What should Ms. Lin know in order to provide effective writing instruction?

Transcript: Steve Graham, EdD

There’s two ways in which transcription skills are developed. One is by explicitly teaching. The second part is fluency: how fast you can do this.

So for example, with handwriting, we typically teach kids how to form individual letters. We try to make sure that they have a pencil grip that is not killing the pen. They position their papers correctly because that determines the slant, and they’re concerned about various aspects of neatness. Those things can be taught directly. Fluency mostly develops as a result of writing and writing a lot. So the more you write, the more fluent you become with handwriting skills.

Spelling is the same kind of thing. It develops in two different ways. One is by explicitly teaching skills. The way that we typically do that is teach kids to spell correctly the words that they’re most likely to use in their writing. The other aspect of development in spelling is incidental or informal. As kids read, they pick up the spellings of some words.

Transcript: Natalie Olinghouse, PhD (Activity Feecback)

These two activities were to show you how low-level writing skills can impact the writing process. For example, low-level writing skills, or basic writing skills—which are handwriting, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and sentence structure—they’re really important. In the first writing activity, you could focus all of your cognitive resources on high-level writing skills, like planning, generating ideas, language at the sentence and text levels, and reviewing what you wrote so that your composition was coherent. In the second activity, you needed to spend much of your cognitive resources on the low-level skills because you struggled to remember all those unfamiliar rules and you had to write with your nondominant hand. You might have felt frustrated yourself in the second activity as you tried to remember unfamiliar spelling and sentence-construction rules while writing with your nondominant hand. Imagine how a student feels doing writing tasks in your classroom if he or she is experiencing similar problems.

Transcript: Natalie Olinghouse, PhD (Suggestions)

So what can you do as a teacher? It’s important to know that effective writing instruction integrates both high-level skills—such as planning, revising, and thinking about language—and low-level writing skills, which are handwriting, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and sentence structure. For example, a lack of automaticity in these low-level writing skills means a student may not be able to write fast enough to keep up with his or her thoughts. In addition, they might have to attend to basic writing skills that interrupt the planning process. Thinking about how to spell a word or structure a sentence makes it difficult to remember what you were going to write next. Also, students who struggle with spelling or sentence-construction skills might use a restricted written vocabulary or a simple sentence structure. That can result in poor writing quality. Another problem could be that written compositions with a lot of errors or illegible handwriting are consistently judged lower in quality, even though the ideas in the composition might be good. And, students who have difficulties with low-level writing skills might not have motivation to write, avoiding writing both at school and at home. Ideally, your program should include instruction on basic writing skills and a student’s knowledge about writing, strategies for writing, and motivation for writing. A good writing program should work towards automatizing low-level skills so that cognitive resources can be allocated to high-level skills. This requires that low-level and high-level skills are taught together. For students who are struggling with basic writing skills, you may need to add explicit and supplemental instruction embedded in meaningful activities.