The ability to understand the genre of a piece of writing is possibly the most valuable information a teacher can learn. When a person decides to write something, they have a purpose in mind. Even if that purpose is purely expressive without any consideration for the reader, there is still an intention. By scrutinising and determining genres I have learned the ways in which ones choice of language and use of structure and grammar directly link to the genre.
This has had a marked impact on my teaching of writing. I no longer expect the children to be able to write unless they have seen the writings of others in that same genre. Through my own learning on this subject and in particular the deconstruction and reconstruction of writing, I have examined the way in which I teach. In an art lesson I would never expect the children to be able to begin work before looking at the work of famous artists or watching me model the skill. Even in maths lessons the children will watch a demonstration of how to use a particular method of calculating before they embark on using it themselves. I am now a devoted enthusiast to the encouraging of adults in my school to ensure their teaching is saturated with two main elements; the deconstruction of writing and then the modelling of it before we expect the children to be able to perform within the ‘rules’ of that particular genre. The teaching assistants in my classroom know what it means when they read on my plans that they are to jointly reconstruct a piece of writing and how that leads on to modelling writing and group writing in order to equip the children to be able to write in a similar way.
Psychologists define learning as "a relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience". After the cognitive revolution, the definition got revised in one important way: we now think of learning as a relatively permanent change in knowledge that occurs as a result of experience. I realise just how important it is that children experience good writing and can unpick that writing to understand what makes it good. The first staff meeting I led on the subject of genre, deconstruction and reconstruction I decided to entitle: You can only write well when you’ve seen good writing.
The literacy lessons in my class now regularly feature an analysis of genre; the deconstruction of a text and the reconstruction of it. I model writing on the interactive white board and we group write before the children embark on their own pieces.
In RE we were due to be learning about Eid al-Fitr and Eid-ul Adha, so I decided to take some text relating to this for deconstruction. We began by reading the text. Before the lesson I asked the teaching assistants to read through the text with Ray and Mac so that they could access it better during the lesson. With some forward planning it makes a huge difference to the children who would find it challenging as a first time read. Mac in particular with his behavioural difficulties is far more engaged when he understands. The children took turns to read the paragraphs so that everyone had an understanding of the text.
The children who celebrate Ramadan at home delighted in explaining the terms and we drew out similarities and differences with the Christian faith. The second time through the text, one sentence at a time, we highlighted the main words. We decided on the words that made the whole sentence make sense. So for example in the line, ‘Families gather in the homes of their eldest relative to exchange gifts and prepare special sweet dishes to be shared and eaten together…’ we underlined: families, eldest relative, gifts and sweet dishes. Each child had a copy of the text so that they too could be highlighting.
|
The final part of the process was to independently put these new skills into practice. The class had drawn out a yearly calendar for Christian festivals and I provided sheets of information on each one differentiated by reading level. The children therefore had two choices; the text difficulty and also the festival – the challenge being to re-produce information that was new to them.
|
With fiction, we deconstructed a piece of text from our class book, Matilda. I chose a short section to analyse and we looked at the structure of the scene setting and how a piece of past dialogue was used to ‘show and not tell’ the reader what the character was like as opposed to a more obvious description. We also looked at how Roald Dahl uses random pieces of information to inform the reader of a general characteristic of a person; together with deliberate repetition and how amusing and appealing that can be. For example:
Mr Wormwood was a small ratty-looking man whose front teeth stuck out underneath a thin ratty moustache. He liked to wear jackets with large brightly coloured checks and he sported ties that were usually yellow.
Then I modelled the reconstruction of the text, merely choosing different nouns and adjectives but sticking to the very same sentence structure. The next stage was for the children to have a go and some of them did this independently. Both the teaching assistants and myself used the group-writing technique with three groups; groups of less able writers and I worked with the boys who are reluctant to write. This led onto deconstructing other sections from the same author and reapplying the techniques in our own writing.
School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. I might write, "It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the sides of the abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she's learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all." (Matilda, R. Dahl, ch1)
Animal fact: The call of the howler monkey can be heard up to 3 miles away. It is the loudest land animal. |
A koala spends 18 hours a day sleeping. Your son does just the same. You should make him sleep at night so we no longer have to suffer his intolerable snoring. |
With my class I have observed the children grow in their understanding of the required features for a piece of writing connected to the genre. Instead of starting a writing activity with a ladder of expected features intended for them to include in their own writing, together we have un-picked pieces of writing and grown more of an innate understanding of the purpose of these different features.
One interesting observation that came about with the non-chronological writing was that the more able children such as Mik concentrated on the text and explanation of the facts whereas the less able children were more inventive with the structure and organisation. The latter often included drawings and diagrams to support their words. I was surprised by the motivation and interest by all pupils having feared the stunting of creativity and repetition of material for the more able.
Perhaps the most marked impact of deconstructing non-fiction has been watching the children tackle their own versions. I can hardly believe now that in the past I would ask them to pick out interesting facts from a text or research the internet before creating their own piece of work on a given subject. They were simply not equipped. As a parent I have struggled to help my children ‘complete a piece of A4 on the subject of a famous person’ when they have no clue where to start, not least understand what is expected of them other than the subject matter and the amount of paper to cover. The children in my class are now prepared and skilled in deconstruction and reconstruction for these types of assignments.
Similarly in deconstructing fiction, I found the quality of their writing so improved when they were emulating the style of an existing successful author. I have detailed a small section of the results of the process below.
When I modelled the reconstruction of the text I merely chose different nouns and adjectives but stuck to the very same sentence structure. So when Roald Dahl wrote:
|
Matilda’s parents owned quite a nice house with three bedrooms upstairs, while on the ground floor there was a dining-room, a living room and a kitchen. Her father was a dealer in second-hand cars... |
In my modelling it became:
|
Lilly’s grandparents lived in a rotten, tatty, old cottage with one bedroom upstairs and one kitchen downstairs that was also a dining room and a sitting room. Her grandfather used to be an architect but now he sits like a cabbage in his chair... |
I then did group writing with some rather reluctant boy writers:
|
Peter’s father and stepmother lived in a stinky jumbled up flat on Bitpongy Lane. When you walked through the front door (which was on the 17th floor) you were faced with a long corridor with several doors leading off it. His stepmother was extremely lazy when it came to cleaning |
And to pick one last example, here’s one child’s own independent creation:
|
Rosy lived with her uncle. The house they lived in was very big, but also very messy. They had ten bedrooms upstairs and a storage cupboard, a kitchen and a lounge downstairs. Her uncle worked for an art gallery. The art was beautiful. |
The more we have deconstructed existing texts in this way, the more I recognise traits of prevailing authors in their own ideas. It has particularly worked well with boys and also reluctant writers (a group that largely overlap!). Rather than be faced with a blank sheet before creating something on it, they are equipped and have a structure to follow. It has become my firm belief that thinking in a vacuum destroys creativity. Even for creative people such as myself I find that I like to start with some parameters. Not least because even very creative people cannot step over boundaries if there are none!
Teaching writing in this way has livened up the literacy lessons. It has brought a variety that the children have come to enjoy. Some lessons as we will see from other chapters in this report begin with almost no talking, just straight into writing and others, such as deconstruction, mean that there are lessons where they don’t even get their writing books out. As they come in from break and see some writing on the IWB they pull up their chairs and gather round to examine the text but interestingly they still see the lesson as a writing one! I’ve also used anonymous work from children in other classes in order to pick it apart and decide how best to improve it. When one does this with their own work, the starting position is one of failing to meet a standard and visibly lowers self-esteem. Why not use someone else’s work to critically analyse and preserve their potential feelings of inadequacy? It works well. It has never sat well with me that as a teacher I am required to ‘S.I.R.’ (Success Improve Respond) mark pieces of work. It is like giving with one hand and taking away with the other. To say ‘yes this piece of work is excellent because… and yet it could have been so much improved had you…’ seems a contradiction in terms.
Modelling writing has had such a big influence on the children’s work. I always involve their ideas and vocabulary but model varied sentence structures and vocabulary so that by the end of the piece they marvel at what they feel they have written. It’s been so rewarding to witness such satisfaction at having contributed to an effective piece of writing. I often say to the class that pinching ideas from good writers and making them your own is a great starting point. After all, when drawing another parallel with a cross-curricular lesson such as art, the children will copy Van Gogh’s Sunflowers before they attempt their own style and version.
There are two other spin-off effects that have tremendous impact on the children’s writing. One is the benefits to creative story planning and the other has been in group reading sessions.
After all the deconstruction/reconstruction work in fiction writing I decided to put the work to test the impact on the children’s story planning. I am embarrassed to admit despite detailing what I had learnt about not starting with a blank sheet, I did in fact give the children to all intents and purposes a blank sheet with ten blank boxes. Unsurprisingly the children were unable to divide their whole story ideas into ten boxes. Either each box was filled with rather disconnected thoughts or they began writing a story in the boxes.
When I marked the work I wrote things like, ‘don’t worry we’ll work on this…’ or ‘let’s tackle this again another way’. In the same way that when a child misbehaves I examine my own approach and decide how to alter it in order to get a better response from a child; I decided it was my teaching that needed altering in order to gain a better written result from the children.
When I marked the work I wrote things like, ‘don’t worry we’ll work on this…’ or ‘let’s tackle this again another way’. In the same way that when a child misbehaves I examine my own approach and decide how to alter it in order to get a better response from a child; I decided it was my teaching that needed altering in order to gain a better written result from the children.
I applied the deconstruction principle to whole story books. We brought the library story box into the class and broke each story down into a plan form (see appendix VI). I used headings to prompt them such as, ‘Who is the main character?’ Where is the story set? What is the problem? And how is it resolved? etc. Having done one together the children set about undoing loads of stories in this way. When we later repeated the disastrous story plan lesson, the children were perfectly equipped with the skills necessary to plan a story using the same prompt sheet that we’d used to deconstruct the story books. I’ve included the grand finale (right) a story from a child in the class who managed to integrate the whole term’s learning into her final piece. She planned it using the same structure and also included much of what we had learned from other authors. An area English advisor took it as an example of good primary school writing to a local secondary school. The teacher said she wished all of her year 9 students could write like this.
|
|
Group reading is the other place where I have found our teaching on genre and deconstruction to have an impact. I will detail this more in the next section on grammar but it altered my approach to these reading sessions. I no longer see them as a chance to purely progress reading, but also to improve writing. We examine the genre features; we talk about openings, settings, problems and solutions to name but a few.