Writer and researcher Jane Mace discusses the place of writing in the adult literacy core curriculum, and a new campaign to promote writing as an exciting and creative means of self-expression.

For many people, writing is something to be avoided: a chore to put off, if not something to be feared. Yet, in the adult literacy core curriculum for England, not much is said to dispel that feeling. As Ursula Howard, director of the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy, recently noted, the focus is on technical competence such as planning, grammar and spelling (Howard, 2005). This creates a risk that the new and inexperienced teacher, relying on a literal, or even over-literal implementation of the curriculum, may deny their students the chance to discover how writing can develop their "creativity, self-expression or critical thinking".

Furthermore, Ursula says, writing is left out of what counts as literacy achievement. In Skills for Life funding terms, literacy learning is still (despite complaints from literacy teachers all over the country) being measured by a test that is one of reading only.¹

Write Where You Are, a National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) campaign to promote writing as exciting and enjoyable, aims to provide a golden opportunity to help teachers overcome some of these problems. As part of this, Kate Tomlinson and I were commissioned to produce a range of ideas for teaching writing in adult literacy education. - the results are online at www.writewhereyouare.org.uk (no longer) .

Under the heading of 'Teaching Writing', the site provides three sections: A Note on Scribing, Tasters and Starting Points. (Regular readers of Literacy Today may recognise in the first some of the points I made in an earlier article about the uses of language experience for learners with very limited writing skills.²) Kate and I are both firm believers in writing as an activity open to all levels of skill and, in our experience, one that works best if there is an atmosphere of respect and humour, inspiration (often from other writing) and good feedback. For this reason, we decided to group the 'Starting Points' in three clusters: under the respective headings of 'talk and write', 'read and write' and 'edit and write'.

Within 'edit and write' one example focuses on adding interest. Our purpose in the activity is to get students to experiment with elaborating simple sentences; to generate group-written texts; and to practise editing and proof-reading. The teacher offers the class a simple sentence and invites them to discuss ways of making it more interesting. Students then each produce a simple sentence of their own; pass it to the person next to them, who adds another; and continue passing and writing until ideas run out. The group then read and share the texts produced, focusing on content first, discussing extra words that could fill out the story; then on noticing and correcting any mistakes they can find; making sure that at the end, time is left for them to reflect on how they felt about the whole activity.

Under 'talk and write', an activity around meetings is more complex and likely to take two or three sessions to work best. Its purpose is to empower students in the literacy of meetings. The activity engages them in a role play, giving them practice in effective meeting behaviour as well as in the tricky work of writing minutes. Downloadable support materials are provided: briefing notes on a fictional committee, its purpose and members; minutes of the previous meeting; agenda of the present one; and notes on 'A good chair' and 'Writing minutes'.

These and any of the other activities on the site can be mapped to the core curriculum according to the students who participate and the slant that a teacher will choose to take on them. They range across many kinds of writing purposes. NIACE's writing campaign gave us the chance to offer them to teachers in a way that, just possibly, could release the creative energy of their students and put them in touch with their own potential as writers.

1. Peter Lavender argues that in their present form the national tests are "an inflexible way of measuring individual progress" (2004). In a piece published in The Guardian on the same theme, I protested that the test had "nothing to do with the real world where people read and write" (2002).
2. Mace (2004)

References
U. Howard (2005) Learning to write in 21st century England, Reflect, issue 2, pp. 24-26.
P. Lavender (2004) Tests, targets and ptarmigans, in P. Lavender, J. Derrick and B. Brooks (eds) Testing, testing… 1, 2, 3: Assessment in adult literacy, language and numeracy. Leicester: NIACE.
J. Mace (2002) Can't someone in the real world write a proper test for literacy? The Guardian, Tuesday 28 May.
J. Mace (2004) Language experience: what's going on? Literacy Today, no. 39, p. 6.

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