Writing in Key Stage 3 English – the view from here.

If you had to explain how to approach the teaching of writing at KS3 English, what would your response be?

Perhaps you might talk about the importance of establishing a context for writing, or touch on the role of sentence-level work, or maybe you would discuss how to use excellent models with students, or how to develop editing skills, or when to set clear writing goals, where to scaffold or encourage motivational talk, or how we can value translanguaging, establish writerly identity, feedback, assess.

All of these things and more feature in the effective teaching of writing.

It can be tricky to know where to start.

This blog sketches out ten broad pedagogical principles we can use to support planning for teaching writing in KS3 English, illustrated by reference to a year 7 sequence of learning (SoL) from my school.

In this SoL, we study non-fiction texts and students finish by writing a Survival Guide to Year 7 aimed at a Year 6 audience. The sequence is embedded within a thematic unit called ‘Your Voice Matters’.

As you can see below, I’ve done a brief explainer of why I think each principle is important, followed by an example of it in action – ‘writers at work’.

1. Authentic text-types, purpose and audience

Writing has a communicative purpose in the real world and is therefore shaped according to its context. It’s important that students have a clear understanding of this big picture when embarking on a piece of non-fiction writing because they’ll need to make language choices that achieve their purpose and satisfy their audience.

Writers at work

An explicit focus on ‘writing to inform and entertain’ frames our year 7 SoL and runs throughout the learning sequence. We have four broad questions:

What is non-fiction?
What are purpose, audience and topic/tone (PAT) and why are they important?
How do writers use language to inform and entertain their audience in non-fiction texts?
How can I plan and write a Survival Guide to Year 7 that informs and entertains a year 6 audience?

To begin, we spend some time exploring the fiction/non-fiction relationship, including this task.

With your partner, look at each pair of book covers and discuss which you think is a non-fiction book and which is a fiction book. Be ready to justify your ideas.

Here’s an example:

After this, we take some authentic texts on the topic of adventure/survival and develop our thinking about text-type, purpose and audience. Here’s a snapshot of a task we do around this:

This is a useful follow-up discussion taken from the English and Media Centre’s (EMC) ‘Non-fiction Shorts’ (we have their previous version, not the updated one).

2. Mentor texts – reading as writers

Genre awareness is a crucial tenet of writerly knowledge so exploring genre features through high quality mentor texts is a must for budding writers.

Writers at work

At this point, we rely heavily on an excellent Survival Guide and accompanying activities from the EMC’s anthology. Because the text is joyfully tricky to classify in terms of its audience, purpose and text-type, it’s brilliant for instigating deeper thinking about these concepts. The playful content also appeals to year 7. The title is ‘THE RULE OF THREES’ by Joel Levy.

Here’s a snippet from the first activity where we read the opening and make predictions.

This is followed by a book cover reveal and a return to our initial predictions to see if they need revising.

We then read the full text and continue to use the activities suggested in the EMC anthology which delve into the concept of tone. There’s a lovely blend of informal and formal language in the piece so students have to grapple with the intricacies of its mixed register, while evidencing their views on its varied tone. It’s well scaffolded as the activity offers different choices such as: is it serious or humorous? Crucially, students’ ideas hinge on their view of what the text is trying to do and who it might be aimed at.

As another great way to explore genre, purpose, audience, students write the blurb for ‘The Rule of Threes’. We compare a couple of models first, talking about differences and similarities (our own resource).

3. Sentence-level work, connecting reading with writing

Sentence-level work is more meaningful when it’s linked to the wider communicative purpose of a whole text.

I like this quote from The Writing for Pleasure Centre because it makes such an important point about how writers breathe life into their sentences by situating them within a whole-text,

‘Sentences are first conceived at the text level. A sentence is produced in response to a writer’s awareness of purpose, audience, content and genre.’
TheWfPCentre, Sentence-level instruction, Our viewpoint¹

The choice of which sentence-level features to focus on can be driven by the overarching-features of genre, audience, purpose and content – which particular structures are most salient in these text-types and why?

Writers at work

Firmly linked to our purpose of writing to inform and entertain, students do some playful, explicit sentence level work based on examples from ‘The Rule of Three’ text.

We work with ‘if’ clauses, imperative sentences, rhetorical questions and relative clauses. There are several examples of these sentence-level features throughout the text; you can see some in this snippet.

Our approach is influenced by Myhill’s work on Grammar for Writing which means we focus on the effect of the feature, not the grammatical label itself. We ask, ‘What does it make you think or feel? What did the writer want to achieve here? How does this feature help them to do this?’

For example, we do a mini-teaching sequence around using an ‘if’ clause (aka conditional clauses). We start by discussing how they are used in the text, then move on to some scaffolded writing as in the screenshot below, before introducing some more playful writing – switching clauses around, changing the topic and tone, discussing effects, but all still rooted in the same parameters of writing to inform/entertain/yr6-7 audience.

We also read a short information text about hippos and do some transformation work as students have to rewrite it in a much livelier style for a Survival Guide like the one we read. Again, it can begin with scaffolding, like this, but since interest level is high, our writers are keen to be creative with it.

As Myhill argues, it’s about showing students ‘a repertoire of possibilities’ so that they have the knowledge to choose particular features for particular effects when writing their own pieces. It is ‘not drills and exercises but looking at how grammar is working in real texts in real situations.’²

4. Word-level exploration

There’s a lot to gain from zooming in on specific word choices and discussing how they function in relation to a text’s purpose(s) and audience(s). Myhill’s grammar for writing pedagogy works just as well at this level.

Writers at work

Here, we ask students to identify informal vocabulary choices and then experiment with words that could be substituted to change the tone.

Another text we use is an article called ‘Lucky Accidents’ taken from Scoop magazine which targets a 9-12 year old audience and fits our criteria of being both informative and entertaining. One thing we do is focus on the use of adjectives in the opening paragraph by asking students to complete a cloze passage.

Then we do a bit of thinking around the creativity of the noun phrases which are alliteratively playful and humorous; both sound and imagery are exploited by the writer to appeal to the target audience.

5. Collaborative writing

If you want to make your writing toolbox zing, add collaborative writing! Not only does it encourage metalinguistic talk (talk about language choices), but it’s also incredibly motivating, creating a writerly buzz in the classroom. It can happen in many different ways – we’re huge fans of it at my school.

From his meta-analysis of writing instruction in the US, researcher and writing specialist Graham noted that one characteristic of ineffective practice was that ‘writing involved little collaboration among students.’ It’s certainly something that I haven’t seen discussed by teacher bloggers in the UK.

A dictogloss activity is one method for setting up collaborative writing in a lesson. It’s a staple of EAL pedagogy, where it’s used to support multilingual learners in their acquisition of academic language. It’s designed to be highly interactive, encouraging talk about language choices and effects, and culminating in a shared writing activity.

There’s a useful overview of how to do a dictogloss from The Bell Foundation.³ We first encountered this as part of a great training course from the National Literacy Trust on Disciplinary Writing.⁴

However, I’d say don’t get too caught up in rigidly following particular steps; be prepared to flex it depending on your class.

Writers at work

We subvert the dictogloss approach in our unit. Whereas its general aim is to get learners to reproduce the original text as closely as possible, we use it to encourage creativity and inventiveness.

First, we ‘warm-up’ the text we’ve chosen to read – the first main paragraph of our article, ‘Lucky Accidents’.

Next, we introduce some tricky words from the paragraph and make sure these are visible during the task.

Then, we crack on with the dictogloss activity, asking students to write down what they hear as we read the paragraph aloud a few times. Finally, they share their notes with a partner and jointly redraft them to produce their own version. This is when the rich learning (metalinguistic) talk happens as our writers are discussing different language choices, making writerly decisions about what to put where.

There are different ways for students to share their writing but because this style of writing is all about creating a lively, engaging ‘voice’, it lends itself well to a performance read. Also, good writers can hear the ‘voice’ in their text whereas struggling writers find this more difficult; reading aloud and listening to others can help with this. We follow up the readings with supportive feedback – ‘one thing I liked was…’

On the slide below, I’ve added the dictogloss passage, a snippet from a self-assessment task and typed up some sections of students’ writing. The highlighted examples replicate students’ own highlighting when they were asked to identify how they’d created an entertaining tone.

The dictogloss passage acts like a scaffold which students can subvert; it’s a type of model text but there’s a creative twist and open-endedness to the writing task.

6. Text-level features

Linguists call it cohesion: the subtle language moves that create meaning across a text, ensuring it makes sense to the reader. Exploring these langage moves at text-level matters because texts make sense as a whole, not just at the level of individual sentences and paragraphs. Writers need to understand how they might use whole-text organisational strategies such as discourse markers and topic sentences to sequence, link and develop ideas.

Writers at work

Through a sequencing task, we focus on the use of topic sentences (the first sentence of each paragraph) throughout the article, ‘Lucky Accidents’

To work out the sequence, learners need to look carefully for language clues that link the sentences and suggest the order. The actual answer is not entirely obvious, so there’s room for some fruitful debate as students justify their choices.

7. Setting writing goals – writing with the reader in mind

By setting writing goals we shape the extended writing task and provide our students with a clear idea of what they are trying to achieve. Also, clear goals enable writers to monitor their writing process. For example, when planning they can ask – what goals am I trying to accomplish and how can I achieve them? Good writers will have the ability to self-regulate like this; it’s an important writerly disposition.

Writers at work

We introduce our final, extended writing task by establishing our writing goals.

Throughout the subsequent planning, writing, editing process we model how to use these goals to monitor our progress by thinking aloud:

‘What goals am I trying to accomplish? I need to make it entertaining and informative.’

‘Who is my target audience? Will this interest my year 6 audience?’

Thinking aloud is a powerful tactic for encouraging students to make sure they are writing with their reader in mind.

8. Constructing ‘success criteria’

This is more meaningful if it’s done as a joint enterprise with the students. If they’ve been immersed in a range of model texts by reading as writers, then they’ll have lots of ideas that can be taken and, with a little teacher guidance perhaps, shaped into success criteria. Foregrounding the writing goals also helps with this discussion – how will you inform and entertain your target audience?

Writers at work

We do two things at this point. Firstly, we share a bad model, a WABOLL (what a bad one looks like), and ask students if they think it achieves its purpose. This simple question is like dynamite – students love playing the expert editor and offering their constructive criticism. Among other things, they will mention how the tone is boring (yawn) and even patronising.

We show students what the paragraph looks like after some editorial input, returning to our question: will the target audience be interested in this? Why?

Secondly, we share another bland, boring paragraph but we ask students to rewrite it themselves. By this point, they are eager to get stuck in and transform it themselves. In my experience, students absolutely love this type of task because it allows them to be the editor of someone else’s work and show off their ‘better’ writing skills!

If needed, we have a few more model sentences to drip feed into the writing although it can be enough to walk round the room and pull out examples from the writing in progress.

When we turn to co-constructing our list of effective features you can imagine how, by now, students have a whole range of suitable ideas. It’s a really good way to wrap feedback on their learning into the task – it tells us, and them, what they understand to be effective features of this type of writing. In short, what they have learnt so far. Usually, they will surprise us with their super ideas, ranging from content, tone and language devices to types of punctuation and visual aids.

9. Planning

Just as with other aspects of the writing process, modelling how to plan offers support to students. Of course, they can only start to organise ideas if they have plenty to say in the first place so it’s important that students have generated lots of ideas through rich, memorable stimuli in the lead up to extended writing. Planning can be modelled in various ways.

Writers at work

With our task, students have no problem generating ideas because the topic draws directly on their own experience of school.

We share part of a another model Survival Guide, discussing its effectiveness in relation to our writing goals and success criteria. Then, we ‘live’ model what the plan/notes for this might have looked like, taking suggestions from students and transferring them straight into a planning grid (this method is sometimes called reverse or backwards planning).

When the students plan their own piece, we give them the same blank template to help them organise their ideas. Our success criteria is summarised at the bottom of the sheet.

This is a huge confidence boost pre-writing: students know that they’ve got something to say, they know how to organise it and they know how they might use language to achieve their purpose.

Throughout all of this, we make it clear that good writers innovate and take risks with their own piece.

10. Writing, editing and publishing.

As students are writing and editing it’s useful to remind them of the writing goals – ‘I am writing for…..’/‘Will my target audience trust/believe this?’

Once a draft has been written, doing some form of self or peer assessment linked to the jointly constructed success criteria can feed into the editing process.

Asking students to give very specific feedback – what is your favourite sentence and why? – is often more useful.

Also, if students know that their piece will have a real audience via publication, it will spur them on to take their editorial role very seriously!

Writers at work

For us, this is an assessed piece of writing so students work quietly to write their draft. We then do both self and peer assessment using a scoring sheet.

As you can see, it’s detailed and specific but allows for personal response to the writing and some dialogue with their partner.

In reality, with almost 300 students in the year group and over 14 feeder schools, we can’t publish (send off) all the pieces. However, we tell students from the start that we can send their piece to their Primary School if they wish and I know that colleagues have done this. Sharing them around the class at least widens the audience from just the teacher.

Translanguaging – an approach that can be woven in throughout

It might be appropriate to encourage multilingual learners with strong literacy in their ‘first’ language to write their draft using this language. For a brilliant overview of translanguaging as a pedagogical tool in the classroom, please visit The Bell Foundation website.⁵ Here’s a taster:

‘It’s a pedagogical strategy that includes the intentional use of different languages allowing students to use all their languages for teaching and learning purposes.’
Cenoz and Gorter (2011), taken from The Bell Foundation.

Writers at work

As with the dictogloss activity, this pedagogical tool can be used creatively here. The final writing task gives our multilingual students a glorious opportunity to employ their language repertoire to achieve their writerly goals by including messages written in several languages if they wish. We talk about how they could use their multilingual identity to build a relationship with those year 6 students who share the same language(s), and the effect of including another language alongside English.

In conclusion…

An admission: we created this writing sequence in the summer term 2021 as our students were returning back to the classroom after the second UK covid lockdown. We wanted to do some supported, motivating work around non-fiction writing but found chosing a focus tricky, given recent events and the fact that we had to cater for a blended learning situation, something that they could work on at home if necessary (hence all the slides). We didn’t necessarily intend this to be a sequence we’d keep using but my colleagues value the approaches developed here because they see students responding well and enjoying writing.

The final task might sound a little ordinary but this is somewhat my point. While I’m certainly not making any overblown claims about our modest SoL, I do think its important to reflect on how we can create a motivating writing environment.

This year, The National Literacy Trust’s headline-grabbing report into children and young people’s writing enjoyment found ‘alarmingly low levels of writing enjoyment’.6 Although the report had a significant focus on attitudes to writing in free time, we might draw some correlation between that and how they feel about writing in the classroom. These findings should provoke hard-thinking about how we can help raise enjoyment levels towards writing. I don’t have all the answers but …

I wonder if one or two of the solutions to the decline in young people’s enjoyment of writing are hiding in plain sight.

Thanks for reading. Thanks also to my fellow planning team colleagues: Helen and Sheetal.

References (apologies, these look messy but wordpress is being glitchy and won’t insert the links properly!)