Talk for Writing

Talk for Writing

At William Law, we have developed an exciting and engaging approach to teaching English, based on Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing. This approach is used from Reception right through to Year 6, aiming to enrich vocabulary, share new worlds and stretch children’s imaginations in both reading and writing.

Talk for Writing enables children to imitate the key language they need for a particular genre orally, playing games and creating actions to help them rehearse this. Children then “unpick” and analyse a high quality model text to understand what makes this so successful, looking at the structure of the model and thinking about how its different components. Through completing shared and then independent writing, children are free to create their own texts using this learning.

The three stages of Talk for Writing are:-

1) Imitation - the children learn a text and the language they need

2) Innovation - the children adapt the model text with ideas of their own

3) Invention - the children create their own text using the language and skills that the model taught them.

Through this approach, William Law fosters confidence, articulacy and aspirations within our writing lessons. The Talk for Writing approach was develop by Pie Corbett, an educational writer and poet. He is well known for promoting creativity in the classroom and has experience as a teacher, head teacher and OFSTED inspector. He regularly lectures on education around the world and the UK government consult with him as an educational advisor.

The video below is of Pie Corbett explaining more about Talk for Writing.

Link to video