Sharing exemplars effectively to help students develop their writing skills

Abstract

Exemplars are sample texts chosen to illustrate levels of quality or competence (Sadler, 2005) and are used in a number of approaches to teaching writing. Although their use is ubiquitous, there is surprisingly little known about how teachers share exemplars with their students, and little advice in the literature about how to most effectively share them. This can result in problems. For example, students often see exemplars as models to follow and teachers fear that students might copy unproductively (Handley & Williams, 2011). This paper utilizes interview and observation data collected from lecturers at the Centre for Applied English Studies to better understand how teachers share exemplars to help students with their writing. Data analysis enabled the construction of a typology of three exemplar sharing approaches; a structured approach, an exploratory approach and a dialogic approach. Through analyzing the practices that constitute each approach, certain facilitating and inhibiting factors were identified that could aid or hinder learning from exemplars. The paper finishes with some tentative recommendations for practice.