Production phase for Florence Nightingale

 After a long and restful summer break (the heat made it a rather challenging summer!), I am back to complete the work on the unit about Florence Nightingale and biography writing. You will remember that we already looked at the reception phase, so now it's the turn of the production phase divided into a guided production phase, where students have the possibility of doing more controlled practice on some aspects of the text, and a free production phase, where they acually write the biography. I must admit that while the structure is very clear for me, I tend to take it for granted that students will be able to write good texts once we have worked on their characteristics. I  have to make a conscious effort to allow enough time for their guided practice, and if I don't, the result is often disappointing.

In the unit designed for the Florence Nightingale text, the focus is on three different features of the model text: the need to include factual and specific information, the format of dates in English and the strategies the writer uses for drawing the reader into the text and making the biography interesting. 

The first feature, the need to include dates and places, is worked on by first allowing students to choose the person they want to write about and do research and take notes about their life. This could be a planning exercise from which students then write the biography, but my feeling is that they won't be ready yet for the actual production. Rather, they need to "experience" the importance of including factual, specific informaton by working on a text that lacks this information, i.e. no dates, place names, etc. are given. It doesn't have to be a long text, but what is important is that students realize that something is missing:

From this understanding, students can be asked to go back to their research and  see if they included enough information. 

In the next step the focus is much narrower, as we look at how dates are expressed in English which, at least for Spanish speakers like my students, is quite a challenge. This aspect is worked on through both an explanation and a game, since not all work in the Literacy Approach needs to be brainy and academic 😉

In the third step, we look at how the first paragraph is constructed, at the strategies we identified as being useful for raising the readers' interest, and do a shared writing of a first paragraph about one of the persons chosen by the students. We might want to take the opportunity to use the person chosen by a weaker student, so that this shared writing also constitutes additional scaffolding for him or her. This exercise, focusing explicitly on the strategies used to raise interest, should allow students to write their own first paragraph at home and thus lead into the free writing phase.

This second phase proceeds through the different steps of the process writing approach explained in the previous blog entry, but notice how much time is spent organizing the information and thinking about phrases or strategies that could be used to make their production successful before students actually start drafting. It takes some time before students understand the importance of this work, but they need to experience themselves that just sitting down to write their text is probably not going to yield the results they want. Just how powerful this is and what an impact this has on motivation was brought home to me by a comment from a student who said to her teacher "Isn't my description great?" 

How often do students feel proud about their productions?