The Writing Assessment Tool assesses quality of ideas.
Tutors are therefore encouraged to provide deliberate acts of teaching on how to generate good quality ideas for writing.
Charles Afeaki described how he used one activity: ‘Brainstorming within categories’ to help students generate ideas for the writing activity.
Using the acronym C-H-E-E-S-E as outlined in the NCLNA Developing Learner Writing workshop, Charles found that it provided a framework to students to generate plenty of ideas for a piece of writing:’ My Story’.
C Culture
H Health
E Economics
E Education
S Social groups / community
E Environment
Learners were asked:
What ideas around culture/health/money/education/social issues/environment are linked to your writing topic: ‘My Story’?
Charles observed that the learners found the C-H-E-E-S-E formula easy to follow and that ‘the continuous flow of ideas seemed to exceed paper space.’
Practising and becoming familiar with how to brainstorm within categories was helpful to learners; Charles reported that the second time they used the C-H-E-E-S-E framework, there was a marked improvement in the number of ideas generated.
Initially, however, the ideas they linked to each category were directly linked to their own context.
With direction, students generated and selected ideas that linked more closely to the writing topic.
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