Planning a Focus on Writing

Scott Thornbury's Essential 35 from 66 Essentials of Lesson Design. Writing is often pushed to homework because it is slow and demands concentration, but when writing is the primary classroom focus the planning has to decide what the writing is actually for, how much support learners need at each stage, and how the teacher will respond. The core move is treating writing as a skill to be developed rather than a vehicle for practising recently-taught grammar.

Five purposes of classroom writing

A writing lesson is rarely one aim. Thornbury identifies five possible objectives, and the planning decisions flow from which one dominates:

• Language practice: writing as a vehicle for a grammatical item or lexical set (the traditional default)
• Sub-skill development: spelling, cohesive devices, paragraph structure, punctuation
• Text-type / genre practice: filling in a form, writing a resumé, producing a recount or argument (links into the Genre-Based Approach)
• Fluency: freewriting or written interaction (texting-style exchanges) as an alternative to speaking
• Creativity and self-expression: poems, narratives, dramatic dialogues

The historical shift Thornbury notes is from the first purpose (language practice) dominating classroom writing, to writing being acknowledged as a skill in its own right. Instruction now tends to split between incremental sub-skill work (Process Writing traditions) and holistic whole-text work with feedback (Product Writing / genre traditions).

Five planning questions

Once the purpose is clear, Thornbury lists five questions that shape the lesson:

Will the task be scaffolded by a model text? The pro argument is that a model avoids the hit-and-miss of pure discovery. The con is that it can constrain creativity and self-expression. The answer depends on the purpose. Model texts are essential for genre work and counter-productive for creative writing.

Individual or collaborative? Real-life writing is mostly solitary, but the learning of writing benefits from collaboration at ideation, drafting, proof-reading, and feedback. Collaborative Writing is often the right answer even when the target skill is individual composition.

How much while-writing assistance? Evidence suggests point-of-need support beats post-hoc feedback. The teacher is well-placed during drafting to prompt ideas, redirect attention to the model text, offer on-the-spot correction, and encourage peer help. Oral Composition fits here: rehearsing aloud before writing is itself a form of while-writing scaffold.

Who is the intended reader? A clear audience shapes organisation and register. "Write a paragraph about your weekend" is a weaker prompt than "write a text message to a classmate who missed Friday's lesson." The reader-less task forces learners to write for the teacher's red pen by default.

How will the teacher respond? If response is only at the level of accuracy, spelling, and grammar, global features get ignored and learners feel their ideas didn't matter. The content deserves a reader's response first; correction comes after. This echoes the principle behind selective correction: not everything needs to be marked.

The seven-step lesson structure

Combining the principles, Thornbury sketches a lesson shape:

1. Introduce the topic, context, purpose, and audience of the writing
2. Present a model text (or several of the same type)
3. Macro analysis: learners identify how the text is organised (its staged structure)
4. Micro analysis: learners or teacher highlight indicators of style, register, core grammatical features
5. Write: learners produce similar texts for different scenarios
6. Share: texts are read, commented on, responded to (by peers and/or teacher)
7. Feedback and follow-up: the teacher addresses specific issues that emerged and sets a follow-up task for homework

This is essentially the Sydney School teaching-learning cycle (deconstruction → joint construction → independent construction) compressed into a single lesson. The model-text analysis at steps 2-4 is genre pedagogy; the shared reading at step 6 adds audience back into the loop.

Practical planning implications

• Lead with purpose, not grammar. If the stated aim is "practise the past simple," the writing will slide back into language practice. Frame the aim as what kind of text the learners will produce.
• Name the audience. Every writing task should have one. If the teacher is the only reader, invent one: a classmate, a parent, a website, a future self.
• Budget real time for drafting. The while-writing stage is where the teacher's support does the most work. Don't compress it to give more room for correction afterwards.
• Respond to content before form. The first response to a student text should be about what they said; form comes in the follow-up pass.
• Don't over-scaffold creative writing. The model-text route is for genres, not for poems or personal narratives where the constraint kills the point.

See also

• Genre-Based Approach: the Sydney School teaching-learning cycle that step 2-4 sit inside
• Process Writing and Product Writing: the two traditions Thornbury's framing sits between
• Teaching Sentence Writing, Teaching Paragraph Writing in ESL-EFL Contexts: the foundational skills that feed into whole-text work
• Teaching Writing: hub for the writing methodology cluster

Reference

Thornbury, S. (2024). 66 Essentials of Lesson Design, Essential 35: Planning a focus on writing.