: Supporting Students with Writing John Rodgers discusses the complexity of writing tasks and support teachers can give to students

Writing is challenging. It requires students to recall and use large amounts of information, communicate effectively and accurately, think and plan logically, and monitor, evaluate and re-draft.

Recommendation 4 of the EEF’s Guidance Report ​“Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools” states: Break down complex writing tasks.

In order to do this, teachers must have an understanding of the components of writing and a shared language with which to discuss how to support students.

The guidance report features a helpful diagram:

The complexity of writing means that the burden on working memory can be heavy for students. To see this in action, here is a little experiment you could try… write a simple sentence using your non-dominant hand (or in BLOCK CAPITALS). You might find that the ​‘simple’ process of transcription becomes much harder and less fluent, it may feel unnatural. This exercise hopefully demonstrates the importance of the interaction between the different elements of writing.

A different model of writing is shown below.

Research has shown that by breaking down complex writing tasks and helping students become fluent in as many of the processes as possible, teachers can support students to cope with the challenge and difficulty of writing.

The guidance report lists several approaches teachers may find useful:

1. Providing word level, sentence level and whole text level instruction.
• By focussing on the components of writing, students will develop their ability to write longer, high quality responses.

2. Supporting students to understand the subject specific connotations of Tier 2 words used in writing questions.
• E.g. ​‘Evaluate’ requires a different response in and Eng. Lit exam than it will in a PE paper

3. Explicitly teaching planning strategies.
• E.g. Graphic organisers

4. Helping students to monitor and review their writing.
• E.g. a checklist of features in high quality written responses
• Or self/​peer assessment

5. Gradually removing scaffolding.

6. Modelling each component explicitly.

7. Supporting students so transcription skills become fluent and automatic.
• Some students may require targeted intervention / support.
• Some students may require additional support e.g. computers.

8. Using pre-writing activities
• Activating prior knowledge
• Pre-teaching vocabulary

Many of these approaches can be supported with the 7‑step model from the EEF.

For more on the 7‑step model please see here:


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