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What Student Writing Problems Tell UsIf you are a language arts teacher, you have probably seen something very similiar to the this:How My Best Friend Should BeHere's what I like about a best friend. A bestfriend plays with you at recess. Abest friend calls you on the phine at night. A best friend makes you feel better when you are sad. Selfish people can't be best friends. A best friend gives you lunch money when you forget it. A best friend sticks up for you. Tiffany has been my best friend this year Alarmingly enough, this style typically represents the majority of the essays I got when I assigned my fifth grade class an essay describing the ideal best friend. Like this example, most read rather like pledges for membership in some sort of "best friend's club". It would be easy to spend time hacking away it the problems in this essay. But to spend time and effort in doing so usually fails to produce lasting improvements. The real issue is why students produce this kind of writing in the first place. In all the writing our students do, there lies buried a picture of those students as writers, the beliefs they have about writing, and the monsters they battle when trying to produce writing that others can read and understand. Therefore, it becomes necessary to look beyond the products to the producers, so that we might construct an effective pedagogy.Before proceeding too much farther, it's important to explain that I'm not examining student writing from the standpoint of "errors " committed, nor am I entirely comfortable with that terminology. Since writing is created and evaluated contextually, styles that are acceptable in some genres are considered problematic in others. With this in mind, I will be considering problematic writing as that which lapses from expectations for any reason. |