Using Writing Conferences to Scaffold First Grade Students' Narrative Writing
Abstract
Young teachers are entering into their profession with little training on effectively teaching writing to their students. Writing conferences promote the growth of student writing skills, but their implementation remains uncertain to unexperienced teachers. This qualitative case study explored how writing conferences are utilized as a means of scaffolding the narrative writing skills of three first grade students, who participated in a series of writing conferences which built upon the specific needs of the students. Results suggest that student interest and peer review are instrumental in cultivating students’ skills of sentence fluency. Implications of results are discussed.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Creativity in Children’s WritingIn this master thesis the author tests three different story writing approaches to determine which best prompts students’ creativity. The three approaches include: tall tales, actual experiences, and suggested topics. Twenty 6th grade students wrote creative stories in one of the three approaches. The researcher made it clear that students’ stories not be graded, and would not impact their grade report in any way. Three different teachers independently scored each story for its creativity. The researcher found that writing about actual experiences seemed to stimulate the most creativity from students. Tall tales yielded the same level of creativity as suggested topics, however both yielded less than actual experiences. The study also suggests that lower-performing students tended to write the most creative stories, while high-performing students tended to write the least creative stories.
-
A Comparison of the Perception which Third-Grade Students and Sixth-Grade Students have of Themselves as WritersChildren learn to write at an early age, however, many children do not enjoy writing as an activity. This masters’ thesis investigates students’ opinions about writing, and compares the opinions of elementary students to those of middle school students. The author surveyed seventy-nine students from two 3rd grade classrooms and two 6th grade classrooms in western New York. The survey consisted of seventeen questions about how students felt about writing in the classroom. These surveys were then collected and sorted into three categories: positive, ambivalent, and negative. The researcher found that about 64% of 3rd grade students had a positive writing attitude, with 0% displaying a negative attitude. Sixth graders, however, had less positive feelings. Only about 40% of the 6th grade students had a positive writing attitude, while 9% had negative attitudes. The author concludes that teachers should not only strive to improve each student’s writing ability, but also their self-concepts as writers.
-
The Effect of Sentence-Combining Practice on the Syntactic Maturity Level of Writing and on Reading ComprehensionThe purpose of this study was to determine the influence of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic maturity level of the writing and on the level of reading comprehension of ninth grade students enrolled in a compensatory-level English class. The indicators of syntactic maturity used in the study were structured writing and free writing. During the six-week, sentence-combining treatment period, the experimental group focused attention on various syntactic sentence structures by writing the exercises and by class discussion of these exercises. The treatment program was evaluated by comparing the treatment group to the control group on the structured writing, free writing, and reading comprehension measures which had been used to equate the groups prior to the treatment period. The data were analyzed by means of the t-test for independent means. The result of the analysis of the data of the three areas investigated showed that the experimental group had a significantly higher mean T-unit length for the structured writing than did the control Group. A trend existed in favor of the experimental group with a mean T-unit length of the free writing higher than that of the control group, but not at a significant level. There was no significant difference between the two groups in the scores of the reading comprehension test. Based on analysis of the data, the conclusion can be drawn that sentence-combining practice does lead to an increased level of syntactic maturity in writing as measured by the repeated completion of a piece of structured writing, which is really an exercise in sentence-combining. The increased level of syntactic maturity did not carry over to the free writing at a significant level. This may be due to student emphasis on the generation of ideas rather than on the condensation and revision of sentence structure. The premise was investigated that as the student becomes aware of syntactic structures in his writing, he may also recognize and comprehend them in his reading. This premise was not substantiated in the study. This may be due to the instrument's inability to measure the knowledge and use of syntax in the reading situation. Interest in writing maturity and the interrelatedness of writing and reading skills opens numerous areas which need further research and gives support for the use of sentence-combining exercises in the classroom.
