Dr. Krashen has stated that when we focus on writing we do not become better writers. Annick Chen has shown that to be true at Lincoln High School in Denver. When we write more we do not become better writers.
Somewhere in Robert’s recent series on Scope and Sequence, Robert Harrell mentions that no serious writing should occur until the end of at least three years of primarily auditory and reading input.
In Denver Public Schools, we take this literally and spend less than ten percent of the first three years with our TPRS/CI students focusing on writing, and then only in the form of dictée and free writes plus some time focused on writing connected to certain computer programs like Textivate.
So I fully endorse Robert’s position on writing. I certainly do not formally address writing in connection to CWB or OWI or any other first year CI activity we do and that applies through the first three years.
Lots of reading brings gains in writing. Lots of writing brings very small gains in writing, and can actually hinder eventual linguistically authentic writing. This latter point is not discussed enough in professional circles. When students focus on structure before they can actually understand and read the language they produce something that is not actually authentic writing, but some mutant form connected to the students’ own L1.
Moreover, students didn’t take our classes to become better writers in the language. That is not what they want from us.
We should be careful. Many of us now have TPRS/CI kids enrolled in upper levels from level 1, and so we have genuine students who actually know things about the language. They can understand it to a much greater degree than traditional kids because, unlike traditional kids, they have heard it in class most of the time for years now.
Likewise, our students can actually read the language because, unlike traditional kids who have wasted so much time focusing on the structure of the language when they should have been reading, they have read it at least 50% of the time they have spent in class for years.
Our kids are really good at listening and reading because they have done so much listening and reading for so long as per this from Trisha Schutzius’ blockbuster summary of Robert’s Scope and Sequence articles (rSS(Sum) published here yesterday:
…listening comes before speaking, and reading comes before writing. The natural order is: listening, speaking, reading, writing. ….
In his Scope and Sequence articles and in Trisha’s summary, it is suggested that we delay writing until the end of the third year at least:
……toward the end of the [third] year students begin to develop their written presentational skills, aided by such devices as Sentence Frames…..
So we must be careful. There is going to be a tendency to focus our students’ attention more and more on writing to prepare for the AP exams, perhaps. Many of us will want to take our upper level kids who are new to TPRS more into writing, but if what Robert says is true, then they are not ready.
We’ve just had this discussion about presentational writing here but it went by pretty quickly and stayed in the comments fields so I want to make sure that we who have grown our own upper level CI kids over the past three or four years seriously consider doing no more writing in those classes than we did in our first and second year classes.
Our students will become better writers by reading more, as per this sentence taken from rSS(Sum):
…when the language system has been internalized to a greater degree in the language program, only then can the linguistics of a particular construction be discussed in a way that enhances, rather than hinders, the student’s use of the language….
Writing comes later and we need to just accept that. And later to me means after thousands of hours, not a few hundred, of aural and reading exposure to the language. Again, to repeat the point because it is so important, we must:
…recognize that receptive skills precede productive skills, so that listening comes before speaking, and reading comes before writing. The natural order is: listening, speaking, reading, writing….
How can we think that something as complex as language can emerge in the form of writing after only 500 hours of study? That is madness. We fool ourselves when we say that our third and fourth year students are ready to write. They are not ready to write after only a few hundred hours (a few weeks) of exposure to the language.
rSS(Sum) – the summary by Trisha of Robert’s Scope and Sequence articles – is really an amazing document. It is the Scope and sequence document that I’ve been looking for all my professional life. It’s not a bunch of jargon and it’s not tied to a textbook but to real research.
If I were a new teacher of language right now I would read and reread the rSS(Sum) document, and thank you Trisha for writing it and thank you Robert for approving its publication here. I would read it five times a day as an elixir to rid myself of some of the untrue things I learned about teaching in the past.
Fully knowing the content of rSS/Sum and being able to slowly internalize the ideas in it and share them with parents and administrators and other teacher in trainings would be a most valuable thing to do. rSS/Sum rocks. It is a revolutionary document.