Writing in English as an Additional Language at Key Stage 2

Writing in English as an Additional Language at Key Stage 2 33
4 Writing a story
The longer writing task required children to write a story. Narrative as a genre is
fundamental in several ways. It is the genre most frequently encountered by children
in their early experiences; it is the genre that young writers develop first, although
some aspects are late developing; it is one of the basic ways in which we understand
our lives as humans.
The story genre, which would include fairy tales, many novels and television soap
operas, conventionally feature a set of characters in a particular setting or context. The
characters are involved in a series of actions that lead to a resolution or dénouement.
Very often the actions are required to solve a problem that characters are faced with or
to reach a goal that they are set. It is in the solving of the problem that characters
reveal their strengths and weaknesses. The interest of a story for a reader is in how the
characters behave and how they tackle the problems that they encounter. The writer’s
task is to make characters and setting come alive for the reader, to keep the reader
interested in what the characters do, and to provide a satisfying – or at least interesting
– resolution.
4.1 The writing task
The task prompt was a set of four pictures which presented aspects of the story:
• Characters - a boy and his mum, a girl
• Setting - a games store
• Problem - boy and girl both want the last game in the store
• The beginning of the plot – the boy eagerly showing his mother a poster for
the new game; queuing to get into the shop; rushing inside the shop; boy and
girl holding a game.
The children had to write the story using the pictures as prompts, completing it in
their own way. Completion required children to “decide how the story ends”, i.e.
construct a Resolution to the problem.
For planning, children were given six bubbles in which to write “useful words and
phrases”. The headings of the bubbles represent aspects of the story: characters, in
the queue, inside the shop, when the boy sees the poster, as the shop opens, how the
story ends.
Pupils were given 45 minutes writing time, including up to 10 minutes planning time,
and had an answer booklet with two lined pages to write in. They could write more if
they wished.
4.2 The analysis
Following the framework for writing in Figure 5, we looked both at how writers put
together the story as a whole and at how they used their language resources to select
words to compose the sentences and clauses that made up that whole.
We began by analysing in depth a subset of twenty stories across language
background and levels, and used this process to decide how to analyse the full set,