An overarching problem encountered in many classrooms is having our students write the way they speak. Why do they do this?

Language acquisition is a biologically primary skill, meaning humans will naturally learn how to speak. However, the written word is a skill that must be taught.

As a new year begins, with it is the promise and hope of uninterrupted learning in 2022. One of the findings from lockdown that has brought so much clarity to our writing instruction, is the understanding of what explicit teaching can actually achieve. Despite two years in and out of online learning we have made some important discoveries about the building blocks that boost learning in writing and the tools to measure it.

One of the questions we have had from members of the TFE Writing Network has been related to genre teaching. Teaching writing in the context of genres is a common practice in Australia particularly due to our curriculum progressions that specify across several year levels: an expectation that students will be able to produce ‘imaginative, informative and persuasive’ texts. In Victoria this is first mentioned in Year 1.

This was highlighted when a friend recently called me during one of our lockdowns, frustrated at watching her Year 2 daughter cry during an online writing lesson where she was required to come up with a problem, solution and list of characters. Why was this so hard for her and why was I not surprised having seen this many times in an early years classroom? An understanding of genres is important. We know it makes a difference and students need to be able to write about different topics and create specific compositions. So perhaps the problem lies in the way we teach it.

I once had a student who loved rhinos. After all, what's not to love? During ‘free choice’ writing sessions (the opportunity for students to engage and communicate across genres of their choice), this student continued to write about rhinos in several formats. There was the narrative on rhinos, the persuasive, the poem – both Acrostic and Haiku.

His writing was engaging, passionate, showed an awareness of purpose and audience, but what niggled at me was that I wasn’t teaching him anything.

Actually, what I found was that my competent writers avoided authorial risks. They wrote texts where the topic was the focus, while writers who found writing challenging, continued to find it so. The struggle to engage was confronting.