Using Talk to Support Writing presents a new and innovative approach to the teaching of early writing. The authors discuss both theoretical and practical issues around using talk in the classroom to support children as they learn to write. Set within the context of national concern for achievement in the development of writing ability, it addresses the gap in understanding early teaching and focuses on the exploration of talk and writing interface.
Author Thomas McCann invites readers to rethink their approach to teaching writing by capitalizing on students’ instinctive desire to talk. Drawing on extensive classroom research, he shows teachers how to craft class discussions that build students’ skills of analysis, problem-solving, and argumentation as a means of improving student writing. McCann demonstrates how authentic discussions immerse learners in practices that become important when they write. Chapters feature portraits of teachers at work, including transcripts that reveal patterns of talk across a set of lessons. Interviews with the teachers and samples of student writing afford readers a deeper understanding of process. Students also report on how classroom discussions supported their effort to produce persuasive, argument-driven essays. Book Features: A focus on “the thinking behind the practice,” as opposed to a collection of lesson ideas. Connections to important elements from the Common Core State Standards, especially arguments writing. Examples of students at work with examples of the writing that emerges from their discussions. Portraits of skilled teachers as they promote inquiry and sequence and facilitate discussions. Appendices with problem-based scenarios, interview questions for students and teachers, samples of debatable cases in the news, and more. “In this important book, Tom McCann has given us not only the admonition to change, but the details about what effective change must be and what it looks like, evidence that it works effectively, and details about how to bring it to pass.” —From the Foreword by George Hillocks, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Chicago. “For a professional book to have an impact on the field, it needs to address a perceived need. Writing arguments for Common Core performance assessments is a HUGE need right now that this book helps address.” —Carol Jago, associate director, California Reading and Literature Project, UCLA.
Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. The study uses a research-driven, iteratively tested framework to help writing center directors, tutors, writing program administrators, rhetoric and composition researchers, first-year composition instructors, and others interested in talk about writing to systematically analyze tutors’ talk and to use that analysis to train new tutors. The book strives toward two main goals: to provide an analytical research and assessment tool—the coding scheme—that other researchers can use to understand writing center tutor talk and to provide a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk that can facilitate tutor training. The study details tutors’ use of three categories of tutoring strategies—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—at macro- and microlevels and results in practical recommendations for improving tutor training.
"The book's lessons are organized by topic and include oral storytelling, drawing, writing words, assessment, introducing booklets, and moving writers forward. Based on the authors' work in urban kindergarten and first-grade classes, the essence and structure of many of the lessons lend themselves to adaptation through fifth grade."--Jacket.
Pie Corbett’s ground-breaking Talk for Writing approach has been successfully used by thousands of schools to teach writing creatively in an engaging way that motivates children. Now Pie and Julia take this multi-sensory approach to Early Years settings introducing a simple way to inspire young children’s language development through storytelling. Children learn language through memorable, meaningful repetition. The Talk for Writing approach enables children to internalise the language of story so that they can imitate it, innovate on it and create their own effective stories independently. Talk for Writing in the Early Years will show you how to put rhyme and story at the heart of your work with children and parents so that young learners language development and creativity flourishes. This multimedia resource shows you how to: • Select a story or rhyme the children will enjoy and tell it engagingly, encouraging the children to join in •Use a story map so they can picture what happens •Use actions to reinforce meaning and emphasise key language patterns •Help children build a bank of tales, developing their linguistic repertoire The 2 OLCs contain: 1 Footage of Pie Corbett conferences with EY teachers showing Talk for Writing in action 2 Clips of nursery children engaged in the Talk for Writing approach 3 Advice on how to use the OLC and handouts to train all staff in the approach 4 Interviews with parents and nursery school teachers on the impact of Talk for Writing 5 21 stories with story maps
Contains a collection of 101 reproducible activities and exercises designed to engage students in the writing process, encouraging children to write and talk about a wide range of text components.
Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk—what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.
In the last 15 to 20 years, writing centers have placed greater importance on tutor training, focusing on teaching tutors best practices in fostering student writers’ engagement and writing skills. Writing Center Talk over Time explores the importance of writing center talk and demonstrates the efficacy of tutor training. The book uses corpus-driven analysis and discourse analysis to examine the changes in writing center talk over time to provide a baseline understanding of the very heart of writing center work: the talk that unfolds between tutors and student writers. It is this talk that, at its best, motivates student writers to continue to improve their writing and scaffolds their learning and that makes tutors proud of the service that they provide. The methods and analysis of this study are intended to inform other researchers so that they may conduct further research into the efficacy of writing center talk.
