Teaching Writing in the Content Areas: Research to Practice

"It's hard to explain. It's easier to point and show."

— Lorenzo, a third grade English learner

When I was doing research several years ago, I met a student whom I will call Lorenzo. Lorenzo said the above words in the middle of a science lesson when the teacher handed out science journals and asked students to explain how electricity works — in writing. The students had just finished a successful science experiment with an LED light, battery, and copper wire. They had talked about what worked and what didn't, and now were taking out their science journals to answer questions related to the experiment. Yet even though Lorenzo had completed the experiment successfully, he couldn't do the writing assignment.

Most of us have heard similar phrases uttered in frustration many times and found ourselves frustrated too because we love our students and want them to succeed. In this series, I will try to explain the reasons many students find writing difficult by answering the question, "Why is writing hard?" and then offer some steps teachers can take to address those challenges. This article is informed by some insights that I have gained through my research with classroom teachers in science, math, social studies, secondary ELA classrooms, and K-5 literacy blocks. I also offer some reflection questions and ideas for using this article in professional learning at the end.

Note: While the experience of multilingual students is centered in this article, the challenges and solutions I outline are relevant and appropriate for all students. In addition, this information can be used by content-area specialists, as well as English learner (EL)/multilingual learner (ML) specialists.

Why is writing hard?

Reason #1: Writing is assigned and not taught

The first thing we can learn from Lorenzo is that he was assigned, but not taught, writing. This is the prevailing writing pedagogy in the U.S. — process writing. The process writing approach puts most of the responsibility for learning how to write on the student, relying on peer feedback or teacher scribbles in the margins. Dr. Maria Brisk, who has been researching writing in Boston Public Schools for the last decade, describes this approach as "assigning and not teaching" (Brisk, 2022). In these classrooms, emphasis is on the process of drafting, editing, and revising — not on explicit teaching of how to write for certain purposes (Brisk, 2022; Hyland, 2003; Westerlund & Besser, 2021).

For example, Lorenzo might have been taught about writing a first draft, but he likely was not taught how to write in the genre of a science explanation, or how to express causes and effects through compound sentences. He picked up his journal after the science experiment and found himself staring at the journal without knowing how to translate that experience — which he understood and could talk through — into a coherent explanation on paper. No wonder he was frustrated.

Reason #2: Writing is disconnected from content areas

Lorenzo's dedicated writing instruction happened in the morning literacy block, which is when writing often takes place in elementary classrooms. Content learning often takes place in the afternoon, when students are learning science and social studies. And in a typical elementary school schedule, the writing block and the afternoon science block do not intersect. In Lorenzo's case, writing in the morning block was about chocolate milk, "small moments", and pets; as a result, Lorenzo struggled to write about magnetism and electricity. This made writing in science very difficult for Lorenzo indeed.

Why hadn't writing about chocolate milk and pets prepared Lorenzo to explain how electricity works in science? There may be several reasons. One main reason that I have found in my research is as follows: Most classroom teachers teach content and concepts, but they don't explicitly teach students how to explain those concepts in writing. Nor do they explain the features that are relevant to the genre or purpose for writing. Writing is assigned in content classes, and not taught, because writing is seen as part of the ELA classroom or literacy block. Yet to succeed with his science assignment, Lorenzo needed to understand that science explanations require abstract and precise language to explain the inner workings of the phenomena. This example shows the rich opportunities available when we connect the science and literacy blocks. Students' content area classes give them plenty of topics for their writing assignments, such as magnetism and electricity, geography, and our local community.

Reason #3: Just because students can talk about it, they may not be ready to write about it

Often teachers say to students, "If you can talk about it, you can write about it." In phenomenon-based science teaching, Lorenzo had lots of hands-on experience with the topic at hand in the class. He had plenty of opportunities to (a) talk, (b) experience an abstract concept of electricity through hands-on learning, and (c) discuss what worked and what didn't. There was high engagement in the classroom of learning and talking. Yet that experience didn't automatically translate into his ability to use language in the written mode. And Lorenzo didn't even have to write a full "essay." The task was to explain how electricity works in his science journal, which only required three sentences or so. And yet, he struggled to consolidate his learning on paper, even with activities and scaffolds such as graphic organizers and sentence frames.

This leads us to another reason writing is difficult: writing for academic purposes is not just speech written down.

Unlike speech, writing is a fairly recent human invention and represents our experiences in a different mode. While speech is fluid, spontaneous, dynamic, and unrehearsed, often accompanying action with objects, gestures and other non-verbals filling in the gaps in meaning, writing is different. Writing is different because it happens after the experience. Those are two extremes to describe differences between writing and speaking, but it is important to consider why the difference exists in the first place, which is mainly because writing happens after the experience. Because of this timing, written language requires a tighter cohesion for the reader to be able to track who is who and what is what. In writing, language does all the work, because there are no gestures or other nonverbals to fill in for loose cohesion, false starts, incomplete sentences, and sentence fragments that occur in speech.

This is not to say that there are other instances where spoken language has written features (a formal lecture) or written language has spoken features (a text message), but for the most part, the written language of schooling expected from students in written assignments falls mostly on the written-like end of the mode continuum.

In the case of Lorenzo's classroom, the teacher assumed that because students experienced an event (conducting an experiment where they had to make a light bulb go on), they could write about it. As Lorenzo's experience shows, that wasn't the case.

The Teaching and Learning Cycle for Disciplinary Genres

So what might have Lorenzo's teachers done differently? I'm going to walk you through a pedagogical cycle called the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC-DG — see Figure 1). The goal of this cycle is to help students achieve disciplinary literacy through explicit teaching of writing in the service of learning. This process is particularly powerful when content area teachers collaborate with ELL specialists who are experts in language development.

Referring to the graphic and table, you can follow this step-by-step approach for teaching writing.

Figure 1. The Teaching and Learning Cycle for Disciplinary Genres (Westerlund, R., 2024)

It starts with planning and identifying the summative genre (blue), and then providing experiences, talk, research, reading and conceptual development (red). Then the teacher guides students by deconstructing the mentor text to study the language of the genre (orange), followed by joint construction of the new genre by negotiating language and meaning together, inviting students' contributions to shape the text together (yellow).

Only then, students write the text individually and in some cases in pairs or with teacher help, especially for newcomers (green). The final step is reviewing and analyzing student data to see how the student met the content standard and the language standard connected to constructing science explanations (teal). Teachers who have learned this pedagogy in my training call it, "Don't jump from red to green." Jumping from red to green means assuming that just because students had an experience, they are ready to write about this experience.

The Teaching and Learning Cycle for Disciplinary Genres is an apprenticeship pedagogy cycling through 6 phases that accomplishes the following:

1. It positions writing in the service of learning by integrating it with content knowledge, reading, writing, and speaking.
2. It teaches the disciplinary genre explicitly by deconstructing and jointly constructing a model text together.
3. It positions learners as successful and capable writers who can learn any school genre by teaching writing and not assigning writing.
4. It draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics, a theory of language that positions language as a dynamic system of choices to make different kinds of meanings.

In this approach, writing is embedded in сontent-area learning and is scaffolded through the following activities in each stage of the TLC-DG (Table 7). Please note that these examples record activities of a teacher who participated in this research.

The Teaching and Learning Cycle: Step by Step

Phase 1: Planning with the End in Mind

The first phase is called "planning with the end in mind." In this phase, educators:

1. Identify the learning goals for the unit
2. Identify how that learning will be measured (summative assessment)
3. Identify the summative genre that matches the summative assessment

In the case of the lesson on electricity in Lorenzo's class, this would look like this:

1. Learning goal: Students will learn what electricity is and what stored energy is, using a battery
2. Summative assessment: Students will write a science explanation explaining what electricity is and how it works
3. Summative genre: Science explanations

In preparation for teaching students about the genre, an important part of planning with the end in mind might include collecting samples you can share with the students as mentor texts. You can read more about different genres and their purposes in the WIDA 2020 ELD Standards Framework, K-12.

Phase II: Building Knowledge of the Field

The next phase involves building students' knowledge of the field. This includes connecting content to students' lived experience, as well as starting to build some background knowledge.

Here are some examples of what this might look like:

Connect to students' experiences around the use of electricity in daily lives. For example, students can share their experiences and ideas and how they currently understand electricity. Remember to identify students' existing funds of knowledge and never make assumptions about the kinds of background knowledge that students do or do not have. For example, you might ask what electricians do and whether your students know any electricians or what kinds of training electricians need in their work. By activating students' background knowledge, you may also identify some misconceptions students have about this concept — this is where collaboration between content and ELD specialists can be quite valuable.

Build students' knowledge by providing experiences and realia, observing phenomena outside or inside, and watching videos with subtitles and revoicing key concepts and ideas of electricity uses explained for scientific purposes. Discuss the video using a focal question. Jot down a few key phrases to begin introducing language for the key concepts.

Provide activities for students to experience an abstract phenomenon through a hands-on experiment. Ask students for their initial claims about how electricity works. Students can then show their electric circuit and discuss what they have observed so far. Teach students that their initial claims might be revised and teach them how to hold those ideas lightly, especially if the concept is new. Tell students scientists constantly revise their ideas in light of the new data.

Throughout these activities, it's important for the teacher to take notes about the language students use when talking. As the teacher walks around supporting students' understanding, the teacher can take the opportunity to revoice/recast students' everyday language with more specialized language "flow" — "power source". This is not error correction — this is an opportunity to help students articulate their ideas through precise language when they reach for words to discuss concepts.

Teaching the procedural recount

So how can teachers help students make this leap? As noted above, when writing in the disciplines, such as writing up a science experiment, we do not just write down what we said when doing the experiment; instead, we go through a process of translating our everyday speech into specialized and discipline-specific language. In order to do this, students need explicit teaching of how language works in disciplinary genres across the years of schooling.

Table 2. Distinctive features of spoken-like vs. written-like language (based on Brisk, 2022; Derewianka & Jones, 2023; and Halliday, 1985).

"Translating" spoken language into written language

Table 3 illustrates how you might help students "translate" students' spoken language into specialized language of the discipline. This is where key vocabulary is introduced, not through pre-teaching, but introducing it after the experience as a micro-scaffolding interactional strategy. Here's how you would do this: The teacher and students collect language for the purpose of explaining a phenomenon, with students contributing everyday phrasing (on the left) and then the teacher teaching students how to rephrase that into a scientific and specialized language (on the right). Students can also use their texts on the same topic to contribute to the specialized phrasing. (Keep in mind that an ELL specialist can identify some of these key phrases and terms.)

Table 3. Activity to translate everyday language into specialized language

Teachers can use a scaffold through a procedural recount, which students can do orally to explanations. The procedural recount will help them process what happened and what results were achieved. That understanding can help them move toward an explanation of how electricity works.

Table 4. Classroom activity to contrast procedural recount vs. an explanation

This chart shows the difference between procedural recounts and explanations. For a more detailed examination, see this in-depth comparison chart.

Phase III: Deconstruction: Introducing the genre

This phase is where students dig into the genre. It is the phase for dedicated, explicit language teaching of the language of the genre and the language features students will need for the summative genre. So how might Lorenzo's teacher teach Lorenzo and his classmates about the genre of a science explanation?

1. First, the teacher shares an example of a mentor text.

2. Next, the teacher guides the students in deconstructing the mentor text or a model response asking questions like:

• What's the purpose of this text?
• How is the text organized?
• What's at the beginning?
• How many sentences does it have?
• How are sentences connected?
• How is precision created?
• How is this genre (explanation) different from a procedural recount?

3. Next, create genre specific language anchor charts. See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Anchor Chart on Electricity

For example, the teacher and students can create a T-chart of everyday and specialized language features on the board to add precision to their ideas, as well as key terms such as, "the positive side", "the negative side", "is transmitted", "conducts." (See Table 3 and Figure 3.)

This activity helps students learn the language needed for the new genre, including the genre's organizational features.

Sample guiding questions might include:

• What language will we need to write for an audience who didn't participate in the experience with us?
• Can we start with "it", "they" or do we need to name our objects and processes?

Through this process, the teacher and students deconstruct text to see the pattern of meanings through Theme and Rheme which creates cohesion across text, sentence by sentence, as seen in the following table.

Table 5. Theme and Rheme examples

Theme and Rheme

How language works in science explanations

In addition, another key step Lorenzo's teacher could take is to help students understand how language often works in science. Language in science is typically taught as vocabulary words, which are very important, but vocabulary alone is not sufficient for students to construct explanations and provide evidence to their claims. That's why the framework of Discourse, Sentence, and Word levels can help us to think what other language students may need in addition to vocabulary. When teachers understand how language works in science texts, it can empower them to teach writing explicitly beyond vocabulary or sentence level worksheet writing. Ultimately, it can help all students to understand how writing supports learning science and what language resources they need to articulate their knowledge (Table 5).

Table 6. Language Features of Science Explanations

Phase IV: Joint Construction

In this stage, the teacher and students together create an anchor chart; the teacher writes on the board and talks about language needed for science explanations using color-coding, such as red for noun groups and green for verb groups. (See Figure 3 below.)

The teacher and students jointly construct the text following Theme and Rheme pattern from Deconstruction. They draw arrows to show how information at the end of the sentence now goes to the beginning of the sentence.

Joint construction is more than shared writing and includes a careful negotiation of meaning and crafting of students' contributions to match the desired genre. This phase is the best illustration of apprenticeship where the teacher and students jointly construct the text to match the summative genre.

The teacher and students create language anchor charts together with:

• Abstract nouns: Terms used to talk about phenomenon, e.g., electricity
• Timeless present verbs: These indicate something that always happens, e.g., flows, lights up, conducts
• Non-human participants realized as noun groups: These include examples such as the positive side, the negative side
• Causal language: These can include "When" clauses…
• Passive voice: This focuses on the process, not on human agency

Figure 3. Noun and verb groups	Figure 4. Jointly constructed explanation

Phase V: Independent Writing

Students write referring to the anchor charts, writing on the board, and the deconstructed and jointly constructed mentor texts. They use the student-friendly checklist to help them guide their writing. During this time, newcomers can work with a partner or request the teacher's help to develop their writing sample.

Phase VI: Analysis and Reflection

In this stage, the teacher collects student work and reviews it according to the learning goals for language and content identified earlier. The teacher also identifies next steps in teaching the disciplinary genre based on the observed patterns in students' writing.

In this science unit, some questions for reviewing the work can be:

• How is students' understanding of how electricity works?
• Were students able to express their knowledge using precise language?
• Did the students explain what causes what to happen using causal language?
• Were students able to explain a phenomenon or just recount steps in the experiment?

Summary of Key Ideas

Here is a summary of key ideas for teaching writing to multilingual students:

1. Position writing in the service of learning by integrating writing into all content areas by focusing on key disciplinary genres.
2. Do not assess everything students write. Focus on key cumulative tasks. Writing should not always equate assessment. Writing is, first and foremost, an extension of knowledge.
3. Apprentice students into the disciplinary genres by teaching writing in the disciplines, not assigning writing.
4. Create genre-specific language anchor charts. See an example here, p. 8.
5. Allow students who are literate in their first language to write in their first language because it will help them show their knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge in any language.
6. With newcomers, give students a genre template and show them the genre structure with sentences started for them that show how the paragraph and sentence openers work.
7. Explicitly teach language in the written mode by showing how cohesion works in writing versus speaking.
8. Create mentor texts and model responses and deconstruct them with students:

• Start text deconstruction at the whole text level to orient students to the purpose of the text and the genre.
• Cut up the text into meaningful sections and discuss the function of each section.
• Circle the meaningful language chunks critical to the genre (noun groups in reports, causal links in explanations, language of place & time in setting narratives, doing, saying, feeling verbs that develop character, reporting verbs for bringing in other voices in arguments and many others). The WIDA 2020 ELD Standards have more language features connected to their functions and the disciplinary genres (called Key Language Uses).

Note: For more deconstruction activities, see Making Language Visible in Social Studies: A Guide to Disciplinary Literacy that I co-wrote with Dr. Sharon Besser.

Applying What You've Learned

This is a process that takes practice, and so we've compiled some resources for you. These include:

• A blank anchor chart
• A comparison chart with additional detail about procedural recounts
• Teaching with the WIDA 2020 ELD Standards in a Second-Grade Literacy Block by Dr. Ruslana Westerlund
• Scaffolding Multilingual Learners’ Access to Wisconsin Social Studies Inquiry Through the WIDA ELD Standards by Dr. Ruslana Westerlund and Elizabeth Folber

Professional learning

In addition, you may wish to consider the following reflection questions and professional learning activities:

Reflection questions

• What are some writing tasks that your students find challenging?
• Why do you think those tasks are challenging for them?
• After reading this article, how has your understanding of those challenges changed?

Professional activities

• Share this article in a professional learning community. Ask your colleagues to identify a writing task that they and a colleague could teach through the Teaching and Learning Cycle. How would they do so?
• What are some writing skills that could be embedded into language arts/writing blocks? How might colleagues collaborate to coordinate that instruction?

Table 7. Activities in the Teaching and Learning Cycle

Closing Thoughts

We can see after going through this process that if Lorenzo experienced an apprenticeship pedagogy over the course of the year where he was explicitly taught how language works in disciplinary genres, he would have had more chances at succeeding as a writer. The good news is that these processes can be learned and practiced — giving students the path forward they need to successfully write in academic areas.

About the Author

Dr. Ruslana Westerlund considers it a privilege and the greatest honor to serve educators, whether it is in school districts in Wisconsin at the Language and Culture Center at CESA 2 or internationally as a keynote speaker and professional development provider. Her life's mission is to increase Multilingual Learners' academic success so they can show the rest of the world their brilliance. She is thankful for the opportunity she has had at WIDA to research and contribute her expertise to develop the new edition of the WIDA ELD Standards by defining Key Language Uses as disciplinary genres and using SFL to bring nuance to the Language Functions and Features. She uses Systemic Functional Linguistics to apprentice MLs into disciplinary genres in K-12 content area classrooms.

Her publications appear in WIDA Focus Bulletins, the ASCD journal, Routledge, Colorín Colorado, and others. She has also co-authored several Routledge books Making Language Visible in Social Studies: A Guide to Disciplinary Literacy with Sharon Besser, Scaffolding for Multilingual Learners in Elementary and Secondary Classrooms with Luciana de Oliveira, and Building the Language Toolkit for Teaching the WIDA Standards, with Sally Humphrey and Olga Malin, coming out in 2025. To process her Ukrainian-American transcultural identity, she wrote From Borsch to Burgers: a Cross-Cultural Memoir. She is also a volunteer in her local and global Ukrainian community supporting her home country through various educational and cultural endeavors serving as President of a nonprofit Friends of Ukraine, Madison, Inc.