Writing instruction versus writing authentically

The findings suggested that the pupils and teachers most commonly ascribed the purpose of grammatical terminology to one of two purposes: (i) increasing future education and employment prospects and (ii) increasing competency as a writer. There is always the danger that the concept learned in school will remain a verbalism rather than a true concept unless or until it is applied to situations or phenomena encountered by students in their everyday lives. However, even when talking about value, the teachers’ and pupils’ comments lacked detail. For example, the lack of clarity in purpose and value led a teacher to ask: ‘Do they need to say what it is if they can already use it?’ At another time, a pupil raised the same question: ‘Do we really need to know this?’ This seemed to run as an undercurrent to their stated beliefs, reflecting Bell’s (2016:160) findings of an ‘apparent inconsistency in staff beliefs about the value and purpose’ which was not always supported by ‘comments made in informal conversation’.

Part of the challenge of teaching and learning grammatical terminology lies in establishing what that everyday application of grammatical terminology might look like. Vygotsky argues that, typically, a scientific concept has no historical development, no link to personal experience, no spontaneous usage in everyday concrete situations, therefore motivation is potentially an inherent weakness of scientific concepts. The inverse is true of spontaneous concepts and positive examples of ‘reading’ and ‘being a reader’ can be found easily within the findings of this study (e.g. the pupil questionnaire demonstrated very high levels of confidence for pupils’ self-perceptions as readers). Therefore, given the high levels of syntactical abstraction within grammatical terminology, it is important to try to ascertain the nature, purpose and value which may, in turn, illuminate motive. As Vygotsky writes: ‘No psychological analysis of an utterance is complete until that plane is reached’ (1987:253).

As grammatical terminology is often situated within writing, it is important to consider the nature of motive for writing. The findings suggested that the pupils had the least motivation of all for writing. As one pupil said (and others around the table nodded in agreement): ‘And we hate, hate writing’.

Within the pupil questionnaires, writing was perceived in terms of transcriptional skills with the physical strain of handwriting alongside the need to maintain concentration over a prolonged period of time emerging as significant themes. Self-perception ratings were the lowest of all for writing, in stark contrast to the enthusiasm and confidence expressed for reading, and the enthusiasm observed in relation to reading children’s literature in class. The pupils’ negativity towards writing sat in juxtaposition to the perceived ease of the SPaG test (DfE 2013b), which did indeed enable the pupils to focus on “one thing at once”, albeit devoid of an authentic and meaningful context. In this way, there was an implied incongruence between the teachers’ attitudes and beliefs and those of the pupils, and potentially between the teachers’ espoused briefs and their actual practice. These were teachers who communicated a passionate commitment to children’s literature. Reading

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and writing were highly valued, and the teachers spoke of the importance of the pupils having ‘lots of opportunities to write’.

Vygotsky maintains that although writing enhances the intellectuality of the child’s actions, even in its minimal development writing is challenging and requires a high level of abstraction. He posits that writing has the longest journey of all to make, from the initial thought to inner speech, to word meanings, to external speech as the written word on the page. However, unlike speech, the motives for writing are more abstract and more detached from immediate needs of reality. Vygotsky identifies motive as the most significant component of this writing journey, as the element at the very beginning and as the deepest, most inward plane:

Thought is not the last of these planes. It is not born of other thoughts. Thought has its origins in the motivating sphere of consciousness, a sphere that includes our inclinations and needs, our interests and impulses, and our affect and emotion. The affective-volitional tendency stands behind every thought (1987:282).

Therefore, it could have been that the motive for writing was reduced by the nature of this writing which, as part of teaching writing explicitly, seemed very structured and pre-determined. While there is an important place for writing instruction that makes explicit, through teaching strategies such as demonstrations, “think- alouds” and practice examples, the implicit knowledge and understanding of the mature writer and the technical tools and conventions of writing, it may have been that this view of writing dominated the writing curriculum to too great an extent. It could be inferred that the many “writing opportunities” were characterised by writing instruction and writing practice and that this was in the absence of opportunities enabling the pupils to apply through exploration and experimentation their writing instruction to real-life, personally meaningful writing.

In her book, The Right to Write’, Cameron (2000:xvi) talks about ‘writing for the sake of writing’. In answering the question of purpose, ‘Why should we write?’ she states:

…writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul.

Graves (1983:3) describes children’s natural desire to write, to mark up walls, pavements, newspapers with chalks and crayons long before school begins in order that they might say, ‘I am’. McCormick Calkins (1991:23) posits that ‘reading and writing are ways in which human beings find significance and direction, beauty and intimacy, in their lives’ and recommends the freer, more collaborative classroom space of the Writing Workshop to enable this to happen. However, in contrast, it is interesting to note that there is no “writing for pleasure” equivalent to the current “reading for pleasure” movement included within the National Curriculum (e.g. DfE 2013a:41). Similarly, there seems to be no distinction made between helping pupils to learn to write alongside helping them to become writers who chose to write for their own enjoyment and satisfaction, as there is for reading. In this way, the emphasis on the enjoyment of reading sits in stark contrast to the ‘negative mythology that surrounds the writing life in our culture’ (Cameron 2000:xvi). Existing research and academic literature suggest many alternative writing-related perspectives and approaches. This includes the socio-cultural orientation of critical literacy, which deals with notions of discourse and power within what are non-neutral texts and positions (Janks, Dixon, Ferreira, Granville & Newfield 2014) and

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rhetorical grammar analysis framed as the art of using language effectively in the choices made about sentence structure and vocabulary (Kolln and Gray 2017).

This underlines the importance of re-considering the purpose and value of writing in order to find ways of increasing their intrinsic motivation as writers at school. This would lead to a better understanding of the purpose and value of grammatical terminology as positioned within school writing and thereby increase pupil motivation for a phenomenon inherently weak in motivation (Vygotsky 1987).

Within the findings, there was very little evidence of grammatical terminology being taught or talked about in relation to authorial choice, control, meaning and effect. This is discussed further in 5.4.2. That said, the key issue lies in the tensions created by what Hedegaard (2017) terms the motives and demands (in this case, pupils’ and teachers’ ‘motives’ versus curriculum and assessment ‘demands’) and the conflicting purposes and values within them, constraining any possible re-conceptualisations. There were a range of examples alluding to this, including around target setting. For example, during the writing conference, Kelly’s responses suggested that the terms were completely devoid of meaning, other than perhaps being a school mantra:

Kelly: I will improve verbs, adverbs and put more punctuation in. Me: Oh why is that then?

Kelly: Because I don’t use a lot of verbs, adjectives and punctuation. (PG1,1:1)

This may reflect the educational context and the pressure of high stakes accountability and assessment that frame – and constrain – teachers’ day-to-day pedagogical decision-making and dilemmas. As previously stated, the second most prominent purpose within the findings was related to increasing the pupils’ future education and employment prospects. This reflects the National Curriculum stated aims of teaching ‘essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens’ (DfE 2013a:6) and, while this is certainly not without huge importance, it reflects a performative, skills-based context within which writing, grammar and grammatical terminology sit.

Final assertion 7: The purpose and value of grammatical terminology was not clearly articulated and, while its purpose was typically associated with improving writing, the value of grammar and grammatical terminology within this did not seem to be clearly understood.