ABSTRACT
A teacher wanted to find out who in her Year 6 class were underachieving in writing and why. What she found was that the majority of underachievers were boys. She discovered that most of these underachieving boys did not like writing, found it difficult to identify their best piece of writing, wrote little, and rarely re-read, improved or edited their first draft. They often did not complete their work and expressed little interest in doing it. One of the boys commented: ‘Writing is boring’. Another said: ‘I’m no good at writing, Miss… what’s the point?’. This teacher found that her underachieving boys seemed to illustrate problems shared by many teachers.
