How Writing Frames Can Help
The work of Cairney (1990) on story frames and Cudd and Roberts (1989) on expository paragraph frames first suggested to us that children's early attempts at written structures might be scaffolded profitably. Cairney describes story frames as "a form of probed text recall" and a "story level cloze." Cudd and Roberts claim that expository frames "provide a bridge which helps ease the transition from narrative to content area reading and writing." Cudd and Roberts's frames, however, were largely in recount genre and we wanted to introduce students to a wider range of genres. As a result, we have developed a range of writing frames for use in the classroom.These frames were all developed in collaboration with teachers and have been widely used with children throughout the elementary- and middle-school years and across the full range of abilities, including students with special needs. On the strength of this extensive trialling we are reasonably confident in saying that not only do writing frames help students become familiar with unfamiliar genres, but that they also help students overcome many of the other problems often associated with nonfiction writing.
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Posted May 1998
© 1998-2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232