempts to integrate ideas from the three theoretical perspectives on writing. Since it doesn’t leave out a critical piece of the writing puzzle, I think that makes it quite special and potentially game-changing.
In this post, I’ve drawn on my learning through the course to outline key terms relevant to Myhill’s approach, discuss its benefits, and explain how you can use it to improve your students’ writing skills.
Key perspectives on writing
Every primary and secondary school teacher wants to help their students become strong writers. There are many specific approaches out there for achieving this, but did you know most are underpinned by one or two of three main theoretical perspectives on writing: cognitive, linguistic, and/or sociocultural?
Briefly, cognitive approaches focus on helping children develop cognitive, metacognitive, and self-regulated learning strategies for managing the processes of writing, such as planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. They are about the thinking processes you engage in while writing.
Linguistic approaches focus mainly on helping children learn to use language features and structures of written texts. They are about your growing mastery of language for writing.
Sociocultural approaches focus on influences of culture and social contexts on what written forms are valued. They are about how you learn to write through collaboration, co-construction, and shared values.
Specific approaches to the teaching of writing tend to draw on ideas from one or more of these perspectives. As an example, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) can be defined as a sociocognitive approach, since it develops children’s use of cognitive processes and strategies to write different genres for different social purposes. It’s important for teachers to know which perspective underpins their approaches to writing instruction since this will impact what aspects of writing are taught, how they are taught, and what skills and understandings they will help students develop.
Metalinguistic understanding
Deb Myhill’s approach to writing instruction is based largely on helping students develop metalinguistic understanding. Myhill described metalinguistic understanding as a subcategory of metacognition. While metacognition is about reflecting on your own thinking and learning processes, metalinguistic understanding is about reflecting on how writers use language to achieve social purposes (Myhill et al., 2020). Students with strong metalinguistic understanding are able to identify and reason about how words, sentences, and paragraphs make meaning in texts (Cremlin & Myhill, 2012). It enables students to both comprehend and produce written texts (Gombert, 1992).
(Meta)talking the talk
Classroom conversations that foster metalinguistic understanding (i.e., how is language working in this text) is known as metatalk. Through metatalk, a teacher can draw students’ attention to a writer’s authorial intention and the language and structural choices they make to achieve the intention (Myhill, 2021). Teachers can use metatalk as a pedagogical device to check students’ metalinguistic understandings before, during, and/or after a teaching episode.
Also, even if students don’t know the technical grammar terms, they can still talk about different aspects of texts and show metalinguistic understanding with everyday language. That said, across the years of schooling, students should be more capable of learning a specific language (or a metalanguage) for referring to given linguistic features, such as noun phrases, verbs, adverbs, and so on. As per the Australian Curriculum: English, Australian teachers are expected to help students learn about these and many other linguistic features from Year 1.
Benefits of developing students’ metalinguistic understandings
According to Myhill, students with strong metalinguistic understanding can look critically at writing and make more informed, intentional writing choices. It reveals the rich possibilities of language and gives writers agency as they create texts (Cremin & Myhill, 2012). It also makes learning visible and encourages students to play, explore, and experiment when making writing choices (Myhill, 2021).
Like many of the important things in literacy, metalinguistic understanding needs to be taught explicitly.
Four ways to build students’ metalinguistic understandings
1. Create opportunities underpinned by teacher knowledge
First, teachers need to create opportunities for investigations into the choices made in texts written by experienced authors, the teachers themselves, and the students. This requires time and for teachers to have a sufficient knowledge about language and structural features of texts. If the teacher can’t articulate what writing choices make a text do its work, they will struggle to build their students’ metalinguistic understandings of it.
2. Use Myhill and colleagues’ LEAD Principles
Deb Myhill and her colleagues at the University of Exeter developed the LEAD Principles to support teachers to scaffold thinking about grammar as being meaningfully linked to writing (Myhill et al., 2020). The LEAD acronym stands for Links, Examples, Authentic Texts, and Discussion.
Links: Teachers make links between a grammatical feature being introduced (e.g., adjectives) and how it works in a focus written genre (e.g., narratives).
Examples: Teachers explain the grammar with examples rather than long explanations.
Authentic texts: By using metatalk to explore the features of authentic model texts, teachers make connections between writers and the broader writing community.
Discussion: Teachers can promote metalinguistic understandings by engaging children in discussions about grammar and the work it does in written texts.
3. Use specific strategies
While the LEAD Principles are relatively broad and flexible, in Myhill’s short course (Myhill, 2021) she suggested the following ten specific strategies for fostering stronger metatalk and metalinguistic understandings in classrooms:
Strategy 1. Fill the Gap: Select an extract of text, probably a paragraph, which allows for students to see the language choice within its surrounding context, and delete the particular language choice you are going to explore. Invite students to discuss what might go in the gap, then reveal what the author chose, and discuss why the author may have made that choice.
Strategy 2. Let’s Compare!: One very effective way to help students see how different language choices can create different effects is to explore two different versions: this can be at the level of a word, a phrase or a sentence (possibly even two paragraphs?)
Strategy 3. Sort it out: Giving students words, or sequences of words, printed on cards to undertake a card sort activity is helpful because the physical manipulation of the cards to create different possibilities also generates a lot of focused metalinguistic talk about the options. It works particularly well to explore the syntactic structure of a sentence.
Strategy 4. Playing with possibilities: Invite students to generate a list of possibilities for a particular purpose eg a list of noun phrases to describe a character; or a list of sentences to describe an image of an event. Then invite them to choose two of their possibilities which create different effects, and to explain to the class what the effect is and what language choice is shaping this.
Strategy 5. Thinking Questions: Crucial to the quality of the peer metalinguistic talk is how the talking activity is set up. Pay particular attention to the questions you give students to steer the activity into focused, purposeful discussion, but without constraining it with limiting or closed questions.
Strategy 6. Collaborative Composition: Give students a short writing composition task to write together, perhaps just one paragraph. There should be a clear goal for this writing which will guide the talk which will occur during the writing. One real benefit of collaborative writing is that peers have to articulate their choices and reasons for those choices.
Strategy 7. Collaborative Revision: This is similar to the collaborative composition but more focused on deliberate decision-making through revision. It works particularly well when students are asked to rewrite together a short piece of text which involves an explicit change eg rewriting this character description to infer that he is gentle, not aggressive.
Strategy 8. Questioning the Writer: In pairs, students read a text, or section of text, looking at how the writer has crafted a particular aspect of the text eg how an argument has been signposted; how formality or informality have been used; how a narrative opens. The students create a list of questions for the author about the language choices that they can see in this extract which link to the particular aspect under focus. These questions can then be used for subsequent group, and/or whole class discussion.
Strategy 9. Text-marking: There are lots of different possibilities for asking students to read a text and mark the text in some way which highlights the language choices made. It could be highlighting all the prepositional phrases which evoke a setting; underlining any verbs which convey a sense of emotion; highlighting formal language in blue and informal language in red. As with the card sort and collaborative writing, it is the peer talk which occurs around this activity which is valuable.
Strategy 10.The Author Talks: After a period where students have been composing their own texts, create time for students to explain their own authorial choices to peers. This works best when there is a focused question to consider and when students are asked to choose one example to discuss eg ‘Choose one noun phrase where you are particularly pleased with how strong a visual image it evokes’. The peer talk is much less effective if student are asked to talk about their writing more generally.
4. Engage in metalinguistic modelling
The final way to build metalinguistic understanding should appeal to any fans of explicit instruction. Essentially, when the teacher models their own thinking while writing, this can assist students to understand what linguistic choices are available and how to make stronger linguistic decisions.
Such modelling could be focused on what the teacher is writing while they write or it may involve them thinking aloud about connections between linguistic choices and the effect in a written text (Myhill, 2021). From Myhill’s studies into metalinguistic modelling, she and her colleagues found that teachers need to be clear and focused about what they are modelling. If they are unfocused or try to cover too many aspects of writing, the intended skills will not transfer to students’ writing.
Also, when teachers focus too much on ‘what’ features should be in a written text, students may never even think about ‘why’ these choices make sense for that type of writing. Unfortunately, this prescriptive focus on including a select set of language features without a clear focus on meaning or purpose is promoted in several popular approaches to writing instruction.
Some key takeaways from the course
Three key theoretical perspectives on writing include linguistic, sociocultural, and cognitive.
While metacognitive understanding is about how writers engage in different thinking processes while writing, metalinguistic understanding is about how language works in different written genres.
Developing students’ metalinguistic understandings helps them make more informed, intentional writing choices and to play and experiment with language.
Metalanguage is language for talking about language. Even without metalanguage, children can show metalinguistic understanding of writing choices using everyday language.
Teachers can use several strategies to promote metalinguistic understandings in classroom conversations. There are also general principles for this represented by the LEAD acronym.
Metalinguistic modelling is text-focused and aims to help students think about writing choices, particularly links between grammar and its rhetorical effects.
Key to discussions about metalinguistic understandings is identifying linguistic/structural/literary choices in texts and explaining their effect(s) on audiences.
There does not seem to be a widespread approach to teaching writing that integrates the sociocultural, linguistic, and cognitive perspectives, but Myhill’s approach seems to go closest.
Developing metalinguistic understanding connects language choices with writing purposes and effects (Myhill, 2021). Without it, the teaching of grammar is likely to be disconnected from writing and, therefore, a poor way to build writing skills (e.g., Andrews, 2010; Andrews et al., 2006).
So, what’s missing from this approach?
After finishing Myhill’s course, I was still left pondering many questions that could be the basis of further research in classrooms with teachers and their students. For example:
What counts as strong metalinguistic understandings of different genres in early, middle, and upper primary school? Without this knowledge, it’s hard for teachers to know what to focus on in their classrooms.
Does this approach follow any kind of developmental pattern, or is it all just randomly generated depending on what teachers teach at a given point? If a teacher chooses to focus on the features of one set of model texts over others, could that change everything their students learn about that kind of writing?
If this is the case, how can there be any consistency in this approach, particularly when aiming to support struggling writers, those in minority groups, or those in low SES areas?
Want to learn more?
If you would like to foster your students’ metalinguistic understandings and help them become more independent writers, it would pay for you to ‘know your stuff’ when it comes to the grammatical, structural, and literary/rhetorical aspects of different written genres. In fact, I would only recommend teachers complete this short course if they already possess an adequate knowledge of language, since it assumes you know your prepositional phrases from your conjunctions and your narrative text structures from your persuasive text structures.
Since I felt Myhill’s course might be most beneficial for teachers more knowledgeable about linguistic features, I asked Associate Professor Pauline Jones (PETAA’s President) and Robyn Topp (PETAA’s Manager of Professional Learning) if they had any introductory offerings to support teachers new to text features. While the following courses are currently not open for registration, they should be again in 2022:
Rod Campbell has an online course named Teaching Knowledge for the Art and Craft of Writing that provides an introduction to English language and sentence grammar, and advanced sentence grammar and cohesion.
Jennifer Asha has a course titled Teaching Grammar with Rich Literature, in which she covers basic skills in functional grammar and how to teach it in the context of quality texts and dialogic pedagogy.
Jo Rossbridge and Kathy Rushton offered a face-to-face course named Grammar and Teaching from April – June 2021. This popular course is likely to be converted into a self-paced, online course in 2022.
PETAA will also soon be launching an open access Early Career Teachers’ Portal with quite a bit of grammar and writing content for new (and old) teachers to upskill in this area.
As a parting comment, the metalinguistic understanding course involved participants planning, writing, and revising a short character description (roughly a paragraph in length) over the five modules. It was such a joy to engage in my own creative writing like this. I believe all teachers of writing should be writers themselves, honing and experimenting with their own writing choices over time just like they expect of their students. Sharing your own writing with a class may feel a bit daunting, but it provides considerable motivation and encouragement for students to write and share their own ideas and understandings with others. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?
References
Andrews, R. (2010). Teaching sentence-level grammar for writing: The evidence so far. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom (pp. 90-108). Routledge.
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.
Cremin, T., & Myhill, D. (2012). Writing voices: Creating communities of writers. Routledge.
Gombert, J. E. (1992). Metalinguistic development. University of Chicago Press.
Myhill, D. (2021). Going meta: Enabling rich talk about writing. Primary English Teaching Association of Australia – PETAA College. https://www.petaa.edu.au/iCore/Events/Event_display.aspx?EventKey=DM181021&WebsiteKey=23011635-8260-4fec-aa27-927df5da6e68
Myhill, D., Watson, A., & Newman, R. (2020). Thinking differently about grammar and metalinguistic understanding in writing. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/jtl3.870
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 platypusswamin 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 platypusswamin 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 platypusswamhappily / 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 platypusswamhappily / 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 swamhappily / in the quiet stream / after a morning sleep.
In the quiet stream, / after a morning sleep, the cheeky young platypushappilyswam.
Happilythe cheeky young platypusswamafter 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.
Mixthe wet and dry ingredientscarefully.
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.
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.
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.
What do TWR’s sentence-level strategies involve?
Sentences and Fragments – requires knowledge of subjects (nouns), verbs, and phrases (i.e., activities for identifying fragments and sentences, converting fragments into sentences, and adding punctuation and capitalisation)
Scrambled Sentences (i.e., activities for unscrambling sentences with mixed up words and adding proper punctuation and capitalisation)
Run-on Sentences (i.e., activities for identifying and converting run-ons into sentences)
Sentence Types (i.e., activities for identifying and writing four sentence types (statements, questions, exclamations, and commands), and adding punctuation)
Developing Questions (i.e., activities for writing questions and commands)
Basic Conjunctions (because, but, so) (i.e., activities for completing sentence stems with conjunctions and other relevant words)
Subordinating Conjunctions (i.e., activities for completing sentence stems or writing sentences that begin with subordinating conjunctions like ‘Although’ or ‘Since’)
Appositives – requires knowledge of nouns and noun phrases (i.e., activities for identifying, matching, adding, and brainstorming appositives in sentences (e.g., Woofy, a playful pup, chased Mittens the kitten))
Sentence Combining – requires knowledge of conjunctions (basic and subordinating) and pronouns (i.e., activities for combining short sentences)
Sentence Expansion – enhanced with knowledge about adjectives (i.e., activities for identifying question words and expanding kernel sentences with question words)
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.
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.
Self-regulated strategy development
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:
01
Develop background knowledge
The teacher outlines background information that will help students write a specific type of text
02
discuss it
The teacher discusses a focus strategy and justifies its usefulness for writing
03
model it
The teacher models how to use the focus strategy to meet the goal of the focus genre of writing
04
memorise it
Students use specific mnemonics and checklists to memorise the use of the focus strategy for their own writing
05
support it
Students set writing goals informed by previous writing experiences and outcomes
06
independent writing
Students engage in independent writing without direct assistance from the teacher
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:
Nouns – proper and common (foundational for every genre; teach with STAR mnemonic)
Verbs and verb tense (foundational for every genre; teacher with Job cards strategy)
The notion of subject-verb agreement (foundational for every genre)
Adjectives (foundational for every genre; encourage students to check whether writing has sufficient detail)
Conjunctions (for combining simple or kernel sentences into compound and complex sentences; teach with FANBOYS mnemonic)
Transition words – e.g., firstly, next, in addition (when writing informational and persuasive genres; teach with WRITE and GRIST mnemonics)
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
Based on sociocognitive theories of writing processes and development;
Writer-focused;
Sees grammar as a relatively small set of important skills that are part of a much broader developmental sequence;
Requires a relatively low level of teacher knowledge about language to guide students through a small number of highly scaffolded sentence writing strategies;
Advocated strongly by researchers in other countries, particularly the US;
Backed by many quantitative studies (>100);
Can be learnt through relatively inexpensive professional development, even if you never learnt about grammar in your own schooling or teacher training.
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
