3. Integrate spelling, grammar, usage, and language convention instruction into daily writing activities.

Writing is a remarkable human accomplishment. Even young children can compose a meaningful message, keeping in mind their audience and purpose, as well as the conventions of word usage, grammar, genre, spelling, and punctuation (Hiebert, Pearson, Taylor, Richardson, & Paris, 1998, p. 1).

Learning writing conventions is an individual process, with particular skills being learned and practiced by particular children at particular times. Hence, asking an entire class to focus on a particular convention of written English seems unnecessary, even inappropriate. Instead, instruction may be more effective if it treats students as individual language learners, with the teacher relying on each student's own written papers for information about what that student knows and is in the midst of learning (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1987, p. 45).

Donald Graves (1994) notes that listening to students is the most important aspect of teaching writing. However, teachers need to know when to step in, when to teach, and when to expect more of their students. He goes on to say that teachers need to be proactive in teaching students how to spell as well as teaching valuable conventions and important tools that writers use to revise their texts.

Pragmatic Cues During the writing process, students, over time, learn to make a series of decisions concerning the key issues of purpose, audience, form, and situation (including point of view).

Purpose: What is my purpose in this composition? What do I really want to do in this writing? Express ideas or feelings? Analyze? Persuade? Entertain? How do I want my audience to respond? What are my personal goals?

Audience: Who will be reading my writing? What do my readers know? What might they need to know? What might they find interesting?

Form: What form will serve my purpose? Audience?

Situation and Point of View: In whose voice am I writing? My own? That of a character or imagined person? That of a neutral, objective person? What does the "voice" or narrator know? Think? Feel?

Students write best on topics from their own experiences. Teachers need to model writing for a purpose and a defined audience. They need to help students draw on their own knowledge, experiences, and imaginations and to make use of others' material (inquiry and research) and suggestions.

Textual Cues As students learn about and work with different forms (including the paragraph, the story, the poem, dialogue), students learn to consider other questions, such as: What is the most effective organization to accomplish my purpose? What should my final product look like?

Experiencing many poems, songs, and stories provides students beginning to write with structures to use. Bill Martin and Peggy Brogan (in E. Buchanan, n.d.) have identified eight different structures that children can use and explore in their own writing: In addition to the general sense of form, children need to understand the elements of the form which give it structure. These include the way the writing begins, the arrangement and sequencing of the ideas, and the way the writing finishes.

Note: To introduce the various literary patterns writers use, many examples of quality literature and poetry must be shared with the class. As students internalize the patterns of printed language, they apply this information in their reading and writing. They use these patterns as frameworks for communicating their ideas and feelings.

Poetry writing can range from formula poems (including cinquains, haiku, tanka, etc.) to narrative poems, to free verse. Help students choose a subject, and then brainstorm their thoughts about this subject and words and phrases that relate to it. Encourage students to write until they run out of ideas. Have students arrange and organize their best ideas in a formula model or free verse. After they write their first draft, encourage students to delete some words and to change, move and add other words that have more power or would say more effectively what students want to say. Encourage students to read what they have written aloud. Does it sound the way they want it to sound? Invite them to revise and polish their drafts.

Syntactic CuesF The research on teaching grammar and usage is extensive and conclusive. The sense of syntax (sentence structure) and the knowledge of complex language structures varies greatly among students from ages six to ten years old. Chomsky (1972, 1980) found that students with the greatest facility with sentence structures were those who had heard books read aloud and those who had read many books. Many traditional rhymes, songs, and stories use basic repetitive and predictable sentence patterns that give students a sense of English syntax. Teachers can also: Semantic Cues Words and phrases are important structures that students use in writing. Both students and teachers need to locate examples of effective words and phrases, and to discuss how these words and phrases are effective. Teachers need to help students: Teachers need to help students understand appropriate usage. Language differs in register according to who the writer (speaker or representer) is, the occasion for which he or she is writing, what the writing is about, and for whom the writing is intended. Register is distinguished by a particular vocabulary and often by particular structures.

Researchers over the decades have demonstrated that teaching grammar as a school subject does not improve most students' writing nor the "correctness" of their writing (Hillocks & Smith, 1991). The experts note that what works better is teaching selected aspects of usage in the context of students' writing, particularly during revising (Calkins, 1986; Weaver, 1996).

Teachers need to help students understand that usage that is acceptable in an informal social situation may not be acceptable in written compositions and vice versa. Students need to develop a sensitivity to language habits just as they do to habits of eating and dress. Students may need help with the following usage issues (Pooley, 1974; Weaver, 1996): Graphophonic Cues

Teachers need to help students develop a sense for accurate spelling. In order to plan their instruction, teachers need to determine students' spelling developmental levels, the strategies they are able to employ, and the strategies they need to learn.

Close attention to spelling comes when a piece of writing is being prepared for sharing with someone else. Emergent writers benefit from help in writing the sounds they hear in words. Gradually, through extensive writing experience, their early temporary spellings develop into conventional spellings. Extensive exposure to print and reading helps children internalize not only the spelling of particular words, but also spelling patterns (Moustafa, 1997).

In the long run, teaching students strategies for attending to and correcting their spelling is more important than giving them the correct spelling of any particular word. Such strategies include: Discussing spelling patterns and drawing spelling generalizations as a class will also help students develop a repertoire of words they can spell correctly in first drafts. Such interactive, thought-engaging lessons are likely to be more productive than spelling lists and tests (Wilde, 1993; Cunningham, 1995).

Integrated spelling instruction includes a variety of teaching and learning strategies and incorporates spelling instruction in students' daily reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and representing. Competent spellers have a base of word knowledge, an understanding of word patterns, and a repertoire of strategies from which to select when they attempt to spell unknown words. See the charts on the following pages for ideas regarding spelling instruction.

Note: Teachers have some valid concerns about the use of temporary or invented spelling. One such concern is that the incorrect spelling of some words may be repeated often enough that it will become a habit that will persist through the elementary grades. This is possible if students use temporary spelling for frequently used words with irregular spelling patterns (e.g., they, want, because).

The goal of spelling instruction is to help students develop a "spelling conscience" - a positive attitude toward spelling and a concern for using standard spelling (Hillerich, 1977).

Gentry (1997) notes that there is a role for direct spelling instruction - not as "the drudgery of memorizing that awful spelling list" (p. 4) but as spelling workshops and groups where children work together on lists of words they have at least partly generated themselves. Spelling instruction should help students acquire a variety of strategies with which to analyze, remember, and figure out spellings. Spelling words for study come from a variety of sources including: Checking for conventional spellings should be a part of the proofreading process.

Teachers can provide explicit teaching of spelling knowledge and strategies through mini-lessons, incidental teaching, and conferencing. Analyzing what students know, and noting the spelling strategies that they are using, can highlight the skills and strategies that need further attention. Based on this analysis, spelling instruction might include mini-lessons about spelling procedures, concepts, skills, and strategies such as the following: Teachers need to help students see spelling words in context and out of context. Teachers can use cloze activities to focus students' attention on spelling the beginning, middle, and ending of words that follow the same pattern. Teachers are cautioned, however, to avoid teaching confusing words together (e.g., there and their; there should be taught with here and where) (Grubgeld, 1986).

Analyzing the major spelling strategy that each student uses can help teachers decide which strategies are best for which students (Booth, 1996). Visual learners prefer to see how a word looks. Auditory learners like to hear the sound in a word and then write letter patterns for those sounds based on prior knowledge. Morphemic spellers like to use their knowledge of basic words and word parts to spell related words. Kinesthetic-tactile learners like to get a physical feel for a word.

Weekly spelling lists and tests, when they are used, should be individualized so that children learn to spell words they need to know but do not already know how to spell. In an individualized approach, children write a pre-test to see which words they must study and then focus on the five to eight specific words during the course of a week using a specific study strategy such as: