Writing pedagogy has been shaped by an array of influences over the years, including social and demographic change, insights derived from research, and grassroots movements among teachers. Recognizing that writing assumes many guises and serves varied purposes, teachers and researchers continue to chart the challenge of preparing diverse students to meet the literate demands of private, academic, and civic life.
History
Written composition became a concern for American high schools in the late nineteenth century. At the time, elementary schools did not teach composition; rather, writing instruction meant teaching students to form letters, to spell words, and to have legible (if not beautiful) handwriting. The high schools, however, focused on preparing an elite group of males for universities, a task that would increasingly demand attention to writing. In 1873 Harvard University initiated a writing requirement as part of its admissions process, asking each candidate to produce a composition about a literary work. Other colleges soon followed with similar requirements, and high schools began to prepare students to fulfill these expectations. Further guidance was provided by the illustrious "Committee of Ten," chaired by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and charged with formulating parameters for secondary curriculum nationwide. In its final report, the group made the then-revolutionary claim that one purpose of English was "to enable the pupil … to give expression to thoughts of his own" (p. 86). And so began the teaching of composition in the nation's schools.
Writing continued to have a place in the secondary curriculum throughout the twentieth century. Students were commonly assigned essays in the forms of description, narration, exposition, or argument, following rhetorical traditions dating back to the late nineteenth century. If teachers followed contemporary textbooks, they taught lessons on the ideal written product, focusing on words, sentences, and paragraphs as component parts, and emphasizing usage and style. Student essays were graded on the basis of how well they approximated these forms and conventions.
Stimulated by the 1966 Dartmouth conference, which brought together leading British and American specialists in the teaching of English, major pedagogic and empirical shifts marked the late 1960s and early 1970s. Active research programs studying writing in the schools followed in both countries, and new ideas were introduced from abroad. The consequences were twofold. First, leading literacy educators argued that assigning and grading writing was not enough, suggesting that students should be supported through an elaborated process of generating ideas, reflection, planning, composing, and revising. Second, U.S. educational leaders began to argue for the teaching of writing in these ways at the very start of schooling, maintaining that learning to write could help students learn to read, and vice versa.
Founded in 1974, the National Writing Project (NWP) quickly emerged as a major professional development movement in the United States. Building from the work of exemplary classroom teachers, the NWP has continued to influence writing curriculum, instruction, and evaluation internationally. By 1985 the U.S. federal government funded a research center devoted to the study of written language; attention turned to how writing develops across the lifespan, the influences of varied school and out-of-school experiences on learning to write, and how these lived experiences intersect with learning to write in school.
Issues and Trends in School-Based Writing Instruction
As educators have recognized that writing is judged effective where it is appropriate to audience, purpose, and occasion, innovative classrooms have come to provide practice in addressing a range of rhetorical contexts and composing challenges. This focus on the contexts in which writing occurs has been accompanied by an equally intensified interest in the diverse profiles of individual writers–what they bring to particular composing events, and how teachers can effectively support and monitor their growth over time. While these concerns have been reflected in university-based research and emerging theoretic conceptions of the writing process, pedagogic innovations have been primarily formulated by teachers themselves, most notably through the work of the NWP.
A hallmark of these teaching innovations has been an abiding concern with the nature of students' composing processes, and with how teachers across the grade levels might more effectively gear instruction to individual needs, backgrounds, and interests. Process-oriented instructional approaches have become common, with teachers providing opportunities to brainstorm ideas, complete initial rough drafts, receive peer and teacher feedback, and revise and proofread. Ideally, such approaches acknowledge that writers in the world beyond school do not follow a prescribed series of steps. Acknowledging the social aspect of the writing process, many teachers have also provided paper and electronic publication opportunities. Recognizing that discrete grammar instruction does not reliably enhance student writing, teachers have increasingly addressed matters of correctness and style as students polish their own drafts.
Guided by theory, research, and insights from their own work with students, teachers have also formulated instructional approaches that acknowledge the developmental trajectories of writers of various ages. Although teachers continue to guide young children toward the standard forms, many are encouraging students to explore sound-letter correspondences through their own "invented spellings," drawing on research that explores these approximations as important developmental building-blocks. Later, as students move through secondary language arts classes, teachers provide assignments similarly informed by an awareness of students' emerging abilities, as thematic instructional units offer opportunities to build from basic writing tasks to more sophisticated challenges that ask students to synthesize and critique information gleaned from divergent sources.
The Writing-to-Learn and Writing-Across-the-Curriculum movements have fostered interest in activities that encourage writing as a tool for exploration and learning in all fields of study. Students may be asked to generate hypotheses or reflect on issues in journals and during spontaneous writing, while more formal writing assignments provide opportunities to learn the discourse conventions of particular disciplines. Especially in middle schools, interdisciplinary teams are creating promising venues for language-arts teachers to assist subject-area colleagues in integrating writing activities across the curriculum.
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