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Talk for Writing

Why and what is Talk For Writing?

Since September 2023, The Early Years Foundation Stage and KS1 have embedded ‘Talk For Writing’. ‘Talk For Writing’ (TFW) is an engaging, rigorous and creative teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett. It is a powerful and cumulative approach that is based fundamentally on the principles of how children learn.

Our aim at Plumcroft through using the TFW approach is for children to become even more excited to read, write and express themselves. We aim for children to find pleasure and develop confidence in becoming articulate storytellers, readers and writers for a variety of audiences and purposes. We aim for the children to make extraordinary progress which in turn will raise standards and attainment across the two phases. Other schools around the country, which have embedded the Talk for Writing approach, have been successful in raising attainment and improving the progress of children’s writing.

Pie Corbett himself answers the question ‘What is Talk for Writing?’ in the following video clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI2OWdZo6nY There are lots of other YouTube clips to explain and demonstrate how ‘Talk For Writing is implemented.

Academic Year 2024-2025 introduces the approach in Year 3 too!

What does Talk for writing look like?

Children are supported to generate and develop their own ideas, imitate key learning patterns for a particular text type, rehearse the tune of the language they need followed by shared writing to show them how to craft their own writing. They do this through following a three- tier pattern: Imitation, Innovation and Independent Application.

Each focus story and unit of work lasts 3-4 weeks. The stories are progressive in content and language from Nursery to Year 2. The stories highlighted below are the fiction stories that are taught. Time is also allocated in the curriculum to teach Non-fiction texts in the TFW style as well as sharing information books to support learning in other areas of the curriculum. Children also have extensive opportunities to read real books and at Plumcroft we have ‘core books’ for each year group.

TFW Stories we teach at Plumcroft in the EYFS and KS1

For more information about Talk For Writing, click on the link below.

http://www.talk4writing.co.uk/about/

The document below shows what a typical Talk for Writing topic looks like at Plumcroft Primary School.