ABSTRACT
If pupils are to be empowered as writers, then they need to understand the potential of writing: to recognise and appreciate it as an active social process within their own lives. Robinson suggests:
What is basic to the development of literacy, I would argue, is the same as what is basic to its full exercise: the empowerment of individuals to speak freely in such voices as they have about matters that concern them, matters of importance, so that conversations may be nourished. The most debilitating suggestion in our dominant metaphors for literacy is this one: that a language must be learned, a voice acquired, before conversation can begin.
(Robinson, 1990: 264) This chapter argues that from pre-school onwards, pupils need to be able to talk about themselves as writers, and value writing as a way of ‘constructing’ as well as ‘conveying meaning’ (DES, 1989). It suggests that prescriptive training and teaching curricula will not necessarily enable this to happen unless teachers recognise that progress in writing cannot be measured simply by a growing command of its code and conventions.