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Progressive mastery through deliberate practice: A promising approach for improving writing

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This study is an analysis of the curriculum used to teach writing at one US high school in which outcomes for students were extremely strong. The study surfaces what was different in the approach used from what is typically understood and promoted as best practice in the teaching of writing. It does so in order to surface what elements of writing instruction are fruitful for further research. Findings identify an approach to teaching writing called progressive mastery through deliberate practice. This article articulates the five elements that constitute this approach (understanding the final product, breaking down its critical elements, creating a hierarchy among the elements, layering and progression of elements, and gradual release of scaffolds), as well as the ways they work in concert to bring about improved student writing and thinking.
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... Successful mastery of L1 writing competence is highly dependent on deliberate practice (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009;Panero, 2016) that could require learners' sustained effort and prolonged interest over many years, requiring that they commit themselves to being gritty. Furthermore, successfully mastering L2 writing skills might require L2 learners to invest more effort and passion than L1 learners because L2 learners must necessarily commit to acquiring L2 vocabulary and grammar in addition to deliberate practice (Xu et al., 2022;Yang & Zhang, 2023;Zhang, 2022). ...
... This might suggest that perseverance of effort plays a more critical role than consistency of interest in accounting for L2 learners' writing achievements. This finding might be interpreted as a function of learners' deliberate practice that the process of mastering writing competence is likely to demand (Panero, 2016). As Kellogg and Whiteford (2009) stated, "acquiring expertise in the writing of extended texts takes many years of deliberate practice under the guidance of an instructor, coach, mentor, or tutor" (p. ...
... Deliberate practice has been conceived to be an essential prerequisite for achieving success in mastering writing competence (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009;Panero, 2016), where learners need to devote themselves to hard work over time and have sustained passion. Thus, being gritty is essential to mastering first language (L1) and L2 writing skills. ...
... The progression of writing skills could be reliant on "the availability of adequate working memory resources and the capacity to allocate them appropriately to planning, sentence generation, and reviewing" (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009, p. 256). Acquiring such cognitive control could be facilitated and accelerated by deliberate practices (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009;Monk, 2016;Panero, 2016). In light of the significant differences between L1 and L2 writing (Wei et al., 2021;Zhang, 2022), L2 students would be required to devote more deliberate practices and thus be more persistent and passionate over time. ...
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