“What New Things these Words Can Do for You”: A Focus on One Writing-Project Teacher and Writing Instruction

Abstract

This study explores a writing-project teacher's premises about writing and illustrates how those underlying principles drove her instruction, influenced children's work, and created a particular theory of writing in her classroom culture. The sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of the transcripts from one w-minute writing conference revealed 7 assumptions about writing: (a) writers need time to write; (b) writers need to be in charge of their own writing; (c) writers find ideas to write about when they read; (d) writing is social and students learn to become writers and authors by interacting with their peers, their parents, and their teachers; (e) writing includes learning how to spell and proofread work; (f) “writers” write many things but “authors” write books; and (g) Writers speak to audiences that they may never meet. The study found that writing conferences are important instructional conversations for the teaching of writing (Graves, 1983), that learning to write also involves the influence of the social lives of children (Dyson, 1993), and that writing teachers benefit from being writers themselves (Blau, 1988).