About the project
Norway has seen declining literacy performance in recent international assessments (PISA, 2022) and writing researchers have raised growing concerns about students’ writing development (Skar et al., 2020). Improving writing instruction thus remains a high educational priority in Norway.
Most writing assessments and instruction focus on the characteristics of the text itself, such as proper grammar, sophisticated vocabulary, and maintaining coherence. These qualities are important but do not necessarily tell us whether a text achieved its purpose. Ultimately, writing is successful only if it communicates the writer’s intended message correctly to the intended reader.
This is especially true for instructional writing: instructions are only successful if the intended reader can use them to complete the intended task correctly. Doing so requires more than a correct text. It requires anticipating what the reader needs to know and how the reader will interpret their text.
Audience awareness is widely recognized as important in effective writing, but it can be difficult to develop, as writers rarely get to experience the consequences of their own writing from the reader’s perspective. This project introduces a practical, hands-on classroom activity that brings audience awareness to the forefront: students experience the role of writer giving instructions, and the role of reader relying on someone else’s.
Write it Build it
As the name implies, students must both write and build. First, students receive an image of a LEGO figure and must write instructions to a partner explaining how to build that exact figure using only words. Then, students exchange instructions with their partner and build their new figure using only the written instructions. Once both students finish building, they compare their builds with the intended models and discuss together when instructions succeeded and when they fell apart.
Goals
The project has two primary goals. The first is to better understand the role of audience awareness in successful instruction writing both through traditional writing quality measures and through successful task completion by following the written instructions. The second is to evaluate whether the Write it Build it activity can strengthen students’ audience awareness by allowing them to experience writing from both perspectives of writer and reader in parallel. Ultimately, the project aims to develop practical, evidence-based approaches to writing instruction that teachers can easily incorporate into their classrooms.
