|
2007
In October 2007 the annual the Foundation Stage Profile, based on teachers’ observations over 500,000 children, found that 40% of children struggle to write their name and to sound out letters to form simple words by the time they are five. More than a fifth had difficulties making a coherent sentence. The assessments also found that children from the poorest areas fell behind pupils from more affluent areas in communication and social skills.
In September 2007, the DCSF announced a programme of intensive support for writing in primary schools – Every Child A Writer.
2006
In June 2006, researchers from
London University's Institute of Education published a report which said that all primaries
should have a handwriting policy and a dedicated member of
staff to teach it. The report recommended that primary-aged
children should be taught how to write properly and adopt
a nationally-prescribed handwriting style. It also said the policy should take into account
the problems encountered by left-handed children and those
whose first language is not English.
The policy would include instructions
on what types of pen and paper children should use. The researchers
found that lined paper is often helpful for pupils with handwriting
difficulties. The researchers interviewed teachers at 39 primaries
in London and the South-east. Slightly more than half said
that they set aside an area of the curriculum in which to
teach writing. A third taught it inside and outside the literacy
hour, as recommended in government guidelines. More than half the teachers
questioned said that they thought it would be beneficial to
have a national style for writing. The researchers claimed that poor
speed-writing is a key reason why only 63% of Year 6 pupils
achieve the expected level 4 in their key stage 2 tests.
Julia Strong, of the National Literacy
Trust, said: "If you have poor handwriting, people think you're
silly when you're not. That can cause depression. And girls
in particular can suffer from an obsession with neatness,
at the expense of content. Having someone in school who can
look at handwriting and work with children can be very useful." To find out more on handwriting policy
and practice in English primary schools visit www.ioe.ac.uk/publications
2004
In 2004. the Telegraph reported that as part of compiling the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford
Dictionary, researchers discovered an increasing confusion
over simple words and phrases. One in five believes we should
'tow' the line instead of 'toe' the line. A further 10% 'pour'
over a book when we should 'pore' over it. The alarming increase
in 'mass dyslexia' was picked up by the dictionary's 100 researchers
worldwide on the look out for new words.
As they searched
the Oxford English Corpus, a database of 400 million written
words, they discovered that while spelling remained reasonably
strong, more and more writers were mixing up like-sounding
words and phrases. The team believed that the chief explanation
was the use of the computer spell check, which does not spot
errors of meaning. They also thought that the explosion of the
numbers of people writing, mainly due to the internet, meant
that more errors were bound to creep in. Whether such mistakes
will, in time, spill over into more formal types of writing
is yet to be seen. The question is: does it matter if in a
generation's time people are writing about 'pouring over magazines'
or 'towing the line'?
In 2004, Emphasis Training, a rival campaign to the Plain English Campaign, conducted a survey of 150 companies and found they felt an average of 17% of the documents they received were badly written, with emails the worst. Faults regarded as most vexing were bad punctuation (34%), bad spelling (31%), jargon (10%), 'generally hard to understand' (16%) and misuse of words (8%). Unexplained acronyms and unclear technical terms also caused anger.
2003
In 2003, the TES reported on StoryStation, a computer programme that teaches primary children how to improve their stories, was to be tested across Scotland following trials in two schools. StoryStation scans text to assess how imaginative the child has been and offers suggestions on spicing up the narrative. The programme was developed as part of the Edinburgh-Stanford Link, a five-year research project between Scottish Enterprise and Edinburgh University and Stanford University in California, both world-class research centres in speech and language technology. Research projects must have commercial potential.
StoryStation keeps to the latest curriculum guidelines and does not tell children how to write but rather suggests ways of improving their work. Virtual characters are used to suggest ways to improve spelling and vocabulary. It can also be used as an assessment tool to give teachers feedback on pupil progress. It was designed for children aged 10 and above who are competent writers but would benefit from help. The designers are now considering enhancing StoryStation, adding a phonetic dictionary to help spelling as well as a plot analysis tool that will help children write better stories.
Sue Palmer, a literacy consultant, told the TES in January 2003 how reading aloud can help teach the music of language: "The problem is that encouraging children to read out loud, as well as listening to others read, is a simple, effective way of familiarising them with the patterns and rhythms of written language. Written language is different from the spoken version. Speech is interactive - we bat words and phrases back and forth - and produced within a shared context, so it's fragmented, disorganised and a great deal of meaning goes on the nod.
"Writing has long been the problem area of literacy. We now know that early phonics is an important requisite, and fluent handwriting helps, but it is also clear that to write well children need to grow familiar with written language patterns. The National Literacy Strategy has so far tackled the aspect of written composition through shared writing, involving increased attention to grammatical construction. However, another, and certainly more natural way to pick up linguistic patterns and rhythms is through speaking and hearing them.
"Reading aloud gives children the chance to hear literate language patterns produced from their own mouths, to know how standard English and sophisticated vocabulary feels, to respond physically to the ebb and flow of well-constructed sentences, learning incidentally how punctuation guides meaning and expression. We should be looking throughout the curriculum for opportunities for children to read decent texts aloud, and encouraging other rhetorical exercises such as reciting poetry, learning scripts and declaiming speeches."
2002
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's evaluation of national assessment tests in 2001 identified some key issues for writing published in Standards at key stage 3 English (QCA, January 2002). Writing attainment continued to lag behind reading. There were two significant issues which were common across the key stages arising from the evidence.
1. The use of full stops and capital letters was not sufficiently secure, and there was some evidence of a decline in the accurate use of sentence boundary markers. This was also seen in the increasing occurrence of the comma splice at key stages 2 and 3.
As pupils learn to write more complex sentences, they should be taught to consider explicitly where sense and sentences end. Rather than assuming that pupils know about full stops and that their omission is a proofreading issue, teachers need to teach clearly the placing of full stops in more complex sentences.
2. In narrative writing, reliance on straightforward chronological organisation was dominant. Paragraphing to link action, character, motive and setting effectively needed to be explicitly taught, as an alternative to paragraphs driven by time - Then, The next day, After .
A lack of structure is evident in the frequency of ineffective endings to narratives. Stories often begin well, but endings do not then link back to openings or offer satisfying resolutions. In tests, pupils are under time pressure, so they need to plan first and effectively, and their plans should include how to end their story.
2001
In 2001, the Developing
Early Writing manual (ref: DfEE 0055/2001) was published by the National Literacy Strategy to advise teachers of five to seven-year-olds
on making children spent at least 15 minutes a day
on spelling and handwriting. Teachers were told to teach the
handwriting and spelling separately and not just as part of
story writing.
National results for eleven-year-olds suggested that the literacy
hour had failed to improve standards in writing. The manual advised infant class teachers to teach phonics,
spelling and handwriting systematically and directly so that
children could develop accuracy and speed.
The Scottish Executive also published a report of the national seminars held to consider the Scottish HMI report Improving Writing 5-14, which included material about good practice and sharing experience. It is online in PDF file format at www.scotland.gov.uk/deleted//library2/doc09/imwr-05.asp
2000
In November 2000, the Daily Mail reported that 38 schools that were identified by inspections as teaching
writing well were to be given £35,000 each to help them
pass on the secrets of their success. The writing 'beacons'
hosted workshops for nearby schools.
The TES reported that, according to research by advertising agency McCann-Erickson in 2000,
the trend for ignoring spelling in emails, and vowels in mobile-phone
text messages could have a lasting damaging affect on written
language as children continue this shorthand into adulthood.
The agency interviewed around 100 five to 99-year-olds to
identify future trends in communications technology.
The teaching of writing in primary schools: could do better, a discussion paper (Ofsted, June 2000)
was published exclusively online. The paper summarised earlier evidence from Ofsted about the teaching of writing within the NLS, with examples of good practice. In a 10-page discussion paper, Ofsted says that there is insufficient attention given to writing, and that where it was taught, too many lessons displayed weakness. For example, in the 300 literacy hours observed by Ofsted in the autumn term of 1999 there was no shared writing in three-quarters of the lessons, although the balance between writing and reading was better in the guided sessions. The paper also stated that the skills learned in literacy lessons were insufficiently transferred into work in other subjects, for example, writing accounts in history, reports of investigations in science, or explanations in geography.
Teachers were criticised for relying on worksheets emphasising creativity rather than grammar, and the belief that providing pupils with a stimulating idea is enough to encourage good writing, without the necessary teaching before and during the writing process. For a copy of the report visit the Ofsted site and see publications: www.ofsted.gov.uk/.
In December 2007, research by Warwick University found that children who concentrate on having neat handwriting tend to do worse in exams. The researchers said that they should instead spend their time concentrating on writing quickly rather than forming perfect letters. They found that children’s attention is diverted from complex aspects of writing, such as storylines and vocabulary, when they were concentrating on being neat. The researchers criticised the national literacy strategy for focussing too much on letter formation and not ‘automatic writing’ – which is the ability to write fast and clearly without concentrating too hard on forming each individual letter.
In June 2006, the Institute of Education University of London, published Handwriting policy and practice in English primary schools. The researchers surveyed 39 large and small urban and rural primary schools in southeast England with varied socio-economic and ethnic pupil populations. They found that while most of the schools had a designated person responsible for handwriting, and a handwriting policy, a quarter had one without the other. Over half of the teachers surveyed felt that they had not received sufficient training in the teaching of handwriting, and only one-third had been shown how to teach handwriting in their initial teacher-training course. There was very limited awareness of the needs of children used to writing in a different script, with only four schools in the survey including some consideration of how to accommodate them. For more details of the report visit: ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=1397&1397_1=14041
The Times reported in June 2000 that students who can write quickly by hand achieve up to a grade higher at GCSE regardless of academic ability, according to a study of the role of handwriting in exam success. Boys who struggled to join up their letters scored half a grade below classmates of similar potential at English GCSE, and girls a whole grade lower, the researchers found. They also found that slow handwriters tended to be poor spellers.
The study, for the Teacher Training Agency, increased pressure for handwriting to be more rigorously taught as it is in France where children spend more time on writing than reading between the ages of three and eight. In France, the researchers noted, teachers believe that fluent handwriting "unlocks the mind".
Children of similar abilities but different writing speeds were monitored for their performance by a team at Lord Williams's Comprehensive School in Thame, Oxfordshire. Nearly 1,200 children aged 11 to 16 took part in the research. The team called for more emphasis on handwriting as part of the Government's primary literacy strategy. The researchers concluded: "Continued attention to handwriting throughout school years is essential and an early start with joined up writing will aid a process that is far more than purely physical.
The national curriculum in England demands that children in infant school be taught how to join letters long before they're seven. In March 2000, the Guardian reported on Fiona Thomas, teacher at Herne Infants School, Herne Bay, Kent, who became interested in the French approach to handwriting and researched and implemented a form of it for pupils at her school. The reception class works with patterns of circles, obliques, crosses, stars and lines, undulating, zigzagging and looped. In the music room they work with rhythms and in PE, exercises are designed to loosen the muscles of the arm and wrist. Mrs Thomas found that fluent writing helps with spelling and punctuation. "They learn to think and write in sentences earlier too", she says.
| 80px.gif)
