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Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Key Concepts

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Key concepts: VELS 1 & 2 | VELS 3 | VELS 4 | VELS 5 & 6

VELS Levels 1 & 2 – Learning to write (Clay, Munro)

Writing is a way of communicating through a process of constructing messages and representing ideas, feelings and information in print.

The process is complex and involves going from ideas, to spoken words, to printed and visual messages.

Writing is used to create meaning, to explore our ideas, to record what we have done and to communicate our thoughts, desires and feelings. It is also a powerful tool of influence.

The intended audience has an effect on the language choices, text types selected and form of presentation.

Purposes for writing:

  • to organise and to clarify what is known
  • helps to keep track of ideas during learning
  • helps retain what needs to be remembered.
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Purposes for writing

To communicate to others what they know and what they are thinking

Students use writing to communicate recent experiences, personally significant events and topics. The students talk about what they write and demonstrate awareness that:

  • speech can be written by being recorded in symbols and
  • writing is used to convey ideas, feelings and information.

Students discuss the purposes for writing and the ways in which they use their writing. They write for different purposes: to tell a story, to entertain, to inform, to reflect, to describe or to observe.

Examples of this include asking students to write about a picture they have drawn, recounts of recent personal experiences (using the students’ oral language as a basis for constructing and ‘reading back’ written texts) or narratives of one or two imagined ideas.

To explore, analyse and apply writing conventions

Students engage in and gradually make parts of the writing process routine.

Examples of this include developing strategies for planning and composing written text, using and varying basic sentence structures, spelling frequently used words making plausible attempts at spelling unfamiliar words.

Reference: Munro 2005

There are many aspects of the writing process that complement the reading process. Writing and reading involve the visual learning of letter features, letter forms and patterns of letter clusters in words. The writer is required to combine this learning with known writing conventions such as left to right progression and punctuation.

Shared knowledge and understandings to be learnt about printed language for reading and writing include:

  • moving in a left to right direction (for English) and controlling one-to-one matching of words, in order, to text
  • drawing on language information stored in memory
  • making and recognising visual symbols
  • using visual and sound information together
  • holding the message so far in mind
  • drawing on the known words and structures of language
  • searching, checking and correcting
  • managing to bring these different activities together as a message is constructed.

Reference: An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, Clay 2002, Heinemann.

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Professional learning

Features of writing:

  • What are the important features of writing?
  • What are the three main messages you take from this information?

Learning and teaching of writing:

  • How does focusing on the purposes for writing with students support their learning?
  • How do you articulate purposes for writing with students?
  • Think of four students in your class. How effectively do they consider purpose as part of the writing process?

Purposes of writing:

  • What opportunities do you provide for students to write for different purposes? For each purpose list ideas that you could you use with some of your students in the next few weeks.

The English Developmental Continuum P–10 provides evidence-based indicators of progress, linked to powerful teaching strategies, aligned to the progression points and the standards for the English Domain of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards.

These teaching strategies are designed to support purposeful teaching of individuals and small groups of students with similar learning needs. It is intended that teachers use the strategies in the context of their own classrooms, text or topic being taught.

See the department’s web page on The English Developmental Continuum P–10.

Related materials

Previous key concept - Selecting appropriate texts to support literacy learning (Anderson, Freebody)

Next key concept - Reciprocal relationship of language (Clay)

Teaching strategy - Writing strategies scaffolding: Collaborative learning and teaching

Assessment - Writing vocabulary assessment task & Hearing and recording sounds in words (part of the Observation Survey - Clay)