Report calls for action in 11 areas
to improve adolescents’ writing skills

by Lew Armistead

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(A photo from our 2006 Summer Leadership Institute.)

Contending that “few high school students write well enough to meet the need of employers or colleges,” a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education recommends 11 classroom strategies to help students become better writers. The report, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools, was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and written by Steve Graham, Peabody College of Education, Vanderbilt University, and Delores Perin, Teachers College, Columbia University.

“Writing well is not just an option for young people—it is a necessity,” the report reads. “Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for participating in civic life and the global economy. Yet, every year in the United States large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required by colleges or employers.”

Reporting that writing is “a topic that has previously not received enough attention from researchers or educators,” the authors recommend 11 elements of effective adolescent writing instruction to help 4th to 12th graders become more proficient writers. The authors analyzed experimental and quasi-experimental research on adolescent writing to develop the list of 11 elements.

The 11 elements in priority order of their impact on improving writing are:

Writing Strategies. “Strategy instruction involves explicitly and systematically teaching steps necessary for planning, revising, and/or editing text,” explains the report. “…explicitly teaching adolescents strategies for planning, revising, and/or editing has a strong impact on the quality of their writing. Writing strategy instruction has been found especially effective for adolescents who have difficulty writing, but it is also a powerful technique for adolescents in general.”

Summarization. “Overall, teaching adolescents to summarize text had a consistent, strong, positive effect on their ability to write good summaries,” according to the report. The authors reported that students can learn to write better summaries from either a rule-governed or a more intuitive approach.

Collaborative Writing. Collaborate write equates to instructional arrangements where adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions, and it shows a strong impact on improved writing.

The report cited one approach to this element from work by Yarrow and Topping. “Collaborative writing involves peers writing as a team,” the report read. “In one approach a higher achieving student is assigned to be the Helper (tutor) and a lower achieving student is assigned to be the Writer (tutee). The students are instructed to work as partners on a writing task. The Helper student assists the Writer student with meaning, organization, spelling, punctuation, generating ideas, creating a draft, rereading essays, editing essays, choosing the best copy, and evaluating the final product. Throughout the intervention, the teacher’s role is to monitor, prompt, and praise the students, and address their concerns.”

Specific Product Goals. The authors explain that this element involves assigning students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are doing, including identifying the purpose of the assignment as well as characteristics of the completed product. Work by Ferretti, MacArthur, and Dowdy describes one approach to this element: “Setting specific product goals provides students with objectives to focus on particular aspects of their writing. For example, students may be instructed to take a position and write a persuasive letter designed to lead an audience to agree with them. In addition, to this general goal, teachers provide explicit subgoals on argumentative discourse, including a statement of belief, two or three reasons for that belief, examples or supporting information for each reason, two or three reasons why others might disagree, and why those reasons are incorrect.”

Word Processing. Graham and Perin point out that using word processing equipment can be especially helpful for writers who are struggling. “Typing text on the computer with word-processing software produces a neat and legible script,” they pointed out. “It allows the writer to add, delete, and move text easily.”

Sentence Combining. This element refers to teaching students to use more complex and sophisticated sentences “through exercises in which two or more basic sentences are combined into a single sentence.”
The report cites one approach where “students at higher and lower writing levels are paired to receive six lessons that teach (a) combining smaller related sentences into a compound sentence using the connections and, but, and because; (b) embedding an adjective or adverb from one sentence into another; (c) creating complex sentences by embedding an adverbial and adjectival clause from one sentence into another; and (d) making multiple embeddings involving adjectives, adverbs, adverbial clauses, and adjectival clauses. The instructor provides support and modeling and the student pairs work collaboratively to apply the skills taught.”

Pre-Writing. The seventh element provides students with activities to help them generate or organize ideas before they start to write. This might include group planning or assigning pertinent reading material. “Engaging adolescents in such activities before they write a first draft improves the quality of their writing,” the authors report.

Inquiry Activities. Inquiry means engaging students in activities that help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task by analyzing immediate, concrete data (comparing and contrasting cases or collecting and evaluating evidence),” the authors indicate. “Effective inquiry activities in writing are characterized by a clearly specified goal (e.g., describe the actions of people) analysis of concrete and immediate data (observe one or more peers during specific activities), use of specific strategies to conduct the analysis (retrospectively ask the person being observed the reason for a particular action), and applying what was learned (assign the writing of a story incorporating insights from the inquiry process.)”

Process Writing Approach. This element has a number of “interwoven activities, including creating extended opportunities for writing; emphasizing writing for real audiences; encouraging cycles of planning, translating, and reviewing; stressing personal responsibility and ownership of writing projects, facilitating high levels of student interactions; developing supportive writing environments; encouraging self-reflection and evaluation; and offering personalized individual assistance, brief instructional lessons to meet students’ individual needs, and, in some instances, more extended and systematic instruction.”

Study of Models. This shows students good models for the writing they are assigned, and students are urged to study and emulate them.

Writing for Content Area Learning. The final element reflects assigning writing in the content area that students are studying.

The authors emphasized that these elements are not intended to constitute a writing curriculum; rather specific strategies to improve writing.

“ In an ideal world, teachers would be able to incorporate all of the 11 key elements in their everyday writing curricula, but the list may also be used to construct a unique blend of elements suited to specific student needs. The elements should not be seen as isolated but rather as interlinked. A mixture of these elements is likely to generate the biggest return,” Graham and Perin suggested.

The complete report can be found on the Alliance’s Web site at http://www.all4ed.org/publications/WritingNext/WritingNext.pdf.

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