One of the questions we have had from members of the TFE Writing Network has been related to genre teaching. Teaching writing in the context of genres is a common practice in Australia, particularly due to our curriculum progressions that specify across several year levels: an expectation that students will be able to produce ‘imaginative, informative and persuasive’ texts.

In Victoria this is first mentioned in Year 1. Given it starts early, why are we having so many teachers and students having difficulties with it? The curriculum describes what writing we should assign, but it doesn’t provide the roadmap for how to teach it.

This was highlighted when a friend recently called me during one of our lockdowns. She was frustrated at watching her Year 2 daughter reduced to tears during an online writing lesson, where she was required to come up with a problem, solution and list of characters.

Why was this so hard for her and why was I not surprised having seen this many times in an early years classroom?

An understanding of genre is important. We know it makes a difference and students need to be able to write about different topics and create specific compositions. There are several meta-analysis studies that have measured it and our national data relies on it. So perhaps the problem lies in the way we teach it.

The studies I have read, use the term ‘genre knowledge’ as the thing that makes a difference. Knowing about genres is quite different to being able to write according to a narrative or persuasive framework.

In Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Graham, MacArthur & Hebert speak of students needing to develop a competence across different genres stemming from:

…how writing will be used to support reading and learning, and how reading and learning will be used to support writing.

They also advocate that an effective writing approach considers the writing process – planning, drafting, revising and editing – and the foundational skills – handwriting, spelling, sentence construction and paragraph construction. 

So to recap –

1. The basic skills of writing which support fluency should form part of a classroom writing approach.

2. Providing students with a framework that scaffolds them through planning, note-taking and constructing sentences, which they reread, revise and edit, forms the basis for them creating a text type. 

3. A balance is required in the writing classroom which includes reading and breaking apart quality text exemplars, therefore giving students the necessary schema they need in order to emulate a genre based text of their own. 

So we may need to look at this from another angle.

If we are asking students to plan a text using a scaffold such as what happened first, second and third and then begin each sentence with onomatopoeia or an agree/disagree statement on whether they prefer dogs or cats – it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will be able to construct a whole text around this. 

Hochman & Wexler in ‘The Writing Revolution’, state that simply handing out lengthy and challenging text assignments without the breakdown of skills to compose them is to be avoided until students have consolidated some key skills. 

Perhaps the angle we should be taking is more about helping students make links between reading, thinking and writing instead of viewing these as stand-alones.

• Students need opportunities to engage in not just reading quality texts, but analysing them. This is an opportunity for them to build the ‘genre knowledge’ that we know they need in order to construct their own.

• An effective instructional approach might be to extend genre knowledge by asking students to emulate a familiar text once it has been studied. This assists them to internalise a strategy that an author has used and makes it more likely that they will be able to transfer it. This approach also taps into what we know about Cognitive Load Theory, releasing students from all the complexity to free up working memory and allow them to focus  on the strategy. 

• Remember, too, that students must know a topic well before they can write about it: background knowledge--Doug Lemov speaks about this in the context of reading, writing and understanding genres--So reconstructing a familiar text, or developing writing based on content knowledge you are working on, helps students cement thinking and build on it. Writing is thinking, and thinking becomes writing. 

To help students tackle the writing of whole texts is a monumental task. It is why the teaching of writing is hard!

We would suggest that we need to reposition genre learning as the pinnacle of an inter-connected and hierarchical set of writing skills--with spelling, sentence composition, and other literary devices underneath.

Perhaps then we can understand why many students need more than just reading one mentor text to “master” a genre, and can work to ensure the foundations are in place before we take on this Everest of writing.

Want to learn more?

Check out this recent TFE talk from Dr Damon Thomas

What is your journey in the writing classroom?

We encourage you to join in the discussion on this page.

Following these regular blog posts, we encourage you to join in the discussion below. A key goal of Think Forward Educators’ Writing Network is opening a conversation about writing in the classroom, using research, trialled techniques, assessment and data collection.

Our second Writing Network Connect discussion will be held on Thursday Sep 2 at 7:45pm Melbourne Time.

We hope to see you there!

Discussion Questions

How do you teach genre in your classrooms?

Have you had success integrating genre writing and sentence writing?

What research have you found, and how could you trial this in your classroom?