Junior School News 

Talk for Writing

Unsurprisingly, the best writers in any class are always readers. Reading influences writing - the richness, depth and breadth of reading determines the writer that we become.

                                                                                                   ~ Pie Corbett, Talk For Writing

Many students find the writing process, both fiction and non-fiction, extremely challenging. These students may have wonderful ideas, but struggle to get their thoughts onto the page. Even those who read reasonably well can experience difficulty with written expression.  

As children read and are read to, they store patterns that form the building blocks of written expression. In order to write sentence patterns appropriate to a given text (e.g. a recount starts with ‘when, who, what and where’ elements), children need to have these patterns modelled with multiple opportunities to say them before being expected to write them. 

In Talk For Writing, the process of “Imitation – Innovation – Invention” is explored. Students learn to orally recite and act out popular stories through listening and reading. The teacher maps out the story using pictures to aid students’ memory. The repetition allows the students to interact with the text and helps them to internalise the language patterns and text features. Students are then taught to use the underlying structure of the original text to create their own version on a different topic. Over time, they move towards independent writing as they create texts about their own topics.

Talk for Writingis a unique process that uses spoken activities to develop writing skills. Quality writing is created by first expanding and developing students’ oral language skills and then teaching the necessary steps for exceptional sentence, paragraph and text construction. Talk for Writinghas the potential to dramatically improve students’ writing. The approach also offers students with learning and language difficulties an opportunity to develop stronger writing skills. Feedback from students indicates that they find Talk for Writing ‘fun, engaging and motivating’.

Warm regards, 

Mrs Christine Pitman

Head of Junior School (Year 3 to Year 6)