James Britton
This brief selection of James Britton's writings is thanks to Myra Barrs and Tony Burgess who compiled it in advance of the LATE 12.3.2016 conference on James Britton and why his writings are still relevant to teachers today.
I have chosen extracts which are particularly relevant to the concerns of NWP (UK). The underlinings and highlights are mine - as is the red commentary beneath. Simon Wrigley, Feb 2016
These passages are from 'Prospect and Retrospect' 1982
Learning to write by writing
Given these conditions I want to suggest that children learn to write above all by writing. This is an operational view of writing in school. The world about the child waits to be written about, so we haven’t the need to go hunting around for exercises or dummy runs. We have to set up a working relationship between his language and his experience, and there is plenty there to write about. An operational view implies that we have our priorities. Of course we care about spelling and punctuation, but not more than we care about what the language is doing for the child. Reading and writing and talking go hand in hand. And development comes from the gradual internalization of the written forms so our standards, the standards we apply to their writing, must be such as to take care that we don’t cut the writer out of the writing; or to put that another way, cut the writer off from his resources at the spoken level.
Development comes in two main directions-towards the transactional and towards the poetic. And in either case, if we are successful, children will continue to write as themselves as they reach those two poles. Their explorations of the outer world demand the transactional; their explorations of the inner world demand the poetic, and the roots of it all remain in the expressive. We don’t often write anything that is merely communication. There’s nearly always an element of “finding out,” of exploration. So it’s a very common process for us to be able to read into our own writing something which we weren’t fully aware of before we started to write. Writing can in fact be learning in the sense of discovery. But if we are to allow this to happen, we must give more credit than we often do to the process of shaping at the point of utterance and not inhibit the kind of discovery that can take place by insisting that children know exactly what they are going to say before they come to say it.
I want again to mention the importance of writing in the spectator role. Chaos is most painful in the area of values and beliefs. Therefore the harmonizing, the order-seeking effects of writing and reading on the poetic end of the spectrum are highly educational, important processes. And then finally the teacher as listener. We must be careful not to sacrifice to our roles as error spotters and improvers and correctors that of the teacher as listener and reader. I could sum it all up very simply. What is important is that children in school should write about what matters to them to someone who matters to them.
Prospect and Retrospect, chapter 10, p. 110
Shaping at the point of utterance
Then what about writing? First it must be said that students of invention in writing cannot afford to rule out of court evidence regarding invention in speech: there must be some carry-over from expression in the one medium to expression in the other. Shaping at the point of utterance is familiar enough in the way young children will spin their yarns to entertain an adult who is willing to provide an audience. (A ten-minute tape-recorded performance by a five year old boy winds up: “So he had ten thousand pounds, so everyone loved him in the world. He buy-he buyed a very fast racing car, he buyed a magic wand, he buyed everything he loved, and that’s the end of my story what I told you.” A five-year old sense of closure!) There is ample evidence that spontaneous invention of this kind survives, and may even appear to profit from, the process of dictating, where parent or teacher writes down what a child composes orally. That it is seriously inhibited by the slowing down of production when the child produces his own written script is undeniable. But it is my argument that successful writers adapt that inventiveness and continue to rely on it rather than switching to some different mode of operating. Once a writer’s words appear on the page, I believe they act primarily as a stimulus to continuing - to further writing, that is - and not primarily as a stimulus to re-writing. Our experiments in writing without being able to see what we had written suggested that the movements of the pen capture the movement of our thinking, and it is a serious obstacle to further composition not to be able to re-read, to get ‘into the tramlines again’.
An eight year old Newcastle schoolboy wrote about his own writing processes: ‘‘It just comes into your head, it’s not like thinking. It’s just there. When you get stuck you just read it through and the next bit is there, it just comes to you.” I think many teachers might regard the outcome of such a process as mere ‘fluency’, mere verbal facility, and not the sort of writing they want to encourage. It is my argument that highly effective writing may be produced in just that spontaneous manner, and that the best treatment for empty verbalism will rarely be a course of successive draft making.
Prospect and Retrospect, chapter 14, pp. 140-1
(In Britton's observations here, I hear an echo of the words of Edward Thomas (8 August 1914): " ... a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply." Fluent and effective writing may be achieved when the writer is 'emotionally warmed up' or when her thought is flowing most freely - often through 'free-writing'. Such 'charged' writing conveys an authentic voice; expression of meaning leads structure, rather than vice versa. This dynamic can be sensed by the reader. Similarly, a reader may readily detect - though not so easily explain - when, by an opposite process, writing is too studied, artificially wrought or emotionally insincere. Such phenomena are frequently noted by listeners to spoken language which sounds dishonest - e.g. 'I can't say precisely why, but something about the way he spoke didn't ring true.')
I have chosen extracts which are particularly relevant to the concerns of NWP (UK). The underlinings and highlights are mine - as is the red commentary beneath. Simon Wrigley, Feb 2016
These passages are from 'Prospect and Retrospect' 1982
Learning to write by writing
Given these conditions I want to suggest that children learn to write above all by writing. This is an operational view of writing in school. The world about the child waits to be written about, so we haven’t the need to go hunting around for exercises or dummy runs. We have to set up a working relationship between his language and his experience, and there is plenty there to write about. An operational view implies that we have our priorities. Of course we care about spelling and punctuation, but not more than we care about what the language is doing for the child. Reading and writing and talking go hand in hand. And development comes from the gradual internalization of the written forms so our standards, the standards we apply to their writing, must be such as to take care that we don’t cut the writer out of the writing; or to put that another way, cut the writer off from his resources at the spoken level.
Development comes in two main directions-towards the transactional and towards the poetic. And in either case, if we are successful, children will continue to write as themselves as they reach those two poles. Their explorations of the outer world demand the transactional; their explorations of the inner world demand the poetic, and the roots of it all remain in the expressive. We don’t often write anything that is merely communication. There’s nearly always an element of “finding out,” of exploration. So it’s a very common process for us to be able to read into our own writing something which we weren’t fully aware of before we started to write. Writing can in fact be learning in the sense of discovery. But if we are to allow this to happen, we must give more credit than we often do to the process of shaping at the point of utterance and not inhibit the kind of discovery that can take place by insisting that children know exactly what they are going to say before they come to say it.
I want again to mention the importance of writing in the spectator role. Chaos is most painful in the area of values and beliefs. Therefore the harmonizing, the order-seeking effects of writing and reading on the poetic end of the spectrum are highly educational, important processes. And then finally the teacher as listener. We must be careful not to sacrifice to our roles as error spotters and improvers and correctors that of the teacher as listener and reader. I could sum it all up very simply. What is important is that children in school should write about what matters to them to someone who matters to them.
Prospect and Retrospect, chapter 10, p. 110
Shaping at the point of utterance
Then what about writing? First it must be said that students of invention in writing cannot afford to rule out of court evidence regarding invention in speech: there must be some carry-over from expression in the one medium to expression in the other. Shaping at the point of utterance is familiar enough in the way young children will spin their yarns to entertain an adult who is willing to provide an audience. (A ten-minute tape-recorded performance by a five year old boy winds up: “So he had ten thousand pounds, so everyone loved him in the world. He buy-he buyed a very fast racing car, he buyed a magic wand, he buyed everything he loved, and that’s the end of my story what I told you.” A five-year old sense of closure!) There is ample evidence that spontaneous invention of this kind survives, and may even appear to profit from, the process of dictating, where parent or teacher writes down what a child composes orally. That it is seriously inhibited by the slowing down of production when the child produces his own written script is undeniable. But it is my argument that successful writers adapt that inventiveness and continue to rely on it rather than switching to some different mode of operating. Once a writer’s words appear on the page, I believe they act primarily as a stimulus to continuing - to further writing, that is - and not primarily as a stimulus to re-writing. Our experiments in writing without being able to see what we had written suggested that the movements of the pen capture the movement of our thinking, and it is a serious obstacle to further composition not to be able to re-read, to get ‘into the tramlines again’.
An eight year old Newcastle schoolboy wrote about his own writing processes: ‘‘It just comes into your head, it’s not like thinking. It’s just there. When you get stuck you just read it through and the next bit is there, it just comes to you.” I think many teachers might regard the outcome of such a process as mere ‘fluency’, mere verbal facility, and not the sort of writing they want to encourage. It is my argument that highly effective writing may be produced in just that spontaneous manner, and that the best treatment for empty verbalism will rarely be a course of successive draft making.
Prospect and Retrospect, chapter 14, pp. 140-1
(In Britton's observations here, I hear an echo of the words of Edward Thomas (8 August 1914): " ... a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply." Fluent and effective writing may be achieved when the writer is 'emotionally warmed up' or when her thought is flowing most freely - often through 'free-writing'. Such 'charged' writing conveys an authentic voice; expression of meaning leads structure, rather than vice versa. This dynamic can be sensed by the reader. Similarly, a reader may readily detect - though not so easily explain - when, by an opposite process, writing is too studied, artificially wrought or emotionally insincere. Such phenomena are frequently noted by listeners to spoken language which sounds dishonest - e.g. 'I can't say precisely why, but something about the way he spoke didn't ring true.')
I also believe that in building NWP (UK), teachers are collectively and autonomously doing what Jimmy described in 'Prospect and Restrospect' - establishing ..." quiet processes and small circles in which vital and transforming events take place."
Simon Wrigley, October 2017
Simon Wrigley, October 2017