Six of the sessions observed involved some teaching of writing. The writing skills observed were proofing (3), planning writing (2), drafting, syntax and punctuation (all 1).
A number of the teachers commented that their learners’ writing skills were noticeably lower than their other skills (including reading) and that they found it difficult to make an impact on this skill – “writing is actually, in some ways, the hardest or the slowest to see progress in.” They also commented that they did not always find it easy to incorporate writing into their teaching sessions and it often tended to be missed out.
Several of the teachers commented that they consciously planned to include at least some writing in their sessions, even when the sessions were predominantly on another area such as numeracy.
They do short stories from time to time and read out in front of the class. We will usually choose a topic and people will write something about it, we will say do 250 words on whatever the topic is and they read it out. They absolutely hate doing it, but I think it’s good. I think it builds up their confidence over time and it also gets them into the habit. Quite often they have an idea in here and they are trying to get it down on paper and they miss out a lot.
One 1:1 teacher asked her learners at the conclusion of each session to write even a couple of sentences reflecting on what they had covered in that session and any insights they had gained from it. This writing was then read aloud as the first activity in the next session, to recap from the previous session, as a warm-up for the new session and as a means of identifying learning needs for subsequent sessions.
Even when rushing out for an appointment, one learner managed to write “I liked today’s coures [sic]" and signed it. Another teacher ensured that her students did some free writing in their learning journals in each session.
A typical writing session in an integrated class (with two teachers, one of which was a literacy specialist), involved the literacy teacher running part of the session on how to write an e-mail. She first gave them a handout about e-mails, then explained reasons for having this session (the previous week’s assessment showed that some had not written their e-mails correctly); the teacher then briefly talked them through the handout and then composed an example on the whiteboard, with the content and form generated as a result of the teacher’s questioning the learners.
In another session on letter-writing, another teacher first brain-stormed types of letters on the whiteboard; picking out one type of letter. She then produced an example of one cut into its main components, which the learners (in pairs) were asked to assemble into its correct order. The session was then completed by the teacher composing a model letter on the whiteboard, based on learners’ responses to her questions.