Re-structuring sentences in order to promote variety within own writing

The concept

A teacher in a comprehensive school said "My level 4/5 borderline children in year 9 struggle with building in variety into their sentence structures. This often means that sentences follow a similar pattern, with the subject being addressed initially, and writing becomes dull and repetitive."

In order to address this issue, the teacher devised a structure to be taught using ICT. It aims to teach the following:

• How variety can improve the writer's technique and the reader's enjoyment;
• How to use the Comment tool in Word to aid peer comprehension of a text;
• How punctuation in a text can change meaning when used to change sentence structure.

Why use ICT?

In the past some children have failed to realise that sentence structure is important to the success of their own writing both in terms of their enjoyment of writing and their educational success.  To build in variety and engagement, the teacher decided to use ICT to help them organise their thoughts and approach this work with a more critical mindset. In order to do this, the teacher decided to focus on the 'insert comment' tool in Word because it encourages students to think critically about the structure of a sentence and to comment on it in a way that is easily accessible to others. The teacher decided to use ICT in the following ways:

• To use the comment tool in Word, to restructure ideas within a text.
• To use peers' comments to restructure a text and comment upon the effectiveness of new sentences.
• To alter meaning, by changing the location of punctuation within the text.
• To re-evaluate character as a by-product of any changes made to a text via ICT.

The lesson(s)

These lessons were taught as part of the study of Shakespeare’s Richard III

Learning objectives and related assessment focuses
SL1: review and develop the meaning, clarity, organisation and impact of complex sentences in their own writing;
SL2: use the full range of punctuation to clarify and emphasise meaning for a reader;
R5: evaluate their own critical writing about texts.

Reading AF:
1. Explain and comment on writers' uses of language, including grammatical and literary features at word and sentence level;
2. Identify and comment on writers' purposes and viewpoints and the overall effect of the text on the reader.

Writing AF:
5. Vary sentences for clarity, purpose and effect.

Lesson one

Starter 
Students attempt basic sentence reorganisation task. Feedback ideas on board. Allow students to interact in this process. The aim of this is to stress why variation in sentence structure is important to readers and writers.

Introduction
Talk about how punctuation is also important in this process of sentence reorganisation and is something that cannot be taken for granted. Students attempt Dear Richard task. Feedback.

The aim of this is to highlight how punctuation is used as a signpost for the reader.

Development 
Show the class how to use the Comment tool in Word. Refer this aspect of the lesson back to the assessment question of Richard's appeal to an audience, which was posed in the lesson before. Change one aspect of the text with class. By doing this, you are showing the class how to use the Comment tool in Word.

Students move to computers. In pairs, students use the Comment tool to change and analyse the text. When complete they save to My Submissions folder and / or print out. This helps students to collaborate, make decisions and re-structure sentences to aid meaning and improve the author's technique.

Pairs then swap annotated texts and re-write the piece using the suggestions they have been given. They then use the comment tool further to consider how the structure of the sentences affects reader's perceptions. The aim here is to teach the class how to restructure sentences and sequence work in an ICT format from instructions given by others.

Plenary 
Listen to some restructured ideas. Ask: Do they work? Why? Students answer questions led by the teacher regarding next steps. Revisit objectives with the class. Here students evaluate the knowledge learnt and progress made in this lesson.

Questions for discussion/ consideration:

Is there more opportunity for the teacher to move from modelled to shared work with the class?
Is there more opportunity for the plenary to be more child led?
Where are the opportunities to use the flipchart and Word (or other applications) to explicitly draw out / record success criteria?
How can this work be differentiated?
How has ICT helped pupils to understand of the text?

Evaluation

Students enjoyed using the Comment Tool and picked up the ICT skills associated with this very quickly. The secure level four students seemed to cope extremely well with this process and were able to restructure the sentences. The secure level five students however, after initially attempting the task with ease, seemed to lose focus later on in the lesson and the quality of work and comments were not as advanced as the teacher would have hoped. What was interesting in the whole process was that students started to evaluate the impact the restructuring had on the content. This meant that both structural and content comments were generated. The second lesson saw more development for all learners as the teacher was able to intervene to address the secure level five learners and exploit the students' responses to the question of why Richard might appeal to an audience.

Developments

The following areas were considered for future development:

Differentiation needs to be addressed in the first lesson in order to move more able learners away from repetitive tasks. This could possibly be done through a shorter extract allowing more time for students to write their own responses, perhaps to a different section.

There could be more opportunities at the start of the lesson for students to interact with sentence structure, by using; for example 'collapsing a text'.

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