Articles

Fluency, Motivation, and Audience

There are many factors that affect how well and how much children write. The amount of writing they do during their school years has a strong impact on the way they think, the amount they read, and the quality of their writing as adults. The amount children will write has been linked to the interest they have in the topic being written about, the genre of the written work, and whether they have an interested audience willing to listen to or read what they have written. Children will write more if they have an actual audience, such as a pen pal, than they will if their audience is imaginary.

An effective strategy for promoting fluency in written work is to use journals. They can be used to write about experiences with exercises, at home, at the cottage, or playing at the play ground. These are all topics that children have stored in mind and help develop memory skill as well as writing skill. Imaginative writing may also be written into journals, making up stories. They may be used to carry out a dialogue between teacher and student, encouraging the development of conversational patterns. An interested audience, the teacher, will keep the students' motivation high, and promote the development of a variety of writing skills. Journals can be used across subject areas to develop writing skill in different content areas. A student might have a journal for science, math, geography, and social studies for example, learning to use the language and nuances associated with each area.

Small group writing assignments can also have a strong effect on the quality of writing and the development of writing skills. Producing a work for publication, such as a magazine or article to be made available at the school library, allow the writers to take on various roles, such as typist, researcher, graphic artist, or editor. When a clear purpose is provided, and a "real" audience will be reading the work, children are much more likely to produce a quality piece of writing, be motivated to do their best. They will be more likely to learn from the experience and retain that knowledge than they would for the standard writing assignment of a few pages to be handed in for a mark.

Handwriting and Spelling

Fluency in writing is also thought to depend on control of graphic forms and punctuation associated with written language. Young writers first base their spellings on the sounds associated with letter names. For example, a young fellows mother was deeply engrossed in a book, and he was having trouble getting her attention. So, he wrote her a note that read RUDF. Knowing the writer was at that letter name to sound stage, his mother was able to interpret the message as "Are you deaf". Early writing forms are creative, first based on the pronunciation of letter names then becoming based on visual patterns. A year or so later that message may have read "ar u def", based on the visual pattern associated with the pronunciation of "car" , "two", and the phonetic spelling of the word "deaf". Both forms are creative, involving metalinguistic knowledge (describe below) of letter to sound correspondence, and the difference between onsets and rhymes. Eventually, spelling becomes lexical, that is dictionary spelling, based on repeated exposure to print, and explicit instruction. At this stage new words may be decoded phonologically, visually, or morphologically (see morphemes below).

While accurate spelling and neat handwriting are desirable characteristics, they are not necessary characteristics of strong writing skills. Technologies are available to help poor spellers and writers with poor handwriting, overcome their shortcomings in the technical aspects of writing, to focus on the creative aspects such as planning, organizing, and critically analyzing their writing.

As a child, and now as an adult, I've always wondered why doctors have such poor handwriting. Perhaps it's just those doctors I've come to know, but there appears to be a pattern. I used to think they wrote like that so you couldn't figure out what they were writing. It seems though, that as you acquire more education, your handwriting becomes worse. Having myself spent nearly a quarter century in school, my handwriting is also virtually indecipherable, much worse than it was during highschool. Of course I have no scientific evidence to support this claim, but it shows that handwriting is not a necessary characteristic of good writers. All doctors have to be proficient writers to become doctors. Nowadays, in institutions of higher education very little handwriting is done. Most writing is done on a computer. As a result, keyboarding skill has come to replace handwriting. While handwriting is still a valuable skill, it's emphasis in early writing instruction as a necessary writing skill may be misconceived. If a young writer continues to show poor handwriting, teaching keyboarding skills may be a better alternative than remedial handwriting instruction.

Vocabulary

Morphologically complex words do not appear in children's writing with any frequency until between about grades 6 and 8. Morphemes are units of meaning, as opposed to phonemes which are units of sound. For example, there are 3 morphemes in the word "reusable": "re" meaning again; "use", the root word; and "able", meaning capable of; literally meaning "capable of being used again". The use of morphological forms of words in younger writers can trail behind the forms they can speak or read by as many as 5 years. They are able to understand prefixes, suffixes, and inflection long before they are able to use them in their writing. This discrepancy may disappear by high school with proper instruction through the middle school years that focus on developing knowledge and understanding of morphological forms. A strong understanding of associations between root words, compound words, prefixes, and suffixes can go a long way in developing vocabulary.

Syntax

Syntax is the arrangement and interrelations between words in phrases and sentences. Both vocabulary and syntax development are strongly affected by the amount of reading a child does. With exposure to print, childrens' recognition of written words and their syntax become highly automated through elementary school. By the end of the elementary years childrens' written syntax becomes more complex than spoken syntax. Correct use of syntax in written work continues to develop through to grade 12 and beyond into adulthood. A sign of syntactic growth in writing is an increasing number of words present within clauses, rather than an increasing number of clauses within sentences.

Organization

Young writers develop strategies and a repertoire of discourse structures, and become more able to produce coherent sequences of ideas. Strategies develop to help young writers organize their ideas. Early organizational strategies include the use of pictures to help young writers keep in mind the ideas that are to be written about. A child might draw a picture of three bears sitting around a picnic basket, then go on to describe in writing the circumstances associated with the picture. Later, as children are exposed to various types of writing, they become able to adopt literary forms or genres. Genres provide structure. For example, the structure associated with writing a personal letter, writing a play, or writing a description of a historic event, allow children and developing writers to, in effect, "fill in the blanks".

One of the early organizational strategies to emerge is the chronological ordering of events. Young writers become able to express events in a natural progression through time; children begin to use a "what next" strategy. They later become able to adopt more advanced ways of organizing written work as described above in their use of genre. Expository writing skill - based on logical relationships rather than chronological order - begins to develop through the early grades and continues to develop through middle school and into highschool. It is quite common however, for highschool students to have difficulty with expository writing. This is likely the result of limited exposure to, and instruction about forms of exposition in the middle grades.

It is believed that maturing expository writing through the middle school years, may be the root of strong essay and research writing in later years. Strong personal or narrative writing in younger years, apparently does not relate to strong essay and research writing .

One of the later organizational skills to develop is the use of outlines to plan out a writing exercise. Despite the opportunity, few high school students make notes prior to a written task. It may be college age before writers use effective outlines to plan writing before a pencil is brought to paper, or a key is pressed. Planning seems to be a relatively late developing skill. This is also true of revision skills; the ability to critically read and analyze one's own writing also develops late.

Thinking and Writing

A strong relationship has been found between writing frequency and intellectual capacities. Organizational, critical thinking, logic and reasoning skills are fostered in writing exercises. Older more experienced readers become aware of the multiple demands of writing ( clarity, logic, audience etc.) These skills tend to pour over into other areas of intellectual functioning used in problem solving or creativity. Metalingustic awareness is the knowledge of the structures and rules of language, or the ability to think about and manipulate language.

Demands on conscious awareness increase dramatically when children are learning to read and write. From conscious letter to sound correspondence (phonemic awareness), to the ability to blend and segment (knowledge of the difference between onsets and ryhmes), on up to knowledge or organizational structures, genre, and audience, writers become aware of written language as a tool, using their knowledge of its characteristics to reach a wide variety of ends.

Sources of Variation in Writing Development

Two major influences on the development of writing skill have been identified 1. instructional and home experience, and 2. reading experience. Children who are encouraged to write, have writing implements available, have an interested audience, and come from families where writing is a valued skill, are more likely to develop into strong writers than children who do not have these influences present. Children who have models available from which to imitate their enthusiasm and skill with writing will they themselves grow into enthusiastic skilled writers, passing these characteristics onto another generation. Group writing exercises with both peer and teacher evaluations have also resulted in greater gains in writing quality than individualized writing assignments. And, as mentioned above, when a writing exercise is interesting, has a well defined purpose, and has a "real" audience, children are more likely to learn and retain what they have learned about writing, as well as the content they were writing about.

A second major influence on writing development is reading experience. It has been suggested that better readers are better writers. Exposure to print may be a better indicator of writing ability than skilled reading. While those with a reading disability are also likely to be poor writers, this is not always the case. Where appropriate repeated exposure to organizational structures, various types of written expression, and a broad range of vocabulary, can become expert writers but remain poor readers. Poor readers are not necessarily deficient in the creative aspects of writing, and with appropriate accommodations, such as spell checkers, grammar checkers, and a computer that will read back to them what they have written, they may be as successful at writing as their none reading disabled peers.

References

Berko-Gleason. J. (1993). The Development of Language. 3^rd Edition. Macmillan Publishing: New York.