Secondary School, Writing Curriculum

Instructional Strategies

The three processes identified as being critical to effective writing instruction are planning, writing, and revision. It is important for teachers to have opportunities to learn more effective procedures for teaching writing to apply the most effective strategies in their classrooms. The direct teaching of focused and intensive writing techniques appears to be more successful than is relying on general process techniques. When the organizational skills necessary for successful writing were emphasized throughout a unit, increases in students' scores on the organizational quality of their essay writing from the pretest to the posttest assessments have been found especially for students who received low scores on the pretest.

Good writers apply a rich vocabulary and correct grammar to convey their written point to their readers. Before students can write descriptively, they must possess a rich vocabulary. An extensive vocabulary is one of the characteristics that is most highly correlated with intelligence. A comprehensive vocabulary development program should be integrated into a secondary writing curriculum and include regular emphasis on interesting words encountered, direct instruction of techniques or procedures to develop a varied vocabulary, connected learning, and practice and repetition. Vocabulary development is enhanced through excellent reading instruction and diverse reading resources.

Writing is an advanced language task and is taught naturally and most effectively when integrated with reading instruction. Interrelated activities organizing instruction into broad, thematically based clusters of work through which reading, writing, and speaking activities are integrated promotes understanding of ideas. Furthermore, a balanced teaching of critical reading and writing skills can be embedded in the context of total language learning through direct instruction. Writing journals have been found to be valued by teachers and students alike for helping in various other aspects of the English curriculum.

Another instructional emphasis that enhances writing is the use of metacognitive strategies. [Page 786]Ample guided practice should be provided by having students use metacognition control strategies for as many appropriate tasks as possible, providing reinforcement and feedback on how students can improve their execution of the strategies. Students need to practice self-monitoring of their performance when using the strategies, and teachers need to encourage generalization of the strategies by having students use them with different types of materials in a variety of content areas. Moreover, all students need teachers to explain writing task expectations clearly and fully.

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