I've found the answer for our household re: afterschool writing instruction.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm using two books:
- Sentence-Combining Workbook by Pam Altman, Mari Caro, Lisa Metge-Egan, Leslie Roberts ISBN 1-4130-1977-3
- Analyze, Organize, Write Revised Edition by Arthur Whimbey & Elizabeth Lynn Jenkins ISBN: 0-8058-0082-4
You can look at Whimbey & Jenkins' book online at Google books, and order his books from BGF Performance Systems. (You can find them used online, too.)
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C's first completed exercise, on page 36 of the book, tells me why reading doesn't (necessarily) translate to writing.
The exercise asks students to arrange a set of sentences giving directions from the the corner of Oak and Adams to the movie theater. The map is below; you can see a larger version of it here.
_____ Go two blocks, which will bring you to the end of the road, and make a left onto Blossom.
_____ You will come to a fork in the road, where you should take the left branch, putting you on Spruce.
_____ Drive west along Oak Street to the first light and make a left.
_____ When you get to the Texaco station, bear right onto L Avenue.
_____ Go straight until you pass over the railroad tracks, then at the next corner make a right.
C. correctly numbered the sentences, but he didn't do the text reconstruction well at all. The directions for reconstructing the passage from memory:
Next, copy the sentences in the order you numbered them on a separate sheet of paper. Copying sentences can be especially helpful for improving writing skills if done as Ben Franklin did -- from memory. Do not just copy word-by-word. For each sentence, follow these steps:
1. Read as many words as you believe you can write correctly from memory (usually five to ten words).
2. Write those words from memory, including all capitals and punctuation marks.
3. Check back to the original sentence and correct any errors you made.
4. Read the next group of words and repeat the steps.
Generally you will be able to read, memorize, and correctly write between five and ten words. Sometimes you may be able to remember an entire simple sentence correctly. But with a large difficult-to-spell word, you may try to write only that one word correctly from memory.
Writing from memory is a powerful technique for learning the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and word patterns used in standard written English (Linden Analytical 2).
Drive west along oak street and turn left. Go two blocks and make a left on to Blossom. Get to the Texaco station and turn right on L ave. Turn left on Spruce. Pass over railroad tracks and turn right. Drive two blocks and arrive at movie theater.
See what's missing?
C's version is correct in terms of content, but the coherence devices are missing. When Ed looked at C's version he said, "This is a list, not a paragraph."
This is the way the brain reads. We remember the meaning of a passage, not the specific words. I'm wondering whether good readers, which C. is, may absorb less useful information vis a vis writing when they read than not-so-fluent readers. (I think I've read research showing that autistic readers do the opposite ... they focus on the words more than the meaning. Will have to track that down.)
In any case, the fact is that C. is going to have to be taught coherence devices directly; he isn't going to "pick them up" from reading (I don't think). He doesn't seem to be getting a lot of direct instruction in coherence devices at school, though I could be wrong. As far as I can tell, the school is assigning book reports and "research papers" to kids who can't yet write a coherent paragraph.
short writing assignments with a point
After each text reconstruction exercise, the student writes his own paragraph:
A friend wants to drive from the bowling alley to Turner Ct. at night when it will be har to read street signs. Write directions using these easy-to-see landmarks: fire station, fork in the road, AAA Restaurant, Star Motel, and bridge over stream. Remember to mention in which direction your friend should start driving along Central Ave.
fluency in mechanics and punctuation
I cleaned up C's punctuation & mechanics before posting his reconstruction of the paragraph, because I couldn't bear to put the thing up here in all its non-punctuated, non-capitalized glory.
He knows how to capitalize street names, but didn't bother to do so because he's writing for me, not the school.
This tells me that while he "knows" capitalization, he's not fluent in capitalization; he doesn't do it automatically. It takes effort to remember to capitalize street names, where for me it would take effort to remember not to capitalize street names.
We'll be practicing mechanics and punctuation to fluency, too.
whole language at home
The irony here is that Whimbey considered his approach to be "whole language," which I suppose it is -- (!) He was also, I gather, a leading figure in the "thinking skills movement."
help for the struggling writer
sentence combining exercise
we're starting a copybook
man-eaters of Kumaon - text reconstruction
expert advice on teaching writing from Joanne Jacobs
eureka
more from Joanne Jacobs
doctor pion on writing a precis and critical reading
first crack at editing exercise
home writing program in place, for now
why kids should do text reconstruction
results of sentence combining exercise
whimbey.com
Arthur Whimbey obit
BGF Performance Systems (carries Whimbey's books)
Tips for Teaching Grammar from the Writing Next Report (pdf file)
Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve the Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools (pdf file)
C's first completed exercise tells me why reading doesn't (necessarily) translate to writing.
ReplyDeleteBoy, that's been our experience.
C's paragraph looks just like my son's. He would have used the same excuses. However, when the time comes to hand something in that he cares about, he makes the same goofy mistakes. Drives me nuts.
I just wonder how much computers have messed up the writing process for kids. We just had to write our butts off. Teachers expected neatness. Now, teachers seem to think that stuff will correct itself. It clearly doesn't in our case.
Sigh. I'm going to have to buy more books, I see.
Also, the short assignment seems to be a great idea and one that I don't think our school is using too much. Just having my son write a number of paragraphs this summer has helped a lot.
ReplyDeleteWe just had to write our butts off. Teachers expected neatness.
ReplyDeleteI didn't write ONE WORD in K-12.
I got through Wellesley, Dartmouth, and grad school on the strength of extremely good reading comprehension - which, at least in my case, gave me the capacity to teach myself everything else I needed to know.
Actually, I'm not sure Chris wouldn't make these mistakes in his own writing.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I say he knows how to punctuate is that he can now do a copyediting exercise quickly and correctly.
But his handwriting is horrific - and VERY labored, so I'm sure just having to write by hand eats up massive amounts of brain resources.
He may not punctuate well when he's writing as opposed to copyediting.
I LOVE Whimbey's book.
ReplyDeleteExactly what I was looking for.
Wait 'til you see C's first sentence combining exercise (I'm posting that now).
The sentence combining exercise (with C's sentences) is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2007/08/2nd-sentence-combining-exercise-in.html
I don't think you'll regret springing for either one of these books. They are amazing.
The other fantastic thing is that I can (finally) give C. some reinforcement for good writing.
He's had to do so many "whole" papers and paragraphs, etc., that nothing he produces is very good.
He looked happy about writing for the first time today after I told him how good his sentences were.
I FINALLY have him working at the level where he can do something well.
I came across a Richard Rothstein article today, something about "balancing the balance" (I swear - the word "balance" was in the title TWICE).
ReplyDeleteHis point turned out to be that students should all be given "integrated projects" as assignments.
When it comes to writing, an "integrated project" means the kid produces a mediocre product AND HE KNOWS IT.
Things like punctuation and capitalisation, etc. are pretty stylistic, and to me while they are important to use correctly they are not really deep concepts. They are pretty artificial actually. It can be a habit, but not "fluent" in the same way you can be fluent in a language.
ReplyDeleteThe great classical writers of Rome and Greece, etc. (or even Vedic Sanskrit) didn't have punctuation or capitalisation. In fact, punctuation was mainly used up until the 18th century as a guide to reading aloud.
So to me, working on word usage would be more important. A "style guide" that I treasure is Orwell's Politics and the English language -- where clarity is the main point.
Because Singapore uses British punctuation style (which I learned in upper primary and secondary school) and my elementary school days were raised in the US with American punctuation style, I end up combining both styles in a very inconsistent manner. This tends to be more noticeable whenever I use quote marks and parentheses.
This tells me that while he "knows" capitalization, he's not fluent in capitalization; he doesn't do it automatically. If he's writing something for his mom, not his school, he doesn't bother.
ReplyDeleteThis made me think of kids’ text messaging habits.
Many teens text messages all day long. Typically, they don’t capitalize, and of course, they don’t worry about correct spelling. This may be an example of their “fluent” style of writing. For other types of writing, such as schoolwork, these teens must consciously THINK about capitalization and other conventions.
Many parents, me included, have had a tough time learning to text quickly. Why? Maybe, part of it is that we constantly have to think about NOT capitalizing and NOT punctuating and MISSPELLING words. Our kids have no such problems.
I’m sure most of us can learn to switch between different styles of written communication, but it seems that many kids have become much more fluent in text messaging than in conventional writing.
Copying sentences can be especially helpful for improving writing skills if done as Ben Franklin did -- from memory.
ReplyDeleteMy 5th grade daughter is in her second month of Kumon reading, and this week’s worksheets include copying sentences from memory. First, she is instructed to read a short paragraph from a story. Then, she is given a few related sentences to write from memory. The instructions are: “Read the sentence until you can remember it. Then write the sentence.”
I had no clue about the value of this exercise, and I don’t recall that she ever had this in school. Now, I’m starting to understand how this can be beneficial. I’ll ask “Mr. Kumon”, (that’s what my daughter calls him) next time about this.
I have great faith in Kumon, even though it’s probably not the most efficient learning method.
ReplyDeleteAfter doing Kumon math successfully for several months, I decided to start her on the reading program this summer just to give it a whirl. She has difficulty with reading comprehension and writing. I have a good feeling about the incremental Kumon approach, with heavy emphasis on grammar.
Of course, she started on a very basic Kumon AI level that she easily completes. I’m hoping to continue once school starts, but my concern is that she’ll find it overly burdensome to handle both Kumon and her homework. I will be keeping an eagle eye out for fluff homework and projects that are time-wasters. We’ll see how that goes.
"Many parents, me included, have had a tough time learning to text quickly. Why? Maybe, part of it is that we constantly have to think about NOT capitalizing and NOT punctuating and MISSPELLING words. Our kids have no such problems."
ReplyDeleteAbbreviation and decapitalisation is a means to typing faster, not an end in themselves. ;-)
I use French chatspeak when talking to my French gaming clanmates a lot, because everyone there use it and because it's really annoying to use keyboard combinations to get the accents. You should see France -- their writing skills have suffered more than us anglophones. ;-)
Again, orthography is not a subject that requires as much foundation as say, learning grammar. So to me, "r sean n ismail gng 2 b thr?" reflects better on one's sense of language fluency than "Is Sean and Ismail going to be there?" Having a strong grasp of inflection and agreement, is more important than good spelling. And these are things you must apply no matter which writing convention you use.
In Norway, for example, you actually have two writing systems side by side for the same language: Bokmal, and Nynorsk. So even though the spoken language is fairly unified, the writing system is not. Writing conventions are more artificial than the mechanics of good grammar.
Many parents, me included, have had a tough time learning to text quickly. Why? Maybe, part of it is that we constantly have to think about NOT capitalizing and NOT punctuating and MISSPELLING words. Our kids have no such problems.
ReplyDeleteOh!
That's funny.
I have never text-messaged in my life, and don't intend to start....only because the INSTANT I begin text-messaging people I'm going to be in the THROES of yet another bad habit.
I like to put words in all caps for emphasis.
ReplyDelete"Fluent" in this context means only that C. should be able to use "formal" punctuation rapidly, without thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteWe did the reading program for a short time, then stopped.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to remember why....
I was impressed by the reading selections; I remember that much.
I think C. was probably doing them a bit too easily, but I really don't recall.
Also, somewhere in there I may have read Hirsch and begun to think that content knowledge was more important...that KUMON Reading was probably too close to the "strategy" school of reading instruction.
But yes, I agree about KUMON. Great faith!
If you've got the "persistence and patience" to stick with it!
Having a strong grasp of inflection and agreement, is more important than good spelling.
ReplyDeleteThis is true, but, interestingly, spelling may be more difficult to learn than grammar.
Christopher's grammar, including his written grammar, is quite good. His spelling is much improved, but I've had him on a serious spelling curriculum for 3 years now whereas I've done essentially no home instruction or even home supplementation in grammar.
A few years ago, when I tried to research what was known about spelling, I came away with the impression that spelling is reading, only harder.
(I may have that wrong, but that was the jist I got at the time. Certainly spelling and reading were always discussed together, never separately. Every time I looked up "spelling" I got "dyslexia.")
In any case, the impression I came away with was that reading involves word recognition, whereas spelling involves word recall.
Recall is always harder.
I am interested to know how most people learned to spell? I never drilled for spelling, since I acquired it purely through reading. Until recently, I held the impression that there were no such things as silent letters -- a mistaken belief -- but one that served well I guess. So there would be a slight difference in reading stress between "knight", "night" and "nite", "caught" and "cot". So I would remember "-gh" in "night" because it partly affected the way I thought about and stressed the word. (And of course, when one learns Old English, one realises that it used to have its own distinct sound too, now lost in modern English.)
ReplyDeleteAnd "sight" *does* seem to have more stress than "site". The vowel seems to last for a longer duration of time, perhaps a remaining trace of the Old English pronunciation. Or maybe it's just me.
I am interested to know how most people learned to spell? I never drilled for spelling, since I acquired it purely through reading.
ReplyDeleteBoy, am I glad you asked.
I think I learned the same way you learned -- and this turns out to be WAY not the way most people learn to spell.
I've come to think that spelling is the least "natural" of the various literacy skills....
As far as I can tell (the spelling research is fairly difficult to skim) most people have to be taught to spell directly, with lots of practice, and they have to be taught the rules of English language spelling.
ReplyDeleteLouisa Moats is probably the best person to read on this subject.
Here's a cool factoid.
There are good readers who are bad spellers.
But there are NO good spellers who are bad readers.
(Pretty sure I've got that right; I believe it comes from Moats' book on Spelling Disabilities.)
I would like to know whether naturally good spellers - you would be one - are extremely good readers.
ReplyDeleteI would bet a small amount of money that they are.
Is it necessarily a natural thing? Could it be a reading philosophy that could be taught? There's a lot about language development that's still unknown, about how people perceive speech and writing (and how people tie them together). Partially the reason that I dig subjects like psycholinguistics.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of literacy aspects that aren't taught very often. For example, we are generally encouraged to have neat handwriting, but teachers do not guide the style of handwriting we use. We develop each of our distinctive handwriting styles on our own. Is it possible for example, to shape someone's handwriting style beyond getting it to be neat and tidy? I have never heard for example, any schoolteacher giving instructions on how to visualise things while reading.
Because of my migrant background and my Singlish (an English-based creole) background, regular standard English was like a semi-foreign language, and at the same time, a native language. So while this made fluency easy, perhaps it encouraged me to read in a different way.
On the other side, dyslexia isn't necessarily crippling. My teacher served as a lawyer for 25 years, while he still makes amusing spelling mistakes on the board.
However, I think most academic literature also points out that English is very irregular writing-wise. Spelling bees would be way too easy in phonetic languages like Italian or Hindi, for example. The only writing systems that would arguably beat English is Chinese and Japanese (mostly because Japanese borrows Chinese characters; the rest of it is fairly regular).