We must always be wary of adopting any one, single approach that claims to be ‘the answer’ in the teaching and development of any aspect of pedagogy. Our role as professionals is to have our aspirations clearly defined, to approach teaching with an open mind, to try new things out and to evaluate their success on a continual basis, refining what we do and assessing it’s fitness for purpose.
When we teach writing, at KS2 and KS3, we might want to consider how to enable learners to:
- Form simple, compound and complex sentences
- Build a bank of structures and core language that they can manipulate well across a the range of contexts at GCSE
- Store language in, and retrieve it accurately from long-term memory
- Be attentive to detail, able to spot and correct errors
- Vary vocabulary and structures
- Write for different purposes, showing an awareness of style and register
It can be really beneficial to identify good audiences for the writing, to encourage accuracy and presentation skills; the audience could be the class (published on walls) the school (published in corridors) parents, exchange partners, e-twins, etc.
Look at the ALL Connect KS2 Writing Module for further ideas about how to develop writing in the primary phase, and the ALL Connect KS3 Extended Writing Module for ideas and resources in French, German and Spanish to develop both structured writing (translation) and extended response writing.
And finally…
We must remember that, whenever there are changes to a curriculum or educational policy, there is a tendency to assume that we need to change or abandon previous practice. Let us make sure that we retain any current practice that is already very effective!