Making Strategies and Self-Talk Visible: Writing Instruction in Regular and Special Education Classrooms

Expository writing is an important skill in the upper-elementary and secondary grades. Yet few studies have examined the effects of interventions designed to increase students’ expository writing abilities and their ability to generalize their knowledge to write expository texts using novel text structures. The present study examined the effects of an intervention that attempted to improve students’ expository writing abilities through an instructional emphasis on teacher and student dialogues about expository writing strategies, text structure processes, and self-regulated learning. The findings suggested that the dialogic instruction was effective (a) in promoting students’ expository writing abilities on two text structures taught during the intervention (explanation and comparison/contrast) and (b) in leading to improved abilities on a near transfer activity, in which students wrote using a text structure not taught during the intervention. Although students in the control group exhibited some pretest-posttest gains on specific text structures, they were not successful in using their knowledge to write about student-selected topics and text structures. The results support the importance of instruction that makes the writing processes and strategies visible to students through teacher-student and student-student dialogues.