ACCESS THE ENGLISH EXEMPLARS ONLINE AT www.tki.org.nz/r/assessment/exemplars/eng/
After Anna had drafted her introduction:
Teacher: I love the way you’ve described the web and used
the contrast idea. Why have you written “strong” and
“4000” in big letters and numbers?
Anna: I wanted to make those things stand out for the reader.
Teacher: That’s wonderful.
Later the teacher gave feedback on the completed draft:
The teacher introduced explanation writing by gleaning the
students’ ideas on what an explanation is. She then asked
them to write an explanation of how the rain falls, from their
previous topic study, to ascertain their writing skills. She found
that most of them could not sequence ideas logically.
So she then proceeded to teach the features of explanation
writing through new science topics, such as: how a poppy is
formed, how a monarch butterfly is formed, and how water
turns to ice and ice to water. She explored these topics through
books with her students, and got them to express the content
diagrammatically and in flow charts. They were to make sure
they used the key content words for these topics.
The teacher then focused on:
•introducing clearly both the topic and the purpose of writing
(”How?” or “Why?”)
• maintaining logical sequence (using “time-order” words)
• achieving clarity of ideas
• writing in the present tense
• concluding succinctly.
She modelled these concepts with the new topics and then got
the students to write their own explanations. They had to
continually re-read their drafts for clarity and logical sequence,
and check these with a buddy. She was pleased with their
progress, as she had already discovered that it was difficult for
some of them to “remove themselves” from the explanation.
The scientific nature of the topics meant they could be reasonably
objective in their explanations.
The teacher then introduced the topic “How a spider’s web is
formed” through shared reading The Life Cycle of a Spider (Jill
Bailey), Spiders (Terry Jennings) and Amazing Spiders
(Alexandra Parson). Because of the poetic possibilities of this
topic, they were not only asked to write their explanations to
the success criteria they had already explored, but also to
consider using poetic devices. They had recently written poetically
on animals.
Anna wrote her first draft and then conferenced with the teacher
before revising.
Teacher-student conversations
Opportunities should be sought in classroom reading programmes
for students to respond to written and visual texts, identifying how
processes or phenomena can be explained. Picture books with
narrative text will be useful, with teacher prompts to focus students
on topics that lend themselves to explanation. Exposure to
transactional texts will be essential. The "reading to" programme
will be an opportunity for discussing specific vocabulary, language
features, and diagrams, which may be transferred to student
writing and drawing.
To m ov e An na t o wa rd s t he n e xt l ea r ni ng po in t, th e te a ch er mi gh t
help her to focus on:
Ideas
– expanding the facts with increasing detail.
Sentences
–increasing the range of sentence structures and lengths.
Vocabulary
– encouraging extended use of precise topic-related
vocabulary.
Spelling
– exploring the “-le” pattern, as in “middle”, “little”, “apple”.
This could be done by:
• modelling of writing using these strategies, and discussion
about the process
•exploring models of writing which exemplify the strategies to
be developed
• giving feedback against the criteria that have been set with
Anna.
WHERE TO NEXT?
THE LEARNING CONTEXT
INTEGRATING READING AND WRITING
How a Spider's Web Forms
English: Written Language
Transactional Writing: Explanation
Page
1
of 4
Teacher: I really like the way you’ve described how the thread
gets taken to the other branch, especially the word
“blown”. I can also see the web very clearly because
you’ve said it looks like the spokes of a wheel. That’s
great ... It’s also good that you’ve used the
time-order words that we have talked about. I suggest
you go through your
writing again now, looking for any mistakes.
Anna then revised her writing as a second draft.
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