Our Grammar for Writing study happened about 5 or 6 years ago now and since then we have
been continuing to develop it, but the original study remains the largest one and we worked
with 32 schools exploring whether if you embed grammar points that are relevant to the writing
that you are teaching, will it help students to improve their writing.
So an example of that is you might be teaching narrative fiction and you could look at the
way characterisation can be developed through effective use of noun phrases, and what the
study showed was a significant impact on writing attainment.
The children in the research group improved by 20% over the year compared with 11% in
the comparison group, and since then we have been continuing to work on this and develop
it.
That research that we did on Grammar for Writing, we've worked together with Pearson to develop
Skills for Writing resources for KS3 where the whole approach has been embedded into
these materials.
One of the things about the Grammar for Writing approach is that all the way through we use
authentic texts as the model for showing children how they can make writing choices, and one
of the things that many teachers said to us was that our approach was just as helpful
for reading as for writing, so we decided to test that out at KS4 by looking at developing
some research which explored: can you help students to make linguistic responses to texts
at the same time supporting them in their writing.
So for example for one thing we did was look at Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est,
and we were looking at the last stanza is all one sentence with two conditional if clauses
followed by the main clause, and we discussed the effect of that and why Owen might have
chosen to do it that way round.
Teachers found that really helpful so Pearson asked us to look at could we explore this
a little bit more at KS4, and we have just completed another study where we combined
the teaching of linguistic analysis for reading with teaching writing about texts.
So here we focus very much on can we help the students to have the right language and
the right understanding to comment on the linguistic features of the texts they're studying,
and at the same time can we support them in writing about those texts effectively, and
the results have shown again a really positive effect particularly for the ability to analyse
the texts linguistically, and interestingly a breakdown of the marks show that it particularly
helps the language aspect of these questions.
It seems to support students in being able to respond much more meaningfully using appropriate
meta language to answering the questions about how the writer uses language - so we have
been very pleased with the way that that has worked.
More recently we have been working with Pearson on resources and support for the Edexcel GCSE
specification, so the unit of work that was used in research looking at reading and writing
and how you can combine them has been adapted and is now available free for teachers to
trial and test out, and we are also analysing some of last year's GCSE writing answers to
look at how students responded and to identify strengths and weaknesses in their writing.
This will allow us to report back to teachers on what they might need to focus on more effectively
in the future.
Another thing that we have been doing is looking at preparing resources - teaching resources
and materials that are specifically geared towards that Edexcel specification, and in
these resources and materials we're combining that approach of always looking at a written
text, a published text and helping students develop their linguistic analytical skills
but then linking that to their own writing and how they might draw on those particular
linguistic analyses to inform how they do their own writing.
Another thing we are doing is working on developing professional learning courses for teachers
that allow them to explore and understand this approach.
These professional learning courses focus particularly on developing confidence with
the grammatical language, but particularly also developing confidence in applying that
in the context of published text and students own writing.