Britton Reflection

July 9, 2010
As Britton notes, young children soon realize that writing is speech written down. This is what their writing looks like. This is also true of many of the students I work with who are chronologically older, but just emerging in their writing skills. The classroom implications of Britton's theories for me are that I need to design lessons that help my students understand the concept of purpose and audience in their writing. First,they need to experience transactional, expressive and poetic writing by listening to and reading rich examples of these types of writing. They also need to discuss, think about,and contrast & compare the examples in a small group setting with the teacher scaffolding the learning.

In terms of actual writing activites I think offering opportunites to write letters to experience expressive writing, poems for poetic writing and a "news" release about something happening at their school for transactional writng(perhaps what their class is studying in science), would be good places to start. The important thing is that they need to begin having a sense of what the purpose of the writing is and who it is written for.