Research School Network: Putting sentence craft at the heart of writing lessons By David Windle, Director, London South Research School at Charles Dickens

The sentence can be a source of great pain for a teacher, certainly at primary school and, I imagine, at secondary, and, I imagine, beyond that.

How often does a teacher in, say, Year 5, remind a child to use full stops and capital letters? A recent survey conducted by me in the staff room at Charles Dickens Primary School suggests loads of times. And, let’s not even begin talking about commas, exclamation marks, speech marks, semicolons (just what are they for?) and the rest. 

But, of course, it isn’t the punctuation that makes the sentence, although it helps it keep its shape. Sentences are thoughts; they are parts of ideas; they are pieces of a bigger puzzle. (Please note semicolon usage.)

Writing sentences and connecting them together to create a coherent piece of text, which conveys something meaningful, is akin to making a jigsaw puzzle out of nothing. You open the box and there are no pieces, each one has to be crafted before it can be connected to the others to make a picture. To make matters worse, when you look back at the box, you realise it is blank, nothing but a white cardboard lid with no image to guide you.

In writing this blog, I feel like I’m currently holding that blank-faced and empty jigsaw puzzle box in my hands. It is looking up at me, as I look down at it equally blank-face and empty! And yet, we ask children to write on a daily basis, perhaps underestimating the immense cognitive challenge it poses.

The EEF’s Improving Literacy at KS2 guidance report describes the immense cognitive challenge that writing provides and references the ​‘Simple View of Writing’:

​“Writing is a complex task because it requires pupils to coordinate a number of different processes at once. The Simple View of Writing highlights three overarching processes that are essential to writing.”

Writing is highly taxing for the working memory. We ask children to come up with and deploy ideas, then construct sensible, accurately punctuated sentences, containing correctly spelt words, and connect them together to form a story or an article, all while remaining motivated and engaged. Even writing that sentence was exhausting.

For a few years now, we have been using comparative judgement through No More Marking to assess writing across our schools. One of the benefits of this programme is that once a year each year group takes part in a national judging, so the children’s writing is compared to, and evaluated against, the writing of thousands of children nationwide.

This provides a lot of information and the team at No More Marking have been able to identify where weaker writers struggle and stronger writers excel. Their findings suggest that weaker writers have not yet mastered the sentence. They identified a few recurring errors including sentence fragments, comma splices and run-on sentences, which weaker writers made.

In the interests of brevity, I’ll cut to the chase: the sentence is the thing.

Back to the KS2 guidance report, we find these two important ideas:

​“Working memory has a limited capacity, so many children find this (writing) challenging. However, with extensive practice, explicit instruction, and encouragement pupils can become more adept at using these three overarching elements of writing and coordinating them in working memory can become less effortful.”

​“It is important to promote the basic skills of writing— skills that need to become increasingly automatic so that pupils can concentrate on writing composition. This includes the transcription skills of handwriting (or typing, where appropriate) and spelling, as well as sentence construction (forming sentences that effectively convey meaning, with appropriate grammar, syntax, and punctuation).”

Right at the end there, hidden away, is that little nugget: ​‘as well as sentence construction’. I’ve put it in bold so you can find it

This lack of emphasis, the fact it is an ​‘as well as’ afterthought needs to be reconsidered.

For us at Charles Dickens, sentence construction has become the core content of our writing units.

We have developed a technique which we have called Supported Writing, to differentiate it from the more commonly practised shared writing and modelled writing. The technique is built around using model sentences and a process of repeated handover between teacher and pupil during the lesson. We aim for explicit instruction and extensive practice of sentence construction, with a heavy helping of encouragement.

Our Supported Writing programme (provisionally titled Supported Sentences) is currently being developed in the EEF’s Early Pipeline Development Programme and will be trialled in ten schools in the Spring Term.

More details will follow in future blogs. Any questions? Get in touch: info@​londonsouthtsh.​org