By exploring one child’s Japanese and Chinese writing over three years, we have shown how this child continued to write about themes that expressed her agency as a family member, a member of a school team, and as a responsible citizen.

–  Analysis of Compositions Written by a Chinese Child in Japan

She found that students drew upon many voices surrounding them, such as songs, playground games, and sports, which entered into their talk during the process of writing.

 – Generous Reading: Seeing Students Through Their Writing

Apart from developing language competencies, writing assignments can also be used to measure and hone other competencies relevant in the twenty-first century. A paper published in The International Academic Forum’s Journal of Education, shows how, through what is termed as ‘Generous Reading’ of student writing, holistic objectives can be achieved. The approach can yield much useful insight.

Generous Reading is the brainchild of Lucy Spence, who elaborated on her ideas and the Generous Reading method in her 2014 book, Student Writing: Give It a Generous Reading.

In Spence’s words, it is to, “look beyond mistakes in spelling and grammar to hear a student’s message” (Spence, 2010). It is generous in the sense that, the reader recognises and appreciates that even writings laden with grammatical or other errors can show “purposeful thinking” and “makes sense” and has “internal logic” (Donahue, 2008 as cited in Spence, 2010).  

Spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes can be distracting and work to undermine credibility. When teachers practise Generous Reading, they allow themselves to set aside the mistakes and focus on gleaning what the writing reveals about a student.

Generous Reading values all writing. Indeed, one of the authors, Lucy Spence, from the University of South Carolina, recommends that the writings of beginning writers, be accorded, “the same respect and level of analysis we afford great literature” (Armstrong, 2006; Donahue, 2008; Tobin, 2000 as cited in Spence, 2010).

In developing Generous Reading, Lucy Spence drew from the work of Bakhtin, who introduced the concept of heteroglossia – many voices within one text. Heteroglossia suggests that what writers say is a combination of what they have heard and read previously from various sources. Such sources can include family, friends, teachers and books. These sources can also be of multiple languages.

Therefore, a teacher practising Spence’s method, can learn a lot about the influences working on a student’s development. If the influences are good, the proverbial village is working well. If the influences are not good, the village can make the necessary upstream changes.

To illustrate how Generous Reading can be practised, Lucy Spence worked with her co-author Yang Tao, who was born in China and moved to Japan. The duo worked with Yang Tao’s daughter who at the time, studied at a Japanese elementary school. They referred to the daughter, who was “born and raised in Japan”, as “Lala” in their paper.

They wanted to understand Lala’s “multilingual identity” and how she was “developing as a person and as a writer”. To show how Lala is multilingual, Lala’s mother explained that though Lala’s external language was predominantly Japanese, she spoke Mandarin, English and Japanese at home. Each of these languages exerted their own influence on the way Lala thought about the world, shaped what was important to her and affected how she expressed herself in writing.

They studied three of her compositions. The first was a journal entry written in Japanese, when she was in third grade. The second was a speech written in Chinese for a contest, when she was in the fourth grade. It was titled, What is Your Dream? Lala had written the final piece used in the analysis when she was in the fifth grade. Here, she had to write about her “impression” of a school-based, outdoor, team activity.

Students may discard their writing at the end of an academic year. It may be useful for them to keep certain of their favourite pieces so they can appreciate how they have changed and developed over the years.

The pieces which were analysed offered remarkable evidence of what Lala valued, how she progressed in her own unique journey and how the various cross-cultural, family, school and community influences played their roles to shape the person she was becoming.

When she was in grade three, she wrote in her journal about a trip to a park. She expressed satisfaction at how she had convinced her father that they should ride bicycles instead of driving there. She then stated she had successfully manoeuvred the monkey bar and that her younger brother had failed in his first attempt. She then described in some detail how he overcame the challenge with her encouragement.

After analysing this piece, the researchers found that Lala, at grade three was already beginning to understand how her words could change outcomes and that her actions made a difference. Japanese cultural influences were evident. For example, in the original Japanese, Lala had used the term, Gambare­ which according to the authors, shows “the belief that encouragement is important and can lead to success.”

When she was in grade four, her dream, as expressed in her own words (translated from Mandarin) was, “to be a person who is helpful to people who need help and protect the earth”. She expressed her desire to be involved in disaster relief efforts in Szechuan after the earthquake and explained that she was thus inspired from having watched a “TV program” about a flood in Thailand – the school floated away. Money was donated and the teachers taught in a floating school. She also expressed her thoughts on how it was very important to separate trash in Japan and reflected on her observations, when in China, of her own extended family’s handling of trash. She ended with how we can make environmentally-conscious food choices.

After analysing this piece, the researchers realised that Lala had been very influenced by the media she consumed and that this piece revealed Chinese cultural influences. For example, she had ended off the speech with “I want to realize my dream bit by bit” and the researchers suggested that “bit by bit” is “reminiscent of” Chinese proverbs.

Lala had always been concerned about the environment. When in grade three, she used her words to convince her father and could make a difference within her immediate family. A year later, she showed signs of wanting to make a difference in the wider world.

In the final piece, she described how her team overcame an orienteering challenge and how she had witnessed a very young student refuse help after she had fallen. Eventually, she had been the one to render assistance to this student. She ended this piece with, “Although it had many troubles, this exciting picnic was fun for me”.

The researchers highlighted how again, in Grade 5, in keeping to her character, Lala had shown herself to be caring, this time in the context of her school community and how to her, “many troubles” can still be “fun” when she overcame them.

Beginning writers do need guidance on spelling, punctuation and grammar.  Spence herself, when explaining what Generous Reading was, pointed out that it is very time consuming and “because a teacher’s time is limited, I recommend using generous reading only occasionally, such as to look at the writing of a particular student”. She added that the method is especially useful “when a team of teachers gather to study the student and his or her work” (Spence, 2010).

It must be reiterated that from a language perspective, that is, to develop competent writers, errors must be addressed. At the same time, students must know that teachers do appreciate their unique worldviews and how much they are developing as holistic individuals.

Words can be telling.

The Brain Dojo