The practice of self-regulated process: Oriented writing instruction in a primary-5 class

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of teaching fifth grade students to become self-regulated writers in the normal classroom when writing narratives in Chinese. The first author, as the teacher-researcher and the self-regulated writing program developer, utilized qualitative approach with techniques such as participant observation, interviewing, thinking-aloud writing, and questionnaires to collect the data from September 2005 to May 2006. We found that declarative knowledge, including the text construction, rhetoric, and punctuation marks, should be taught before procedural knowledge, i.e., how to write. Further, both cognitive strategies and self-regulated strategies should be included in the writing instruction. Limited writing is good for teaching children to plan and write narratives. We also found that most of the children improved a lot in the knowledge and the attitude toward writing in several categories, as well as the motivation, self expectance, strategy attributions, the length of narratives and the quality of papers. Some suggestions for teachers, schools, and future researchers were also made as well.