Holy crap! I didn't realise I've read this book before (never mind twice) so yeah... In my defence, it was a different edition, it was blue AND I read so many books at university that a lot moulded into one. When I wrote my reviews whilst I was at university (see below), I was in a completely different mindset towards Talk for Writing. I had a very naive approach to the teaching of writing. For my training, I was very lucky to be in high attaining classes that found it easy to write. To be truthfully honest, I've always found writing harder to teach - even though I specialised in English at university.
In my NQT year, I was brought to reality on how difficult it is to teach children writing all year and be responsible for that. We spent AGESSSS writing that the curriculum was restricted but at least the writing was good. Moving schools and year groups meant the shift of priorities changed and the writing changed. Where I teach, writing and reading are much more difficult to teach than your bog standard school as often children arrive at my school with little vocabulary and not a varied range of sentence structures and many don't have books home. Now try and say - write a text about... I'm starting from nothing and it is hard.
This is where Corbett comes in. I'm hoping the master of wrting...He speaks about talking as a writer and developing language patterns and internalising text structures. I've had a go at this approach with barely any training and it was hard. I've read the book and felt a little more enlightened but I have a PD day on it next week which will help me further.
The purpose of me reading this book was to gain a better understanding and think of some questions to ask the trainer, which I have done. Very useful! I'll be using this for the rest of the year. _________________ May 2017 update:
Rated down to 3*
- Not as good at the end of my training.
_______________ January 2016:
A very useful read - 3.5*
This book is definitely very useful for trainee teachers (such as myself) and it has really developed my understanding of the different features for non-fiction writing. I will definitely be adding the fiction writing version of this book to my to-read list. From this book, I now have a definitive list for each piece of writing and what to focus on, e.g. language features.
There was also some theory in here which I enjoyed. I can even add this to my development targets as this helps me meet one of my targets from year one.
Pie Corbett has developed an innovative approach to teaching creative writing:'talk for writing' and it is brilliant. In this book, he discusses the key principles as well as practical ideas. A must-read for any teacher of creative writing.