Partly as result of the predominant 'narrow' view of writing in England's recent school curriculum and assessment, current primary school pupils often hold a skills-oriented view of 'good' writing for a substantially longer period than has traditionally been reported in the literature. This makes it difficult for teachers to promote and engage…

Children and young people with learning disabilities may not acquire the independent reading and writing skills which are conflated with 'literacy' in international educational policy, calling into question what 'literacy' means in the context of 'special education'. Existing literature explores teacher perspectives, but less is known about parent…

This study aims to explore pupils' views on writing in primary school through focus group interviews conducted in the North East of England with children aged 7-11 years old. Pupils' views templates were used to stimulate children's ideas about their thoughts and feelings towards writing and acted as a starting point for discussion. All children…

This paper reflects on the teaching of the unseen poetry element of the English Literature GCSE in 2022. It explores the author's reflections on the successes and limitations of using a less structured approach with a single Year 11 class, concluding that the pedagogies outlined were more successful than previous iterations in terms of pupil…

Widespread changes in communication associated with new technologies have led to a growing interest in digital literacy. Although the concept of digital literacy suffers from a lack of agreed definition, this paper suggests that reading and writing with technology remains a key point of concern. The written word, a central feature of evolving…

This paper reports the findings of in-depth qualitative research to investigate two-year-old and three-year-old children's writing. It focuses on nine families whose children attended the same early years pre-school setting. The research developed a clear understanding of what children of this age understand about the functions and purpose of…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

This article discusses two schemes for teaching writing in schools. One uses analysis of model texts into techniques and devices then application of these by students to their written compositions and one uses a process approach that includes pre-writing and exploring, drafting, sharing and discussing, revising and celebrating to exploit students'…

Teaching children scientific vocabulary is an important part of science education and should be carefully considered when planning units of work so that children can understand new words and apply them to their learning (Sewell, 2018). This view is echoed in the aims of the National Curriculum in England, which states that pupils should be able to…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

Handwriting difficulties are frequently mentioned in descriptions of developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Recent studies have shown that children with DCD pause more and produce less text than typically developing (TD) peers. This temporal dysfluency indicates a lack of automaticity in handwriting production. One possible contributing factor…

The Craft of Writing (CoW) is an intervention aimed at improving the writing skills, writing self-efficacy and writing creativity (ideation) of primary school pupils by developing teachers as 'writers' and improving their own writing practice and their teaching of writing. This intervention was delivered to Year 5 pupils between June 2018 and July…

This paper explores the impact of an action research intervention to support primary aged children's confidence as writers. Set in a school where few children (the majority of whom had English as an additional language) were performing at or beyond national expectations in terms of writing, the intervention looked at how to engage children more…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

In January 2019 the University of Derby delivered its first module entirely dedicated to and structured around editing and writing articles for Wikipedia. The course focused on using Wikipedia as a means to improve students' skills in writing for public consumption, in addition to enhancing their digital and collaborative skills. Students…