blog #2 Writing Instruction I Received

As a young student I remember writing in school, but don’t remember learning how to write.  From what I do remember, I was not ever taught grammar explicitly.  I was taught what nouns and verbs were, but don’t remember learning other parts of speech specifically.  I don’t remember ever learning how to diagram sentences or how to construct a good sentence.  I do remember one teacher showing us examples of paragraphs that she would construct.  As I got a little older, I remember being given a topic that we were to write about, and being expected to do an outline, rough draft, and final copy.  Peer editing or collaboration with peers was not part of our writing instruction.  

I would say that this takes on more of an acquisition view although there was no peer interaction and I’m not sure that the writing was always authentic, but more scripted.  Another aspect that I would say followed the learning view more than acquisition was our weekly spelling tests.  We were given a set of words each week that we would practice for homework and test on at the end of the week.

Looking back at my own writing instruction I think there could have been more of a balance between the two methods.  I do feel that acquisition allows for more authentic and creative writing, however I do think that students need to learn the different parts of speech if they are to be successful with academic language.  I know that for me, writing academic papers has always been very difficult because I don’t know when I’m making grammatical errors.  I also have found that I have a very hard time peer editing for people because I can’t find their errors.  I think there needs to be a balance between learning and acquisition tasks so that students can explicitly learn certain skills, but then have many opportunities to practice and go deeper with authentic reasons for reading and writing.