Writing
Across the schools, we use colourful semantics within our writing teaching which is a psycholinguistic approach used to develop the children's speech and writing abilities, as it teaches the children how to understand and build sentences which helps to develop their grammar.
Our aim at BCF is to further the knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the English language and its literature, and to foster mastery in its learning at all levels. To achieve this, we use a process called ‘Talk for Writing’. This approach encompasses a three-stage pedagogy, enabling all of our learners to internalise the language structures needed to write through ‘talking the text’. This improves the children’s writing ability as they approach written tasks with far greater confidence and accuracy. This method of teaching was developed, by author and poet, Pie Corbett, on the idea that in order to write something, children need to be able to say it first.
Talk for Writing is a powerful tool because it follows the core principles of how children learn. It enables them to imitate the language that they need for a particular topic orally before reading and analysing it, then write their own version.
The Talk for Writing process goes through three core stages:
Imitation: children learn a high-quality model whilst also being exposed to other models and snippets of writing. This is the point at which children unravel the how of writing – how certain effects can be achieved
Innovation: children are guided through the writing process with the teacher modelling. Choosing the right ‘level of innovation’ is key so that challenge is high.
Independent Application/Invention: this is the culmination of the writing process when children pull together all that they have internalised and learnt about a particular type of writing and apply it in an independent piece or number of pieces.
Long Term Overview