Current Trends in the teaching of Academic Writing

Current Trends in the teaching of Academic Writing

Andrew Hood Director of Academic Writing and Oratory

A Abstract

While recent research suggests there is no clear consensus on how to teach academic writing, there is definitely a trend towards more explicit instruction on how to plan, structure and compose writing. Furthermore, a very promising development is the explicit teaching of key sentence structures that underpin academic writing and embody the complexity of thought required to write at a sophisticated level. A review of a variety of methods is presented including application to the Barker context.

It is generally agreed a fundamental skill that students need is the ability to write fluently and express themselves clearly. Parents and employers constantly stress how crucial for future employment it is to write well, even in occupations that don’t immediately seem to require writing. And beyond the pragmatic need for strong writing skills, in higher education and the workforce, many also recognise the quiet satisfaction students gain from a wellcrafted piece of writing. Writing is a key life skill but also an art and a pleasure.

So, the crucial question in recent years for the education system has been how to teach writing most effectively in an era when students seem less exposed to quality writing and writing standards appear to be dropping. Indeed, while significant research has commenced on how to teach writing composition more effectively, there is still little consensus on how it is best done, with a recent NESA report from 2018 suggesting that an approach would be to study good teachers of writing and try to learn what they are doing in their classroom: a response that suggests little confidence in the research so far (NESA, 2018a).

With this in mind, at Barker we are embarking on ways to lift the standard of writing by exploring a range of approaches, testing them in the classroom and integrating them into key units of work. To identify areas to target, we have proposed working with a broad model of the writing process that commences at the content stage, works through the question and planning stage, then addresses sentence, paragraph and extended response writing, with the drafting and feedback stages explored, all with the help of student exemplars. Within this model, there is already excellent work going on, in many departments, at various stages of this process, with excellent scaffolds, systematic writing instruction at various stages of a unit and solid conceptual planning. Departments are now targeting areas that could do with further attention and development.

This follows one powerful trend in writing instruction, which is gaining traction around Australia (even if more research is needed): the explicit teaching of writing. Older parents will remember they received very little training in writing composition at school, with fairly sketchy directions on how to write an essay. However, now there are a variety of scaffolds, exemplar responses (at different levels of quality) and very clear instructions on planning an essay guided by explicit writing tips. We will continue to build on these strengths but work on analysing, at even closer depth, the structures and methods that lead to even more powerful writing. But there is a tension: explicit teaching is crucial in building clear expectations for quality writing but, at some point, there also needs to be room for students, especially in senior years, to experiment and respond to open questions with fewer prompts. This is the process that we are now embarking on to improve writing across the school –recognising existing strengths while also researching and targeting the explicit teaching of writing – at appropriate points and at appropriate levels.

One area that appears to offer significant benefit for students is to focus on teaching at the sentence level. This has recently been characterised by the Australian Education Research Organisation, in their second paper on writing, as the activity of sentence combining (AERO, 2022). Basically, it means that students are explicitly taught ways of combining clauses and phrases into more complex sentences, which not only function to indicate more sophisticated literacy but also enables more complex ideas to be expressed. It comes from close analysis of the grammatical types of sentences that are intuitively recognised as expressing complex ideas and the key parts of speech, like noun groups, that function to denote academic writing.

From our review of literature and practice, and current testing of this idea, a significant number of educational groups, teachers and organisations are exploring this practice in a variety of fruitful ways. One significant player is Dr Ian Hunter, the CEO of Writer’s Toolbox, who promotes a web-based writing program that has a number of powerful learning features, including an instant AI evaluation of a student’s writing, based on algorithms that measure the clarity and precision of expression (Advanced Learning, 2021, 2022). The key feature that we have been using at Barker this year is his teaching of 12 different types of sentences. His program encourages and educates students to adopt more complex sentence styles, with dependent clauses, focusing on the effect on expression of these different sentence types. Rather cannily, he does not give these grammatical names, like “dependent clause” or “adjectival clause” but snappier names like “the -ed start” or “explore the subject” which make them appealing and less daunting for young users (although the grammar can be taught later after the use is embedded). Certainly, all the research for the past 60 years suggests that traditional grammar instruction does not fundamentally lift writing composition (NESA, 2018b). But this kind of writing instruction does show that handson teaching of basic structures can help. Furthermore, Hunter’s recent study of four years of Naplan data, from the 70 Queensland schools using his program, suggests that this method of increasing sentence variety and complexity is highly effective (Writer’s Toolbox, 2022). Our Middle School students, and their teachers, have access to this program and are integrating it into the teaching of their writing. Furthermore, a range of teachers have now attended his courses and we trust that his explicit teaching of writing, including this sentence level focus, can be increasingly incorporated into the everyday writing that occurs in our classes. He, and we, recognise that it is crucial that this teaching is built into the everyday

teaching of content in classrooms and not remain an isolated activity if it is to become a step forward in the teaching of writing.

Another related approach from the United States, is Hochman and Wexler’s The Writing Revolution (Hochman & Wexler, 2017). Best suitable for Stage 4 students, these two writing educators focus on a few key areas of writing that are built into the content teaching of a unit (a key principle they hold: that the teaching of writing should be integrated into content delivery). Initially, they focus on fragments and run-on sentences, teaching students what constitutes a complete sentence and how to remedy unfinished sentences. They then work on key subordinating clauses – introduced by subordinating conjunctions because, but, so – in a series of exercises that teach students how to express cause and effect, qualifications to an argument and the consequences of an argument. They add the very useful tool of the appositive, a dependent noun clause, coming after the main noun, that packs extra information into a sentence (for an example, re-read this sentence). From there, they develop these basic grammatical features into sentence combining, working on building longer, deeper sentences that pack in great content.

Closer to home, Ben Seldon’s approach from Balgowlah Boys High in Sydney, is already proving powerful in some classrooms (Seldon, 2022). His focus is on the evidence-analytical sentence in academic essays and the underlying grammar of that sentence. He reduces it to a profound simplicity –“this does that” – which is the bedrock of English essays – this feature shapes that meaning. This simple skill is certainly transferable to other Humanities subjects, giving a shape to the nature of the evidence sentence in each discipline. From this simple structure, with one finite verb (which he calls an ‘s’ verb) there are a series of cascading present participles (“ing” verbs) that can create a cascading sentence – “this does that, doing that, doing that” – giving a student a rich and proliferating tool to build from a simple grammatical structure to a lengthy one, while staying focused on what is arguably the key skill in an essay: providing evidence and analysis for their argument.

Finally, the approach from Sammuri and Quaglia from Dulwich Hill High School is also helpful: an explicit focus on the skills of nominalisation (turning verbs into nouns), a foundational skill in academic writing (Sammuri & Quaglia, 2022). Alongside this, this team works on building complex noun groups (the carriers of advanced subject content) and on relational verbs (the cause and effect link words in academic sentences). This approach will work well at Stage 5 and 6 level.

In conclusion, while this is a brief tour through some recent trends in the explicit teaching of writing, it does give an idea of where it can go and what benefits it can bring. By strategically focusing on a few key practical, grammatical skills that really matter in academic writing, rather than analysing grammar in broad terms, students can improve their writing with an explicit understanding of what makes for strong academic prose at the granular level.

Advanced Learning (2021) Writer’s Toolbox, https://www.writethatessay.org/ [accessed 12 February 2022] Advanced Learning (2022), Writer’s Toolbox, https://www.wtbox.com/ [accessed 12 February 2022]. Australian Educational Research Organisation (2022) Sentence Combining https://www.edresearch.edu.au/resources/sentence-combining-practice-guide [accessed 21 May, 2022]. Hochman, Judith C. and Wexler, Natalie (2017) The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades, [Jossey-Bass, New York]. NESA (2018) “Teaching Writing: Report of the Thematic Review of Writing” p.15 https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/wcm/connect/f58f0df9-31f8-43b3-862ac8c4329c889e/thematic-review-teaching-writing.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CVID= [accessed 2 February 2022]. NESA (2018) Teaching Writing: Report of the Thematic Review of Writing p4. Sammuri, William and Quaglia, David (2022) An explicit approach to teaching academic writing: research-based methodologies to improving teaching writing, mETAphor, Issue 3. Seldon, Ben (2022) Exxcalibur S YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0nCckP7RFGgsXIiGMs7A [accessed 10 April 2022]. Writer’s Toolbox (2022) How to Improve NAPLAN Writing Results | Writer's Toolbox Schools Outperform Queensland. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Yim8p2QU0 [accessed 1 September 2022].