"The book's lessons are organized by topic and include oral storytelling, drawing, writing words, assessment, introducing booklets, and moving writers forward. Based on the authors' work in urban kindergarten and first-grade classes, the essence and structure of many of the lessons lend themselves to adaptation through fifth grade."--Jacket.

Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. The study uses a research-driven, iteratively tested framework to help writing center directors, tutors, writing program administrators, rhetoric and composition researchers, first-year composition instructors, and others interested in talk about writing to systematically analyze tutors’ talk and to use that analysis to train new tutors. The book strives toward two main goals: to provide an analytical research and assessment tool—the coding scheme—that other researchers can use to understand writing center tutor talk and to provide a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk that can facilitate tutor training. The study details tutors’ use of three categories of tutoring strategies—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—at macro- and microlevels and results in practical recommendations for improving tutor training.

Contains a collection of 101 reproducible activities and exercises designed to engage students in the writing process, encouraging children to write and talk about a wide range of text components.

Using Talk to Support Writing presents a new and innovative approach to the teaching of early writing. The authors discuss both theoretical and practical issues around using talk in the classroom to support children as they learn to write. Set within the context of national concern for achievement in the development of writing ability, it addresses the gap in understanding early teaching and focuses on the exploration of talk and writing interface.

This bestselling resource has been fully updated, putting formative assessment at the heart of the Talk for Writing process and showing how to help children love writing across the curriculum. By helping children speak the language of non-fiction in a fun engaging way before they attempt to write, the Talk for Writing approach builds children's confidence and linguistic ability enabling them to craft their own writing. In the new edition, this practical resource offers: • Fully worked, tried and tested examples of how to apply Talk for Writing to each non-fiction text type • A wide range of fun activities helping children internalise how to express and link text effectively • A process that co-constructs learning so that children learn how to structure text and create toolkits of key ingredients • Guidance for teachers in England on how to apply the approach across the primary curriculum • An OLC including new footage of Pie Corbett demonstrating Talk for Writing and new footage of classes engaged in the approach • Advice on how to use the DVD and handouts to train all staff in the approach • Evidence of impact from cold to hot tasks Designed for busy teachers, Talk for Writing across the Curriculum, second edition, will help transform children's writing and attainment across the curriculum. "This book celebrates the importance of talk in becoming and growing as a writer: talk to share ideas; talk to analyse text; talk to co-construct writing; and to talk to evaluate writing. Throughout the book constantly underlines the importance of talk for learning and the many creative and rich ways talk can be used to help young writers internalise the rhythms and patterns of text. Full of practical ideas and activities, the teaching combines being creative and being critical in a wholly integrated way. An invaluable resource for primary school teachers!" Debra Myhill, Professor of Education at the University of Exeter, UK "The teaching of reading has always taken priority in policy and practice in literacy. Pie Corbett and Julia Strong have produced a very welcome counterweight to that dominance in their Talk for Writing Across the Curriculum. It is so refreshing to see suggestions for teaching to bring elements of language together, especially when done in such an entertaining and engaging way as this. This new edition makes a 'classic' even better." David Wray, Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick, UK "This latest update of Pie and Julia's best-selling book reflects changes in the curriculum, strengthening the T4W approach, using cold and hot tasks, showing new worked examples of how to apply T4W to each non-fiction type and placing formative assessment at the heart of the process. It is exciting to see how all the best ideas and findings in education are converging, evidenced in this latest 'up to the minute' excellent publication." Shirley Clarke, Formative Assessment Expert

Author Thomas McCann invites readers to rethink their approach to teaching writing by capitalizing on students’ instinctive desire to talk. Drawing on extensive classroom research, he shows teachers how to craft class discussions that build students’ skills of analysis, problem-solving, and argumentation as a means of improving student writing. McCann demonstrates how authentic discussions immerse learners in practices that become important when they write. Chapters feature portraits of teachers at work, including transcripts that reveal patterns of talk across a set of lessons. Interviews with the teachers and samples of student writing afford readers a deeper understanding of process. Students also report on how classroom discussions supported their effort to produce persuasive, argument-driven essays. Book Features: A focus on “the thinking behind the practice,” as opposed to a collection of lesson ideas. Connections to important elements from the Common Core State Standards, especially arguments writing. Examples of students at work with examples of the writing that emerges from their discussions. Portraits of skilled teachers as they promote inquiry and sequence and facilitate discussions. Appendices with problem-based scenarios, interview questions for students and teachers, samples of debatable cases in the news, and more. “In this important book, Tom McCann has given us not only the admonition to change, but the details about what effective change must be and what it looks like, evidence that it works effectively, and details about how to bring it to pass.” —From the Foreword by George Hillocks, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Chicago. “For a professional book to have an impact on the field, it needs to address a perceived need. Writing arguments for Common Core performance assessments is a HUGE need right now that this book helps address.” —Carol Jago, associate director, California Reading and Literature Project, UCLA.

In the last 15 to 20 years, writing centers have placed greater importance on tutor training, focusing on teaching tutors best practices in fostering student writers’ engagement and writing skills. Writing Center Talk over Time explores the importance of writing center talk and demonstrates the efficacy of tutor training. The book uses corpus-driven analysis and discourse analysis to examine the changes in writing center talk over time to provide a baseline understanding of the very heart of writing center work: the talk that unfolds between tutors and student writers. It is this talk that, at its best, motivates student writers to continue to improve their writing and scaffolds their learning and that makes tutors proud of the service that they provide. The methods and analysis of this study are intended to inform other researchers so that they may conduct further research into the efficacy of writing center talk.

Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk—what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.