This was a powerful message to some teachers who accepted it as permission to abdicate responsibility for the teaching of any mechanics. In the years following the Braddock et al. study, two approaches to writing instruction emerged. Many of the studies focusing on sentence combining and construction have shown positive growth in syntactic maturity of writers. However, these studies have not responded to the question of reduction of errors and it is this aspect of writing that often determines a rater s view of the quality of the product. What a teacher expects shapes what he or she will see.
Teachers can focus on either what the error is or why the error occurred.
Thus, Shaughnessy suggested that teachers must decide what a tolerable error is by determining which errors matter most in the communication process and which can be corrected over time to allow students to grow in this area of their expertise. She argued that a behaviorist view that drill alone will result in accurate applications of rules is faulty because it assumes that concepts students learn in isolation will be transferred to other contexts. She proposed that a constructivist model encourages students to grapple with both the meaning of the conventions and their useful applications, noting, like Shaughnessy, that errors are likely to occur during the learning process because students actually try to incorporate their new conceptualizations into their writing. Weaver suggested that teachers use incidental lessons to introduce concepts and inductive lessons to guide students in an awareness of grammatical patterns and to provide opportunities for students to arrive at their own generalizations about use. Although this is only a brief review of the literature on writing instruction, it does offer to us at least four paths to consider in the improvement of student writing.