Assign a wide variety of texts students can use as models for their own writing;
Personally, I dislike that most writing for school follows the same format. For as long as I can remember, most of my writing assignments have been an introductory paragraph, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Not only was doing this same format over and over again extremely boring, but not knowing how to do other formats took a toll as well.
First, there exists an educational culture that privileges test-ing over sustained and meaningful encounters with texts.
One of the biggest qualms I have with schools today is that most of them prioritize test scores and grades much higher than they do actual learning. From elementary school to high school, almost all of my teachers and administrators have stressed how important it is for the school as a whole to do well on state assessments. A good chunk of our classes were devoted specifically to studying for certain tests and I always left out feeling as though I ever truly retained anything. Very rarely was something taught just for the sake of our learning.
This often manifests itself in teaching only surface-level reading strategies in K–12 such as skimming and reading for the gist, and in cries of, “They should know this stuff before they get here!” at the university level.
Honestly I can't count how many times i've spent in English classes learning how to skim through texts for main ideas and "key points". Every single time we go no deeper than these surface observations and we're always left to wonder if the rest of the information really wasn't that important or if we were just cheated out of it by our teachers.
They do so because research has shown that students learn to read and write better when they are instructed in both simultaneous
Thinking back, I remember the early days of preschool and kindergarten. When we were first taught about reading and writing, it felt as though it was much easier to actually comprehend the words that we saw on pages once we learned how to formulate and write them for ourselves. Therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with this notion that students learn how to read and write better when they do so at the same time.
Even a two-year-old who has been read to consistently will recognize that “once upon a time” indicates the beginning of a story, and will often begin that same way when asked to make up his or her own
Ever since the time we were all young, language has been a huge part of life everywhere. Even without prompting, young kids will often try to use words to describe themselves and the world around them. At the same time, they like to scribble on any type of paper or surface that they can find. While it may be incomprehensible to us, oftentimes that is their way of expressing ideas.
Johnny spends too much time on the computer and not enough time reading books. He spends so much time texting and tweeting that he has forgotten how to write correctly, how to spell, how to develop ideas in more than 140 characters.
In this day and age, it's easy to argue that technology makes writing much easier than it has ever been before. With tools such as blogging sites, virtual encyclopedias, and the world wide web, it is insensible to discredit the internet as a whole. Instead, those who are doubtful of it should take time to actually delve into it before passing judgement.