Children's writing in the primary school : an evaluation

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to assess students' creative writing (free writing) in Year 3 and Year 5 of the primary school. The participants in the study were set four writing tasks autobiographical, argumentative explanatory, and narrative. The main variable, the task, was kept constant across both levels. The main aim of this dissertation is that of assessing both the linguistic and syntactic characteristics (spelling, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, paragraphs and content) for each of the two year groups. These four tasks were given to students attending three schools - Independent School, State School and Church School. This made it possible to study any differences between the work of students attending these three schools, as well as any background factors influencing writing in a second language. The findings show that students encountered serious difficulties when writing in the English language. It also showed the importance of students' exposure to the English language, both at school as well as at home. There were also differences in the performance of students attending the three schools, as well as in the writing ability of the boys when compared to that of the girls. The study indicated that teachers can have varying ideas about the role of writing in the classroom. Finally the study showed that writing lacks the importance it should have in the English classroom.