Example teaching sequence

In this example you can find five steps to help you to focus your teaching and activities.

Step 1: Explore the features of a text

Considerations

It is unlikely that any one text will demonstrate all the features that occur in all forms of persuasive writing. While the main purpose of a text could be persuasion, it could also have a number of other purposes. The best persuasive texts can often be as entertaining or enjoyable to read as a fictional narrative, poem or play.

A review could contain any number of conventions that might normally be associated with other text types. For example, a restaurant review might also reveal or recount details about the writer's life.                 

Activities

• As you read a text, focus on the features or conventions that are common to the type of writing, but also beaware of occasions that break convention, for example a writer who:
  • uses a cumulative pattern of four rather than three ideas to make a point in a persuasive text
  • does not use rhetorical questions, but uses other rhetorical devices.
• To help you identify the purposes of the text, think about what it is doing at any particular point, for example is it explaining, providing information or painting a picture?

Step 2: Define the conventions

Considerations

When explaining to pupils that you are focusing on a number of conventions, you can also explain that there may be many more in the text. Helping to promote cross-genre thinking can help pupils independently to make connections and links between texts, ideas and forms.

Activities

• To demonstrate the similarities between different types of text, you could typically compare these examples:
  • diaries and novels
  • ballads and scripted plays or monologues
  • a football report and a film review
  • a novel opening and a personal letter
  • a job application letter and a persuasive essay.
• Engage pupils with a statement about convention and then question it, for example, ‘Diaries are written in the present tense; novels are not’, and ask pupils to discuss whether this is the case. In fact, a number of writers use the present tense form in prose fiction.

Step 3: Demonstrate, compose and scaffold

Considerations

At this stage, references to connected texts during the writing process may be too complex for some pupils. As part of interim plenary sessions or development work, making connections to other texts is important.

Activities

• Demonstrate and scaffold a particular convention, such as the withholding of information in the opening of a novel. For example, ‘The girl didn’t know what had hit her; only that she was carried along by an enormous, monstrous force...’

• Then reveal the withheld information (what the force was, who the girl is).

• Link this pattern to another text type which uses the same convention, for example, a newspaper report on a tsunami which begins with a reporter’s personal take on matters before revealing the facts.

Step 4: Encourage independent writing

Considerations

If pupils move beyond the conventions or limits you have set when they are writing their own texts, take stock before marking them and consider whether their ideas do work. For example, they may have used a pattern of four where a pattern of three has been taught, used rhetorical questions in the ‘wrong’ situation or used informal language in a so-called formal text.

This approach is not designed to encourage unfocused or careless writing, but to encourage creativity and open students up to experimenting with a taught convention.

Step 5: Draw out key learning, and review

Considerations

The bulk of your attention to the way the conventions may be used and adapted in different text types or genres may be most easily focused here. However, do not ignore the possibility that it can be included in the teaching sequence.

Activities

Once the conventions and features are secured in pupils writing, make links between what has been taught and other areas of the curriculum or contexts outside the classroom. For example, think about whether creative and imaginative writing is something that might be used in the curriculum outside of English.

Consider whether there is a place for the conventions of metaphor and imagery in science writing.