Scaffolding students’ writing

Preparing students for writing: oral rehearsal

Speaking activities play a very important role in preparing students for writing. Most teachers will be familiar with brainstorming, concept mapping, and so on. These are very good ways to generate vocabulary and key ideas for writing. The inquiry Supporting spoken output and the associated materials, The ‘Say It’ activity – example and How ‘Say It’ supports students , outline the ‘Say It’ technique, which scaffolds students’ oral rehearsal of ideas and language.

PMI (Plus Minus Interesting)

In the PMI brainstorming technique, students’ ideas are categorised as being: Plus – in support of an idea; Minus – against an idea; and Interesting – other interesting points that come up. This is good preparation for writing an argument .

Cubing

Students who are preparing to write a report on a topic can use cubing to think about the topic from six different perspectives:

1. Describe it. Physically describe the topic. What does it look like? What is its colour, shape, texture, and size? Identify its parts.
2. Compare it. How is the topic similar to other topics/things? How is it different?
3. Associate it. What other topic or thing does the topic make you think of?
4. Analyse it. Look at the parts. How are they related? How are they put together?
5. Apply it. What can you do with the topic? What uses does it have?
6. Argue. Argue for or against it.

Students can do this orally, in a group context, by throwing a dice and having each person perform one of the six perspectives.

Using self-questioning scales

A self-questioning scale acts as a checklist for content. This tool shares some characteristics with the technique, familiar to most primary school teachers, of having the students ask themselves questions beginning with ‘4 Ws and an H’ (who, what, when, where, and how?). Self-questioning scales also make use of text structure.

When they are reading a text, students can use a self-questioning scale to check that they have located the information they need. They can also use the scale when they do their own writing, to check that they’ve included all the necessary information. This means that self-questioning scales help students make the links between reading and writing.

The following example of a self-questioning scale was designed for an explanation text on the curriculum-related topic “What did Sir Apirana Ngata see as the major problems facing rural Māori in the 1920s and 1930s? How did he attempt to solve these problems?”

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Ask yourself these questions to locate information in your reading text(s) to prepare you for writing. Then check that your own writing answers the questions.
Participants	___	Who/what group was involved?
Location	___	When/where did the situation take place?
Conditions	___	What factors were originally present?
Effects	___	What happened to change these conditions, or as a result of these conditions?
Event	___	What was the result of these factors, or what is now different from the original condition?

Notice that the teacher could have included an intermediate step of filling in an information transfer grid to make the link between their reading and their writing.

Using writing frames

‘Say It’, PMI, and Cubing are all very useful activities to prepare students for writing. For their actual writing, a writing frame can be extremely helpful, because the frame enables students to structure language and content in the way that is required by the purpose for which they are writing (as reflected in the genre or text type). (See the video clip Secondary curriculum and vocabulary .)

The inquiry Generic patterns in texts introduced the idea of generic patterning in texts. Different types of generic patterning in texts can be referred to as genres or text types. That inquiry also discussed ways in which the organisation of a genre or text type could be made explicit for students. Writing frames are one way of helping students use knowledge of text structure to support their writing.

Purposes for academic writing

“Most texts produced and read by students combine a range of genres” (Ministry of Education, 1996, page 156). This means that most texts have more than one purpose. On page 132 of Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13 (Ministry of Education, 2004), the main purposes for academic writing are listed as: identify, describe, explain, discuss, argue, justify, apply, analyse, and evaluate. Beside each of these purposes is a definition of the processes involved in it: for example, ‘explain’ is defined as “Write a detailed account of how and why – Procedures or methods; How things happen or work; reasons for action or event.”

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When students are explaining the reasons for an action or event, they need to be able to describe causes and effects and to use related expressions, such as ‘because’, ‘consequently’, ‘as a result’, ‘due to’, ‘leads to’, and ‘therefore’. It can be useful to use a writing frame, as in the example below, for cause and effect (also known as ‘result’). The kind of frame used in the example is called fishbone mapping .

Fishbone mapping

(From www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/actbank/sfish.htm .)

Other examples of graphic organisers (for cause and effect, problem and solution, tabulated format, and dot and jot) can be found on pages 163–164 of Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13 (Ministry of Education, 2004).

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