How should we teach writing in primary schools?

Part 1: The Problem

Solomon Kingsnorth

Published in

Solomon Kingsnorth

8 min readFeb 3, 2020

The Fundamental Question

Why are almost a quarter of children unable to write effectively when they leave primary school?

It’s worth noting that this ‘quarter’ could well be much more than that, given that writing is teacher-assessed and overwhelmingly not moderated (and in the 25% of cases where it is moderated, the evidence suggests it is done poorly).

For a quick reminder of expectations for children’s writing at the end of primary school, click here.

Beyond our grasp?

I can’t be the only teacher who looks at that list and thinks, almost every time, “This is a lot more basic than I remembered.”

It seems a fair set of expectations after 7 years of schooling.

In this blog, I want to explore how much of the current rate of failure might be down to how writing is taught in primary schools, and whether there is a better way of approaching the subject.

Why are some children so much better than others?

Here’s a challenge for you — try it. You have 60 seconds to come up with a sentence about preventing sunburn, beginning with the words ‘In order to’.

Too easy? Try this one — 120 seconds to come up with a sentence about Brexit, also beginning with the words ‘In order to’.

I’m going to predict that most people reading this have at least a teacher’s level of education, and that most people would have been successful at the challenges, give or take a few seconds.

How is it that you were able, almost without thinking, to arrange your words in a meaningful way, especially on as complicated a subject as Brexit?

Now think for a moment about how many sentences you have come across in your life, either by reading them or hearing them.

If you need a benchmark, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien contains 5,879 sentences. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has 5,179.

If you’ve read even 50 similar-length books in your lifetime, that would bring your total to over a quarter of a million different sentences (and that doesn’t include anything outside of these books that you may have read or heard — even a typical film will have somewhere between 7,500–20,000 words).

Now imagine you could catalogue and filter all of these sentences in a giant spreadsheet. How many of your sentences began with ‘In order to’?

Out of hundreds of thousands of sentences, it’s safe to assume that you’ve come across a very large number of sentences beginning with ‘In order to’. At some point in your life, through repeated exposure to a certain phrase, you have automated your use of it in a sentence.

In the book Understanding English Grammar, author Martha Kolln outlines ten common sentence patterns. According to Kolln, these ten patterns account for 95% of sentences in English.

Let’s assign each one of Kolln’s sentence patterns a number from 1–10.

Imagine for a moment every sentence you’ve ever come across running across a screen with it’s sentence pattern labelled, Matrix-style:

and on and on for a very long time…

What is the impact of hearing or reading the same sentence pattern over and over again every day, each one with a similar cadence and rhythm — reinforced in your long-term memory with every like sentence?

And here’s another interesting couple of facts about the classic novels mentioned above: the 100 most commonly written words account for 51.3% and 50.1% of the total number of words in each respective book.

Over time, that’s a lot of exposure to the same words and sentence patterns. And a great number of them, by sheer repetition, will have worked their way into your mental schema for sentence structure — in other words, your tacit understanding of how sentences can be constructed.

What are the children in our classes drawing on when they construct a sentence?

There are many reasons why children find it difficult to write, but let’s look at two very crude examples of hypothetical children who many of us will recognise.

Imagine all the sentences and patterns of syntax that have streamed into their consciousness from the moment they were born.

Child A:

Child B:

Now imagine each child sitting down to write a newspaper article about their current topic in history or geography.

As mysterious as the process of writing may be, there is one thing we know for sure. Everything that ends up on each child’s page was retrieved and synthesised from a physical location in their brain. It didn’t come from thin air: what they need in order to be successful is either in there or it isn’t.

As they pick up their pencils to write, each child is subconsciously scanning and searching their sentence schema for the perfect words, phrasing and intonation required by the piece.

According to linguistics researchers Dan Slobin and Thomas Bever, children build up ‘canonical sentence schemas’ as they develop from birth — a schema in this case being ‘a summary representation of the characteristics of a linguistic entity.’

These schemas are ‘formed on the basis of linguistic experience and are used for recognising utterances as interpretable.’

As words and sentences pour in to our consciousness, we become attuned to a variety of sentence forms and build a map in our long-term memories of the rules for putting sentences together when we want to speak or write.

As we develop linguistically, more complex patterns become accessible to us and we are able to control them for a greater number of different effects. In the words of Slobin and Bever:

Issues of topic, focus, surprise and the like, are signalled in other ways, requiring attention to the interaction of word order with factors such as syntactic variation, charactersitics of the verb phrase, and prosody.

When a child in our lesson goes to write a sentence, they can only draw on the sentences that have left an imprint in their long-term memory. We can only deviate from very basic sentence patterns in proportion to our tacit ‘feel’ for more complex grammatical rules and structures, which themselves come from our previous exposure to them.

In simple terms, when Child B searches for complex ways of conveying an idea on paper, the words seem to fly onto the page in an almost automated fashion. The tacit knowledge of the specific genre conventions attracts the required syntax like a magnet.

Child A, on the other hand, can only choose from a basic repertoire of words and sentence structures.

The Problem

Many primary schemes of work impose a very high cognitive load on pupils. One lesson may contain a multitude of objectives, many of which are extremely abstract and difficult to grasp for the novice writer.

Most learning journeys, instead of moving from concrete to abstract, work the other way, from the big picture to the smaller details.

We send our pupils into infinite outer space with no map and give them a huge shopping list of features that we’d like them to magically return with.

Here is a pupil checklist from a best-selling primary scheme of work (which shall remain nameless):

This is an extraordinary number of things that a novice writer is expected to do successfully at the end of a 3–4 week unit, tying it all together in extended pieces of writing that require immense stamina and confidence.

Here is another list of objectives from a unit of work on play-scripts:

I know how to build tension in a piece of writing.
I can discuss the features of play scripts.
I can write a play script conversation between two characters.
I can convert a text into a play script.
I can perform a play script.

A PLAY-SCRIPT! You know…just your average, run-of-the-mill playscript — because they’re infamously easy to write, aren’t they? Somehow, struggling writers in Year 4 are supposed to master these objectives in SIX LESSONS. I challenge you to walk down your local high street and find someone who can write a decent play script in 6 hours.

Imagine unpicking all of the small steps and pre-requisite knowledge needed to master that one objective alone!

How most writing units are structured

The model used in most primary schools is to plan a writing unit based on a particular writing genre, such as newspaper reports or narrative writing.

The starting point for these units is very often a huge, abstract idea such as ‘plot development’ or ‘creating characters that the reader can empathise with’. Multiple elements are presented to the children all at the same time.

While novice and struggling writers are trying to wrap their heads around such mysteries, they are also expected to use a whole range of grammatical devices successfully in their writing. In many unit plans, reference to these grammatical devices, the building blocks of language, will be fleeting — miss your chance to properly understand them and it may not come round again for a while.

Once again, this is like sending a child into outer space with no prior knowledge of it and expecting them to make sense of how everything they see fits together.

In the language of cognitive science, many writing lessons contain a very high level of element interactivity.

When a child has to juggle lots of interacting elements at the same time in order to understand something, it can overload their thinking and sink their efforts — there is just too much to assimilate and make sense of when trying to be successful at the task in hand.

Perhaps the struggling writer can pick themselves up and dust themselves off after one of these units, but after several rounds of failure, we risk losing them for good.