Teaching Expository Writing with Informational Texts

As a teacher sometimes it is hard to motivate students to write essays. Teachers need to look for opportunities to stimulate their interest. Recognizing that our interests are often not the same as our students, we must encourage them to follow their educational pursuits.

Once, I had a student who loved pythons. I noticed he would discuss them with his fellow classmates passionately. On his trips to the media center, he would check out books about snakes and during silent reading time would read and re-read the texts. One morning he came and his mom had bought him an informational book on pythons. He was excited. He told anyone who would listen, the facts he found in the book. What was unique to this situation was the student's struggle with reading. Despite the fact that by testing standards he was two years below grade level, his interest in reading remained. Of course as much as he read about pythons, he enjoyed writing about them. Tompkins, entails the goals of expository writing for grades 3-5 as: "Recognize and use all five expository text structures and research and write reports" (171). It was unfortunate that my student was unable to fulfill those goals because of his limited reading efficiency; it was however, exciting that he tried. It became his determination to learn as much as he could about pythons and as he learned he wrote. It is these informational texts that Furr writes in his article, Struggling Readers Get Hooked on Writing, "Not only does the acquisition of "new" information from such texts appeal to preadolescent students, but information in these series often mask low readability" (3). Through the manipulation of such texts students create some of their more meaningful essays and oftentimes these students are the ones whose struggle with reading. Furr in his article describes a lesson he taught in a modified writing workshop where struggling readers participated and were successful (169). It helped me understand the need for expository writing and how it supports students with reading and writing instructional needs. It hooks them into the writing process and produces substantive writing that might have normally not have occurred. Using webs and shared writing experiences, Furr encourages teachers to capitalize on their student's interest and funnel these interests into quality writing projects. I recognize now, what I might think of as a passing interest, could be a student's initial introduction to a long-living desire to write. Tompkins offers these additional tips for teaching expository writing:

· First, teachers should link reading and writing.

· Second, teachers should teach children how expository text differs from other genres.

· Third, teachers should teach children about plagiarism. Children need to learn how to take notes and to paraphrase the information they've read so they won't copy word for word from books when they write summaries, reports, and other types of expository writing (186).

The last tip I had not thought of. I realize that for struggling students it would be easy to just rewrite the words they read and see. I hope that through the writing process I can help my students learn how to write the information in their own words. I will consider this next year as I teach informational writing.

References

Furr, Derek. (2003). Struggling readers get hooked on writing. The Reading Teacher. 56

(6), 518-525.

Tompkins, Gail E., (2008). Teaching writing: balancing process and product. (5^th. Ed.).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.