How do the Features help students?

The Features of Effective Writing can help students to become better writers by:

Allowing students to focus their attention on just one feature at a time. By reducing the cognitive demands of writing, students can focus on the aspect of writing that is most important at each step of the writing process.

• Providing students with more opportunities to succeed by focusing on areas of strength as well as weakness. Evaluating student writing with five distinct scores helps students to see themselves as multidimensional writers, with weaknesses and strengths. Students who are poor spellers can be recognized for the quality of their ideas, while perfect spellers may realize that correct writing is not necessarily interesting writing. Students can learn to recognize their strengths and work to improve their areas of weakness.

• Making expectations visible to students. When students know the criteria by which they will be evaluated, they no longer have to rely on the teacher to make judgments about the quality of their writing. They can instead use the Features to revise their writing continually.

• Teaching students to become critical readers of their own writing. Students who are taught to diagnose and correct their own writing problems are on their way to becoming self-regulated, independent writers. By providing instructional support, including demonstrations of writing strategies, writing "think-alouds," guided practice in small-group settings, conferences with teacher and peers, and opportunities to transfer strategies to new contexts and genres of writing, teachers can move students toward independence.

• Teaching students to become critical readers of the writing of others. Students can use the Features to evaluate their peers' writing in order to give constructive feedback during conferences. Students can also learn to read critically and evaluate the writing of professional authors and to appropriate their techniques.

• What research says about the Features

North Carolina's model of five Features of Effective Writing is similar to another model, the Six Traits of Writing, on which there has been significant recent research. Although research on the effectiveness of teaching the Six Traits is relatively new, several studies show that the quality of writing improves when students are taught to use this model to evaluate their writing. In a study in Oregon, three fifth-grade classrooms where teachers taught the Six Traits as part of the writing process were compared to three classrooms in which students learned only the process. Students in the Six Traits classrooms scored higher on the state writing assessment than students in the process-only classrooms.

These preliminary results are confirmed by earlier research showing that teaching writingscales such as the Features of Effective Writing or the Six Traits improves the quality of students' writing. In his meta-analysis of twenty-five years of writing research, George Hillocks (1986) concluded that writing scales were the most effective way to improve student writing.

Research also shows the importance of integrating direct instruction into the writing process. Studies of classroom instructional modes have revealed that classrooms using an "environmental" mode of instruction, in which direct instruction was integrated into the writing process, were much more effective than classrooms that used the writing process alone. Unlike the "natural process" classrooms, which were characterized by low teacher input (a lack of direct instruction and guidance) and high student input, environmental classrooms were characterized by high input from both teachers and students, including both direct instruction and guided practice insmall groups. The least effective classrooms, characterized by high teacher input and low student input, focused on teaching traditional grammar and provided students with few opportunities to evaluate or revise their own writing.

Another study of effective language arts instruction in high schools, conducted by researchers at the National Center for English Learning Achievement, confirmed that teachers in higher achieving schools were more likely to teach skills in context, while teachers in more typical schools tended to teach skills in isolation with few opportunities for students to practice them inauthentic contexts.

Other studies support teaching students specific procedures for diagnosing and correcting their own writing problems. In studies of procedural facilitation,students were taught to evaluate their writing using question cards that helped them compare their writing to their original purpose, to diagnose any problems, and to operate to fix the problems to match their purpose (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987). Researchers have also successfully used cognitive strategy instructionand self-regulated strategy developmentto teach struggling writers procedures for planning and reviewing their writing (Harris and Graham, 1992).

References:

Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. 1987. The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Graves, Donald (1994). A Fresh Look at Writing. New York: Heinemann. Harris, Karen & Graham, Steve. 1992. Helping young writers master the craft: strategy instruction and self-regulation in the writing process. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.

Next in this series:Focus

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Product and process writing: A comparison Vanessa Steele

There are several ways to approach writing in the classroom. It should be said at the beginning that there is not necessarily any 'right' or 'best' way to teach writing skills. The best practice in any situation will depend on the type of student, the text type being studied, the school system and many other factors. Thus, this article cannot prescribe a system for the teaching of writing that is optimal for all teaching situations. Rather. 1 hope to describe and contrast two popular, yetvery different approaches, and examine how both can be used in the classroom.

· A product approach

• A process approach

• A summary of the differences

• Which approach to use

• One or the other

• Further reading

A product approach

This is a traditional approach, in which students are encouraged to mimic a model text, which is usually presented and analysed at an early stage. A model for such an approach is outlined below:

Stage I I

Model texts are read, and then features of the genre are highlighted. For example, if studying a formal letter, students' attention may be drawn to the importance of paragraphing and the language used to make formal requests. If studying a story, the focus may be on the techniques used to make the story interesting, and students focus on where and how the writer employs these techniques.

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