Children who struggle with reading typically struggle with writing. Even if their reading improves, their writing often doesn’t.
A common reason for their continued difficulty is the failure of their schools to adequately diagnose their writing problems. Instead, their schools limit diagnosis to grade equivalents from standardized tests — “Sawyer’s grade equivalent for writing was 2.9; he’s three years behind.” This statement fails to identify the current causes of Sawyer’s problems. It fails to tell his teachers and parents what he isn’t doing or can’t do that’s causing his writing problems. In all likelihood, instruction that’s built on an inadequate understanding of Sawyer’s problems will be inadequate. It will likely ignore or give short shrift to those parts of the writing process that should be stressed for Sawyer.
If your child struggles with writing, it’s essential to examine how he meets the demands of writing. In an excellent summary of how to teach writing to struggling writers, Tanya Santangelo, Karen R. Harris, and Steve Graham describe the demands. They assert that for a struggling writer to become a skilled writer, he must:
- Develop extensive knowledge of writing. Skilled writers know that good writing requires far more than good penmanship and knowledge of grammar and spelling. It must logically communicate important content in ways that interest its audience.
- Plan, compose, evaluate, and revise what he writes. Skilled writing is involved and systematic. It takes planning, writing, and evaluating and revising drafts — in other words, commitment — to write something that’s clear, focused, relevant, engaging, and concise. As Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and physicist, quipped, “This letter [is] longer than usual because I had not the time to make it shorter.”
- Plan carefully what he will write — before writing. “Prior to creating a draft, skilled writers devote significant … time to planning and developing goals [to] … guide what they say and do” (p. 4).
- Generate substantial content about his topic. “During the initial phases of writing, skilled writers frequently generate more content than they need and then eliminate superfluous ideas or information through the revision process” (p. 4). Without substantial content, readers will complain, “What a waste of time. I didn’t learn anything.”
- Revise his drafts. Revising requires writers to critically analyze what they’ve written, with an eye to cutting unneeded words, adding information, and rewriting and reorganizing sentences and paragraphs. This takes considerable thought and time. Writers who don’t revise their work or do so superficially produce poor work.
- Have good transcription skills. These include spelling, capitalization, punctuation, handwriting, and, in some cases, word processing skills.
- Persist, persist, and persist. Good writing is difficult, systematic, and time consuming. It requires students to think about what they want to write, gather and organize information, compose drafts, revise them, and solve problems of organization and phrasing that can seem insurmountable. This requires persistence — a quality of skilled writers.
If your child struggles with writing, ask the school personnel responsible for his program to assess his needs in all the facets of writing listed above. This is needed to determine the kind of writing instruction he needs.
If you would like a good understanding of how to teach writing to struggling writers, I encourage you to study Santangelo, Harris, and Graham’s article. If you think your child’s teachers would like to read it, give them a copy. But be careful not to insist that they follow its advice. Insisting is likely to backfire.
Reference. Santangelo, T., Harris, K. R., & Graham, S. (2007). Self-Regulated Strategy Development: A validated model to support students who struggle with writing. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 5(1), 1-20. [Available from Learning Disabilities Worldwide, www.ldworldwide.org.]
HM © Reading2008&Beyond
no comment untill now