ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the teaching of the authorial and secretarial aspects of writing, both independently and as complementary processes as children learn to write. The strategies introduced offer differing levels of support from the teacher and broadly fall into four categories: modelled writing strategies, shared writing strategies, guided writing strategies and strategies to support independent writing. Teaching strategies involve varying degrees of responsibility for writing from both the teacher and the children. The children's role is to observe what the teacher is writing and to listen as skills, strategies, procedures and understandings are verbalised by the teacher. Learning to write in English is a complex process that needs to be explicitly taught to children as a meaning-making process which follows set rules and conventions. Writing is also critical to literacy in the twenty-first century, with children required to create both print-based and multimodal texts for a variety of social purposes.
