The Staffroom: Helping learners develop their writer’s voice

For my chapter in Great FE Teaching, I explored teaching adult literacy in a women’s center. Here, I want to show that the ideas I set out about learners developing their writer’s voice are relevant to any setting and that we can use writing about the familiar to remove some of the learning burdens when learning new or different ways to write. Within functional skills qualifications, learners are expected to be able to write in different styles, such as business writing (emails and reports), personal writing (emails and letters) or persuasive writing (blogs and articles). Therefore, an essential aspect of teaching writing is a consideration of the format of a text, as well as its purpose and audience. When adult learners first join a class, as they may have been out of education for some time, there could be significant learning and adjustment in teaching and learning practice. This could be further compounded by being asked to complete unfamiliar classroom writing tasks. This is true for any new learner and those who are not exposed to these formats in their daily lives. There is a significant learning burden – or cognitive load – when thinking about what to write and how to write it. If we remove the burden of the content by asking learners to write about familiar things, then that can reduce the load and enable learners to […] Kerry Scattergood-staff-room-find-voice-feat | FE Week

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