According to Evertts (1970), letting the student see his ideas in written form is an ideal way of teaching some children to read. The general environment that the teacher creates for learning is extremely vital for encouraging children’s writing. Evertts suggested the teacher should encourage students to write in their own interest, the opportunity for boys and girls to explore their creativities and imaginations. “ An experienced high school teacher wanted her students to be able to write about the common place – to see, to observe, and to notice things carefully so that they could bring clarity, direction, exactness to their writing.” (p. 13).
Children should have opportunities to experience the reality such as the feel of the rain touching their little faces, the observation of how plants grow, and to see carefully how the cocoons turn into butterflies. There are many examples of real life that give children inspiration on writing. The art of rhetoric writing should be taught before children’s initial writing. Children would write better and clearer if, the principles of rhetoric were taught in class, prior to their first writing. Sometimes, metaphors could be used to expand children’s thought and expression in writing if, they are unable to find the vocabularies for the sentences. Often, the emphasise on using and looking up every new word in the dictionaries is wasting time and too artificial. Evertts suggested to write a list of words that could be used for creative writing on the board could help young children to obtain the correct spelling of the words. This way, the teacher structures the children’s thinking.
James Mimmo Britton is an expert in research on writing abilities in children eleven to eighteen and is a member of the International Committee on Literature, International Association for the evalution of Educational Achievement (Evertts, 1970). Britton worked on the children writing process, he focused on how children learn to write by writing, and how children learn by writing. Writing is a lonely task. To a child,writing is equivalent to pushing a boat into the water on his own and sink or swim (Evertts, 1970).
According to Britton (Evertts, 1970), a good way to get the students to start writing is to ask them to write running commentary ( to say what is goingon). Britton observed children process of writing and allocated the processinto categories:
1. Self as audience
2. Child to trust adult
3. Student to teacher
4. Student to examiner
5. Expert ot laymen
6. Child to peer group
7. Group member to working group
8. Writer to his audience
9. Unclassified
Writing as a role of a spectator for fun, for need for either is a way children express what they saw in the events that they were in (Evertts, 1970). In this form of writing, children describe about the situations, using and building words that suit to the situations. The spectator is giving his attention to forms: forms of and in the utterance: to linguistic forms, to the form of events, and especially to the pattern or the form of feeling. (p.62) Britton suggested the continuous use of language by speaking or writing or listeing or reading,is the productive factor ln all language learning.
Burrows (Evertts, 1970) claimed young people are often potential poets who possess unique patterns and imagery in their writing styles. We need to ask ourselves as teachers (p.86):
1. How to get chidlren to write, to want to write, and to keep writing?
2. How do you teach chidlren correct English mechanics without restraining their free and far ranging orginality?
Burrows suggested:
1. Encourage creative efforts in many media,not only in words.
2. Show each child that you welcome his uniqueness.
3. Find ocasions for reading stories dictated or written by other children.
4. Have many story-making sessions in which individuals tell their own ‘make-up stories”.
5. At times, suggest building upon a storybegun by someone else, inventing a new ending or adding a character who reshapes some action in the original.
Well-presented children writings need to start from the learning in the class. Teacher should regularly test the children in dictiation skill such as reading stories from other sources, and then, to have the children dictate the content of writings back to the teacher.
Reference:
Evertts, E.L. 1970, “Explorations in Children’s Writing”, USA: National Council of Teachersof English.