The
most effective way to build writing fluency is to require students
to work with their own writing rather than with publisher-created
materials.
Most teachers fear teaching fluency via authentic activities will
require way too much time and effort.
That need not be the case.
All native English speakers intuitively know a fact that will enable
them to build fluency readily.
Sentence information order
Most of us know that an English sentence has a predictable grammatical
order. Subject, verb, and object (or subject complement) are normally
arranged left-to-right: subject | verb | object
You may not be aware that there is a pattern to the content
of information in English sentences as well.
"Given" information, which the reader knows or can deduce,
is on the left toward the beginning of a sentence. "New"
information is on the right toward the end of the sentence. The
pattern, then is
given information | new
information
That arrangement of information is something native English speakers
absorb from hearing spoken language. It is one of the reasons that
people can carry on a conversation using sentence fragments.
Armed with that information, you can create fluency activities
from students' own writing in a jiffy.
Info pattern key to unified writing
The information pattern can also be used to help writers
learn to unify their writing.
A paragraph by a beginning writer is likely to read like a collection
of sentences. The sentences could be cut apart and moved around
without any noticeable loss of meaning.
Try doing that cut-and-move with a paragraph by a mature writer.
It will not work.
Mature writers link sentences so that each sentence begins with
a link to the old information established in the previous sentence.
The sentences of a mature writer work like links on a chain. Each
sentence links into the one before and the one after it.
Linking strategies
Good writers use several different strategies for creating links:
Teaching students to link their sentences together is no harder
than teaching list of transitions. And links unify a piece of writing
in a way transitions cannot match.
Visual-mechanical approach
You can teach linking in a purely mechanical way. I did this long
before I had heard of the concepts of given and new information.
It works really well.
What you do is this:
Tell students to think of a sentence as having two parts. The second
part of sentence 1 must share something with the first part of sentence
2. The second part of sentence 2 must share something with the first
part of sentence 3, and so on.
Some students will have picked that process up from reading. Others
need to have it spelled out for them.
Students who need to learn how to link sentences are helped by
seeing visual representations of the process. Analogous visuals
are
-
Venn diagrams
-
Knitting
-
A metal chain
-
Crocheting
-
Sewing
-
Painting
The plodders among my students can handle this mechanical approach
to unifying their writing. They start out doing it very stiffly—
those first attempts really creak — but pick up speed and fluency
quickly.
If you combine your writing instruction with reading instruction,
I think you'll find students make rapid progress.
