Explain the Importance of Modelled Writing in the Primary English Classroom

Modelled writing is part of the genre approach to writing, which developed through arguments propounded by Rothery (1984) and Christie (1990) (cited in Green and Campbell, 2003, 133) for a weakness in the process writing approach - specifically that students were producing a surplus of the narrative genre to the detriment of developing writing competency in other genres, and further, that these subsequent genres needed to be taught explicitly. The genre approach promotes a selection of text types that are "modelled, jointly constructed with the teacher and then independently written by the children" (Derewianka, 1990, in Green and Campbell, 2003, 133). This is a useful approach to take, because when planning a writing program for students, many aspects of writing need to be considered, including "the nature of writing, the relationship between writing and reading [and] the way the social purposes of writing change for different groups in our culture." (Green and Campbell, 2003, 132).…