💬 Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing
How can conversation help teach writing?
Teach Writing Tomorrow addresses major myths and misconceptions about teaching writing. It will move from attitudes to actions and mindset to methods, showing how any teacher, regardless of their own perceived ability or creativity, can teach writing tomorrow.
Recap: James Moffett on Discourse
In my last post, “Let Writing Teach Speaking,” I presented James Moffett’s theory on coding and language. That is, we code the nonverbal world of raw experiences into language through conceptualization, verbalization, and literacy. When you consider information moving two ways, through encoding and decoding, we get the four Language Arts of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (Moffett also uses the important term “discourse” to refer to them.)
After establishing how Moffett sees literacy (as the blending of the three levels), I addressed the stuck student writer. How do you help the student paralyzed by the blank page? Also channeling Moffett, I proposed two means:
1. Say what you want to write. Many students find mental blocks between what we say and what we write. So, oral composition bridges the gap. By organizing classes around discussion, students say what they want to write.
2. Abandon traditional prewriting. The other issue lies in unquestioned assumptions about how we write. Most textbooks perpetuate current traditional rhetoric, with a focus on brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising (BOWR). This narrow view of writing assumes the final product before starting, such that students cannot explore their ideas. Instead, Moffett suggests writing and transforming ideas from one medium to another.
Five Ways to Let Speaking Teach Writing
How does this work in practice? The most practical way includes purposeful discussion before writing, or helping students rehearse main points out loud. But beyond that, this quick list came to mind. Note: These suggestions are by no means exhaustive!
1. Discuss Daily Writing
Students should discuss what they write about literature. This integrated view blends reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Since my daily writing focuses on anticipation or recall, the writing always complements the reading. So the most literal way to blend categories without much effort just includes discussing daily writing. A few things, though.
One, avoid endless show and tell. Sometimes one student’s story turns into an unexpected epic. Consider this: When every student writes, every student participates. Simple partner talk means everyone is engaged twice over.
Two, these discussions needn’t happen mechanically or every day. Writing means engagement, and if anticipation prompts steer students towards the topic or theme, then they’re already primed to read. But classroom discussions certainly reenforce.
2. Focus on Questions over Curriculum
All information can be expressed as questions or statements. Moving between them provides the heartbeat to conversations. When we focus on questions, we focus on ideas. When we focus on ideas, other aspects (like grammar) become means to ends. Placing meaning over mechanics doesn’t mean that grammar isn’t important—meaning just situates mechanics.
Never forget how questions encourage thinking. If we ask reading comprehension questions blindly just because, then we miss the point. Some stories endure because they resonate with what it means to be more human. Fiction becomes the perfect conduit for deep observations about human nature.
So how does this work? Have you tried training students to write twenty questions about a text?
One question framework I love is the QAR framework by Taffy Rapheal. This relies on four kinds of questions and their relationship with the text. Being explicit not only helps with inferences, but making students aware of how we know things from a given text.
Right There Questions. You can point to.
Think and Search: You point to multiple parts of the text.
Author and You. You point to the text and life experience.
On My Own. You point outside the text entirely.
Many other question asking frameworks exist, each with its own focus. This includes questions on elements of fiction, text structure, test-specific questions, and so on. (Derek Cabrera’s DSRP framework has been particularly influential.) Just don’t obsess over which framework or asking every question—they tend to overlap.
The best part? Question asking inevitably leads the dialogue, the next two topics.
Aside: The longer I teach, the more I believe flexible frameworks win. Oh, good content wins for sure, but once you’re able to teach the same thing from many angles, the game changes. Teaching becomes more than reading a script, hoping your audience matches. Instead, understanding connections between ideas and mediums creates a different picture. Teaching becomes moving across a web, not following a linear path. But this requires disbelief in many silly schooling myths.
3. Transcribing Dialogue
The richest discussions about grammar have never happened because of a magic worksheet. Instead, they happen by sourcing language from all around us. Through transcribing dialogue. The general activity is simple: Students watch a movie clip, shorter than a minute, and write what the characters say. (This takes priming by writing together and providing templates.)
There’s a danger to the testing-focused or essay-only approach in English. Students should write across mediums and transform ideas from one to another. Learning often happens through contrast, as transformation highlights differences in assumptions and conventions. With scripting, my general progression goes as follows:
transcription > rewriting as prose > introducing text evidence
Teaching through transcribing dialogue also has a curious effect: It reveals how our memory works. Or doesn’t. Generally, even after we pause and write, pause and write, we drop words or add synonyms. Watching multiple times and rereading forces revision.
✍️ As for teaching, I tend to have a general process. Let me know in the comment section if you’d like a follow up.
4. Invented Dialogue
This has been an ongoing experiment this semester: How can students perform deep analyses with as few words as possible? Because generally, we’ll wade days into an essay before discovering the extent to which some students just don’t understand. So writing dialogue tends to expose those flaws faster without bloated essay conventions.
What works best? Of course, students need some clue about the topic. For the time being, I also have a strict starting structure, splitting a thesis statement into the first three lines, followed by incorporating dialogue. Assuming we start with reading and discussion, I’ve tried the following progression:
writing twenty questions > narrowing to six or seven > arranging in order > writing with templates
For now, while I still consider this writing experimental, the goal is dialogue as prewriting. If students can explore ideas deeply, then the next task lies in transformation, moving from questions to other mediums. Lately they’ve written 14-20 line dialogues (without set endings), but I’d love to expand to 35-40 line dialogues with goals as they write.
Teachers: Be comfortable moving outside your comfort zone. Expand beyond the trite and tired theme-centered essay. Contrast might prove the best breath of fresh air!
5. Regular Peer Review
I won’t mince words: Peer review is flawed. Yet useful. A room of twenty students has twenty-one graders, not one. I’ve experimented for years with many checklists, but a general principle holds: Students must hear their ideas in another voice.
My formal process is simple: Students partner up, and one student reads the essay back to their owner. The owner, hearing their words in another voice, another speed, another tone, and so on, will predictably freak out with, “I didn’t mean to say that!” Despite our best checklists, which many students won’t follow, simply hearing their writing in another voices reveals flaws like turning on a light switch.
And this does’t just apply to essays: Frequent peer reviews work well with daily writing, regular assignments, and so on, so long as you have countable problems students can point to. If students struggle with basic capitalization, punctuation, and so on, simply trade and mark (in pen!) and allow the owners to revise.
Remember: If twenty students fix one mistake each, the waters rise.
What Next?
This series started with “101 Random Lesson Plans.” As I work forwards by building backwards—or however I’ve worded things—James Moffett’s four categories account for the fields used in my spreadsheet. However, I’ve yet to explore the thought experiment and question itself: What if you could lesson plan once and never again?
Stay tuned!
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For my fifth-grade students, I sometimes show silent Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin shorts, and have students write the dialogue based on the actions of the characters. It’s a lot of fun and gets younger students to see dialogue as something that must be attuned to separately from, yet complimentary to, the plot.
Every time I do your peer review strategy (switch papers, let them read each other's out loud) I think about what a great editing strategy this is and that I should do it more often :)