Writing Sense: Integrated Reading and Writing Lessons for English Language Learners by Juli Kendall and Outey Khuon.
Several years ago, we attended a weeklong Writing Institute coordinated by
Columbia Teachers College Writing Project and our school district. It wasn’t
the first time we had been trained in writing, but this time we had a chance to
sit together and talk to each other as we learned. During the advanced sections
on Writer’s Craft, Revision, and Group Structures, we took notes and made
plans to implement lessons, confer with student writers, and organize units of
study with the teachers we work with as Literacy Specialists.
The whole time we talked about how what we know about developing oral
language and teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) could be drawn into
lessons about writing. “What do you think about using this book with our
kids?” one of us would say, and that would head everyone off into a conver-
sation about stages of language acquisition and appropriateness of the texts
used to model writing for lessons. It was a challenge to overcome our own
fears and trepidations about teaching writing. For two years, we worked tomake it all come together. And then came the year we were told, “Don’t worry
about writing this year; we’ll worry about it next year.”
