Writing

Writing helps pupils to clarify their thoughts and experiences and to give them personal meaning. Through writing, pupils can define, order and understand ideas. Because writing is essential for communicating within society, it is important that pupils learn precision in its conventions.

Handwriting skills will be formally taught, especially in the early years. Later, pupils will pay attention to handwriting in the normal course of composing their own writing. For the most part, writing will be developed in association with the other three outcomes. Acquiring writing skills begins in the earliest years. The youngest pupils will start to compose and communicate their ideas by means such as talking and drawing, and the teacher will periodically act as scribe to give these a written form. Gradually, as pupils learn the skills of handwriting and spelling, they will begin to draft their own pieces of composed writing. At all stages the teacher should be involved in the essential processes of listening, discussing and assisting with the selection of ideas, overseeing content, organization and form. The teacher will also demonstrate and require different writing strategies. For example, the following approach to drafting and redrafting might be used:

presenting ideas;

discussing them with teacher and/or peers;

selecting what is appropriate;

developing them in expanded text (writing, drawings, storyboarding, word processing or simple flowcharts, as appropriate);

discussing this with teacher and /or peers;

producing a re-draft (which may be the final copy).

Schools should have an agreed correction code which teachers and pupils can use to identify points in a piece of writing when redrafting seems to be needed. At the early stages, the teacher should respond to the content and structure of what is being written, and focus on spelling and simple punctuation in the final draft. But with regular practice the pupil should be taught to give increasing priority to technical features and presentation of the text through control of sentence structure, punctuation, spelling and handwriting.

As pupils begin to read more widely, so their writing will develop and become more varied. From writing about events drawn from their day-to-day lives, they will write about matters which go beyond their real-life experiences. They will demonstrate that they can write for a larger number of audiences and purposes, and from points of view other than their own. They will attempt more complex narratives and will be asked to extend their ability to write non-narrative texts, for example reports, letters, and news items.

Teachers will, therefore, spend time devising programmes which will provide contexts in which pupils will be asked to write in a variety of forms. Pupils will also write for a number of readerships, in language registers and with degrees of formality that will depend on the writer's familiarity - which may be real or imaginary - with the target readership. In such programmes and contexts, teaching approaches, tasks and experiences will motivate and support pupils, especially those with special needs, as they gain a set of essential but complex skills.

The combination of purpose, form and readership will influence pupils' choice of appropriate language, and they should be faced with tasks which clearly demand the use of a variety of styles. Mostly this will involve forms of Standard English, but from time to time the pupil's own dialect will also be used for appropriate purposes, and attention given to enriching it.