This is from last spring. I was reflecting on how well my kids could write (free writes rules are on the posters page of this site) after very little practice that year. In fact, we didn’t focus on writing at all. I thought I would post that blog entry from last May again here as the year begins so that we can be aware that working directly on writing (the only thing I do is a ten minute free write per week, usually on a Friday) is basically a waste of time:
Since we did listening and reading 95% of the time in all my level one classes this year, one would expect that few of the kids would show any writing skills at all. After all, we only did four free writes totalling forty minutes of actual real writing all year, plus maybe twenty minutes total of dictation. That’s it.
But, in fact, the kids could write. Some wrote beautifully, communicating fairly effortlessy as per our new CO standards that say that communication is the desired goal and that grammatical accuracy is not the goal.
Why could the kids write acceptably after not working directly on the skill in the target language for more than an hour all year? I asked that question to one class today and a student said that he had seen a lot of writing on the whiteboard all year. Another said it was the reading. Another said it was “just easy after all the stories”.
It was their significant auditory and reading bases that turned into writing at a level below conscious analysis and control of the mechanics of language. They could write because they listened and read a lot, simply put. Input precedes output.
Had the kids spent their time trying to learn how to write from the beginning of the year, putting the cart before the horse, as it were, I think that they ironically would have emerged, now in the spring, worse, much worse at writing than they are.
Only the mathematical grammar jocks would have gotten it, the rest would have just learned to hate French – think about that – kids hating a language because they can’t write it….
Think of the joy they brought to learning when they were in primary school. Aren’t their young lives difficult enough but that they now have to deal with being told they can’t learn a language, even though they may be fluent in English and/or Spanish already?
Isn’t that really a teacher lying to a child? Isn’t it lying? To tell, especially, a Latino kid that they can’t learn a third language when they already have magnificent fluency in two? What the hell?
What is scary about all this is that some teachers really do start the year off with writing, and the kids write more, and continue writing, as the teacher spends very large amounts of class time using English to explain its various forms (grammar analysis, worksheets, verb conjugations, etc.) with the result that the time that could have been using for CI reading and listening input is lost.