Writing for Pleasure

Theory, Research and Practice

Ross Young, Felicity Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000298840
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores what writing for pleasure means, and how it can be realised as a much-needed pedagogy whose aim is to develop children, young people, and their teachers as extraordinary and life-long writers. The approach described is grounded in what global research has long been telling us are the most effective ways of teaching writing and contains a description of the authors' own research project into what exceptional teachers of writing do that makes the difference.

The authors describe ways of building communities of committed and successful writers who write with purpose, power, and pleasure, and they underline the importance of the affective aspects of writing teaching, including promoting in apprentice writers a sense of self-efficacy, agency, self-regulation, volition, motivation, and writer-identity. They define and discuss 14 research-informed principles which constitute a Writing for Pleasure pedagogy and show how they are applied by teachers in classroom practice. Case studies of outstanding teachers across the globe further illustrate what world-class writing teaching is.

This ground-breaking text is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the current status and nature of writing teaching in schools. The rich Writing for Pleasure pedagogy presented here is a radical new conception of what it means to teach young writers effectively today.

CHAPTER 1

Teachers’ orientations towards teaching writing and young writers

How one was taught to write at school, for better or for worse, will have a profound influence on one’s present and future perceptions of writing and, importantly, of oneself as a writer (Graham et al. 2001; Street 2003; Cremin 2006, 2019; Leigh 2014; Gardner 2014). A teacher’s perspective on writing teaching is shaped and guided by their own past school experiences, how they were trained, how they themselves undertake writing as an adult, their choice of reading on the subject, and of course by school and government policies (Parker 1988; Frank 2003; Hall and Grisham-Brown 2011; McCarthey and Mkhize 2013; Dobson 2016).

We begin this chapter by considering some of the views of writing held by educators, drawing on how they have been articulated by academic theorists and researchers such as Dixon (1967), Hillocks (1986), Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987), Street (1995), Maybin (2001), Hyland (2002), Ivanič (2004) Locke (2015) and Gardner (2018). It is not our intention to give a historical overview of favoured approaches to the teaching of writing at various times (these can be found in Kinneavy 1980; Graham and Kelly 2009; Gibbons 2017; Durrant et al. 2019), but simply to describe a range of different ideologies and beliefs which may be held at the present time and which may sometimes appear to be in conflict with each other. All these orientations have the power to govern classroom pedagogy.

We anticipate that readers of this chapter will recognise aspects of their own beliefs and practices in many of the descriptions of different orientations, but will understand that we have written them in a somewhat caricatured way.

The presentational orientation

The presentational orientation is also referred to as the exercise approach, the tutelage approach, the ‘assigned tasks’ approach, retrieve-and-write, the immediate training for immediate performance approach (Kellogg 2008), the autonomous approach (Street 1995), the compliant scribe approach (Gardner 2018), drill and skill, one-shot perfect-product approach, the algorithm approach, writing as object and rules, the mechanistic approach, authoritarian, high-stakes, evaluative, codification writing, mechanics, regurgitating, recite for writing, artificial, the memorization approach, the transactional approach, the banking concept (Freire 1996), and, rather bluntly, according to Wray and Beard (1988), as the ‘dead-dead-end’ approach. This orientation sees writing essentially as a set of complex cognitive skills. Children are required to master these skills and then to present their competence by producing an accurate writing product or outcome to their teacher’s specifications, ready for evaluation. Without learning these skills, any attempt to craft text and share meaning is likely to fail. Therefore, the teacher sees their role as primarily to teach children how to write passable texts, but not necessarily how to be writers.

The conception of writing and the writer

A presentational-orientated teacher largely views writing as rules and processes to be followed, an outcome, a piece of evidence that shows how or whether students are fulfilling the objective, which is to apply and showcase skills learnt with a high degree of accuracy. Whether the writing was meaningful in its intent and successful according to its readership is seen as less important than correctness. The teacher gains satisfaction from their pupils building on these skills incrementally over time.

The relationship between teacher and pupil

This approach is teacher centred, with the teacher as the gatekeeper and controller of knowledge, cognition, and skills. Teaching is focused on the individual student, with little sense of the social or collaborative aspects of composition and meaning making. Students are seen as empty vessels to be filled, coming into school with nothing that would be useful to them in learning how to write (Smith 1988a).

The content of the writing curriculum

The teacher’s priority is typically the teaching of correct spelling, handwriting, punctuation, vocabulary, correct grammar usage, sentence combination, cohesive devices, and the conventions of Standard English.

Teaching strategies

Writing tasks and assignments are chosen by the teacher. These are largely set for evaluation purposes and may take several forms. For example, the teacher transmits content knowledge and students are then required to show their application and understanding of it through drill exercises or error-recognition tasks. Artificial writing tasks might be set which have a pseudo-authentic purpose and a pseudo-audience. In either case, all pieces of work are marked and corrected, and the student may or may not be asked to attend to the errors and corrections. A major teaching strategy is to provide a model for the student to internalise and imitate. Children are required to arrange sentences and paragraphs into prescribed patterns and to follow pro-forma instructions which over time become more syntactically complex.

Limitations

• It is essential that children internalise the key basic skills, processes, and strategies involved in crafting texts (MacArthur and Graham 2017). However, the main limitation of a presentational approach is not so much its focus on the teaching of these skills but rather the vast amount it ignores when developing children as writers (Locke 2015; Eyres 2017). It appears that presentational-orientated teachers excel at teaching children to produce what Zoellner (1969) called ‘Skinner box’ writing, where, like mice, children can perform certain actions in response to specific stimuli. However, these teachers do not see the necessity of teaching children to be independent writers.
• Children’s personal growth, motivation, and enjoyment as writers are largely seen as unimportant factors in ensuring academic success. Instead, the teacher’s focus is solely on the written product and not on the young writer who produced it.
• Children’s writing is deemed successful largely because it is transcriptionally accurate or syntactically complex. This can result in children writing ‘impeccable nonsense’. There is often a lack of attention given to text-level and genre-based teaching and little focus on purpose and audience.
• The favouring of skill exercises and contrived writing tasks coupled with a lack of emphasis on children’s agency does not help children understand how they can write for their own purposes and audiences at school, at home, and in the future. Instead, they become the passive recipients of their teacher’s writing voice, ideas, models, and desires.
• Since children are producing the same piece as one another, their texts tell teachers very little about how individuals are developing as writers (Graham et al. 2013).
• Because, in this conception, learning tasks are so often limited in terms of the application of new learning, the process of ‘equilibration and cognitive restructuring – necessary for deep learning – will likely fail to occur’ (Allal 2019, p. 3). Children are offered little opportunity to develop higher-order skills or ‘the mental operations necessary for writing expertise’ (Chuy et al. 2011, p. 181). In this conception, children are routinely taught to mentally store ‘single-use’ procedures for constructing writing and are not required or taught to develop a long-term and general understanding of the strategies and acts of cognition needed to be able to write independently for their own purposes and in response to their own urges. Essentially, teachers in this orientation end up assuming the cognitive responsibility for the children’s writing (Chuy et al. 2011).
• The emphasis on product devalues the importance of the writing processes, with the exception of those which are to be assessed. The processes of writing are therefore seen as largely unimportant, and the practices of writers out in the world are largely ignored.
• The approach assumes that children will be interested in the content knowledge being taught to support the writing task, and that they will retain enough information in their working memory to recreate it in their writing. Both these factors, if not realised by the child, can adversely affect the teacher’s judgement as to whether or not they have been academically successful.
• Children are only ever taught; they never get to teach others. They are not invited to comment or advise on the learning process; they are simply subjected to it.
• Children are not seen as capable of choosing their own subjects or ideas for writing; the teacher may also actively oppose their writing desires (Rosen 2017). Subjects and ideas for writing are generated for them and imposed on them and children are therefore only ever spectators and not creators of writing. In many ways, it is the teacher and the stimulus doing the ‘writing’, but children are given the illusion that they are the ones crafting their text. In this conception, children spend a lot of time writing without ever composing. They become, to use a computing analogy, automators of writing and not authentic writers.
• At its worst, the presentational orientation towards writing turns it into an utterly unnatural set of mechanical and nonsensical procedures which are far from how writers craft and work. Not only does such an approach decontextualise writing; it also decontextualises the writer (Street 1995).

The self-expression or naturalistic orient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• The Writing For Pleasure Centre
• 1 Teachers’ orientations towards teaching writing and young writers
• 2 Defining writing for pleasure
• 3 The affective domains of Writing for Pleasure
• 4 Self-efficacy
• 5 Self-regulation
• 6 Agency
• 7 Motivation
• 8 Volition
• 9 Writer-identity
• 10 The enduring principles of effective writing teaching
• 11 Create a community of writers
• 12 Treat every child as a writer
• 13 Read, share, think, and talk about writing
• 14 Pursue authentic and purposeful writing projects
• 15 Teach the writing processes
• 16 Set writing goals
• 17 Be reassuringly consistent
• 18 Personal writing projects
• 19 Balance composition and transcription
• 20 Teach mini-lessons
• 21 Be a writer-teacher
• 22 Pupil conference: Meet children where they are
• 23 Literacy for pleasure: Connect reading and writing
• 24 Conclusion: An action plan for world-class writing teaching
• Index