Year 5 students have weekly spelling and grammar lessons to help them master language conventions they will need to write academically in the Writing Workshop. This week, class teacher Sally Sterk helped our students to become more familiar with the conventions of formal and informal language.
Formal language is more specific and specialised than informal language, which is mainly used for chatting with friends and family. It is formal language that students need to use when writing for an academic purpose or speaking to a potential employer in a job interview. Formal, academic language is only ever found in two places: in books and school lessons. It must be explicitly taught for students to begin using; otherwise most will carry on writing informally the way they speak.
Here you see that Mrs. Sterk provides two model texts (linked to newspaper writing) that show the difference between formal and informal writing. She highlights specific words that change the writing's tone: from serious and formal to chatty and informal.
At the close of this unit, children were asked to examine side-by-side examples of formal and informal writing to become more aware of how to move between them. Their last step was to add more formal language into their own news article, to raise the level of their academic writing.
Here is an example of Year 5 student news article. The academic words he successfully added are highlighted in red.
