This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
5.14 Composition
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
Practical teaching approaches Part 2
Multisensory teaching in practice illustrated; comprehension, composition
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
Okay, so now we're going to talk about written expression, or
written composition,
and strategies that can be used to help with this skill.
So actually what I'm going to talk about is very parallel to what I
talked about with reading comprehension in previous segments.
So actually even if you've come straight to this segment on written composition,
it might be worth actually just listening to
the one on reading comprehension because the processes
are kind of mirror images of each other in terms of what you're trying to do.
And if you remember from previous weeks when we talked about writing, it's this
complex skill where you're bringing together many different tasks at once.
And so, to scaffold it, what we're really going to do is,
we're gonna take those different parts and we're going to try and
kind of stretch them out, take out the individual components.
So that the task is more manageable and students with dyslexia,
as we talked about, with reading comprehension there ... ...
... may be various hurdles for them or issues.
It could be that they're struggling with the spelling and
the sentence composition, and so this is meaning
that's it's actually hard to think beyond that and
think about the bigger picture of a longer piece of work.
Or it could be that there's graphomotor
issues that make written composition effortful.
So whatever the case, it's probably part of the process is difficult.
And so that's making the whole thing
really quite effortful and, not always successful.
So we will think through the various steps, so
first of all we're going to talk about what you can do at the pre-writing stages.
So here, again, as with reading comprehension, we're going to really
think about take some time to think about okay, what the task here?
And recruiting all the background knowledge we have,
recruiting the possible words we might be wanting to use for this.
So we're trying to then make the task of transcription a bit easier.
So you'll look at the writing task with your students.
Work out, discuss if they understand the key words in terms
of asking them exactly what they're expected to do.
Are they being asked to explain something?
Are they being asked to discuss something?
So all these words that could sound a bit similar to a student but
are asking actually very different things.
So make sure the student knows what's expected.
And then you can potentially have a free brainstorm of
anything that comes to mind about that topic.
And just as we talked about mind maps in the previous segment for
helping kind of draw out meaning, you can also use mind maps or
even less structured brainstorming, pieces of paper, pictures:
get the ideas down that don't need to be in a very organized state to begin with.
But again, do the bit that doesn't need the text.
Get the ideas out and start to think in that way.
Then we do need to think about organization.
And as with strategies in reading comprehension
there are strategies of making the implicit explicit,
really successful strategies for
writing as well, and there's been some research looking at this.
The research in writing is still very much behind the research in reading.
Reading's rather taken the lime light
so far in educational research.
The writing's definitely kind of coming in there and
so the research in what's best practice is definitely growing.
So in terms of where writing research is, a couple of key names in this area,
Karen Harris and Steve Graham, in the US,
who have done a lot of research on self-regulated strategy approaches.
And so going back to our task here, so we’ve brainstormed,
we’re thinking about how we’re going to structure our writing piece, and
so it’s gonna be useful to have, first of all,
we actually want some frameworks or some scaffolding.
Within which the student can put their ideas or their sentences.
So first of all, so you'll want to have a framework
that's gonna work for the task at hand.
And as we've said with reading comprehension it's not necessarily one
frame would fit all situations and so you will need to build up a collection
of templates that a student can use for different types of writing task.
But then again the aim here is this reduces the cognitive load
during the writing process itself, because some of the thinking
is kind of done beforehand in terms of this structuring.
So the student can start writing within this structure, and
as much as you can try and make the writing task an authentic one.
It can be hard, but I think sometimes if we're
asking students to write some instructions about something where
they know some instructions already exists, or something just feels a bit fake,
students know this, and I think, especially when you're struggling.
This can, it can just reduce your motivation to do it, just a bit more.
So, think of situations where you can write to a real author and
see if they'll respond, or write to a real person, see if you get a real response.
Or write to a newspaper, for real, and actually send it to the newspaper.
So, I think it can help to have an authentic writing task.
So, you do also, before you plunge into the writing to much,
it is also important that the student thinks about audience.
Because again, when you're in the flow of writing and just trying to get stuff out,
this idea of well, actually who am I addressing?
And should I use a more formal type of language or
should I use a colloquial style?
These kind of things almost sometimes some of the first are going
to fall out of the equation if the load is heavy.
So, again, you can pre-think about this.
Who am I writing to, and what's that going to mean in terms of my writing?
What kind of phrases might I use, or what kind of language?
So again, you're trying to make it so when the student does the writing,
there's some stuff that's already been taken care of.
So, they can do some drafting and then once you have some text, there's then
lots of ways in which we can think about, how do you edit and draft this?
And you have to take this carefully because I think if it's
effortful to write, often when you've done one draft, you feel like you're done.
You don't really want to see the thing again.
But part of the writing process for anyone, and
indeed research that's looked at skilled writers, shows that actually so
much of the process is in the editing and the drafting, and so even experts do this.
And so you're wanting to try and encourage the student to just
kind of take this as part of the process
and see the benefits too.
And again, what we want to do is make implicit, explicit.
So where you might automatically look something over and do certain checks
without really, consciously knowing what you're doing, we need to draw that out and
make it explicit for the student cuz it may not, it is likely not to be automatic.
So here's many acronyms that you can use.
One example is MAPS.
So when something is being written, the M is for Meaning.
Have I actually conveyed the message I wanted to in my sentences or paragraph?
Then you have an A so, have I got here Agreement
between my different grammatical tenses or my pronouns?
Are my sentences cohering with each other?
Then you have the P for Punctuation, so have I got all my punctuation in?
And again, with dyslexia, sometimes punctuation can kind of fall
to the wayside in the effort to just get the words out.
And then finally the Spelling, that's there.
So this is a fairly basic level check list.
You may want to tailor, come up with a mnemonic that's unique to a student,
or something that they come up with themselves.
Again, it needs to be a strategy that they want to use and can use.
So think about that for students.
And a book by Graham and Harris who I mentioned earlier called 'Writing Better' is
actually a really nice resource for these kind of self-checking templates.
So you can have a look and take ones that are useful.
So for now, we're at the end of the writing.
We've done some editing and revisions.
And next week,
we're gonna talk much more about technology in writing because actually
technology can increasingly make many parts of the writing process a lot easier.
It very much ties to what we're talking about now, but do stay tuned for
next week where we will talk about these steps of pre-writing,
writing and then revision, we can see those through a technology lens.
So technology is actually great for, again, reducing the load in some areas.
Okay, so that's technology.
So just to sum up what we've talked about in the last few minutes.
So basically, we're trying to break down the complex process of writing and
make it manageable chunks.
For each student,
there's gonna be a different area of writing that might be the hurdle.
So work out what that is, scaffold that part.
And as we said with reading as well, often writing is sometimes just an automatic
way for schools to allow students to demonstrate their knowledge or
kind of just finish up an activity by writing some answers.
But always be thinking with a student with dyslexia,
do we have to use writing in this sense?
Can the student actually explain their comprehension in a different way.
So, use writing strategically, is what I'm saying.
Have times when you really do focus on writing
because it's an important skill and it can be made manageable.
But also think of times when you
want the focus to be on the student demonstrating their knowledge and
whether their writing is really necessary.
Either you could have a scribe, or they could do an oral presentation as well.
So be flexible and yeah, make writing manageable in bite size chunks.
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