Writing Instruction Should Be Integrated Throughout the Curriculum
Don't relegate language arts education to just "English."
When I was in high school, way back in the ‘90s, everyone took “English” class every year. There, we studied English literature. This included “belles-lettres” (fiction, drama, poetry, etc.) originally written in English, and generally excluded non-fiction and translated works. I remember being assigned to read, analyze, and write about Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, John Donne’s “The Flea,” plays and sonnets by William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, William Blake’s “The Tyger,” Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Great Gatsby.
English class was also where we were taught writing: i.e., grammar and composition. We did write essays and papers in our social studies classes (history, government, economics, etc.) and lab reports in our science classes (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.). But, aside from teachers marking up our assignments, those classes did not involve any systematic writing instruction.
Nowadays, the way subjects are named and taught may vary more from school to school. For example, students may take “Language Arts” instead of “English.” But it largely remains the case that writing instruction is relegated to a single class.
The Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) approaches writing education very differently. They help homeschooling parents and teachers integrate instruction in the arts of language (listening and speaking, reading and writing) throughout the entire curriculum. Students are taught language arts exercises that involve listening, reading, speaking and writing about history, philosophy, literature, geography, science, etc. And doing such exercises is a key way students learn facts and ideas relevant to those subjects.
This makes much more sense to me.
To fully learn most any subject (especially among the humanities), a student needs to be able to process and reformulate what he’s heard and read into his own spoken and written words. And to learn how to do so well requires focused instruction and coaching.
Moreover, for students to get enough practice to become competent speakers and writers, they need abundant material to speak and write about: more material than kids generally have in their heads yet. Teachers and teaching parents can provide students with that material through texts and talks relevant to their various studies.
Students need to learn subject matter through language arts. And they need to learn language arts through subject matter. The two are interdependent, so it makes no sense to sunder them as our public school system has done. By reintegrating them, the Institute for Excellence Writing makes teaching both language arts and scholarly subjects easier and more effective.