Why does the school make students write less and less? Or how writing changes at school

Abstract

The school makes students write less and less. This assumption requires an in-depth study both on the purposes that school writing has pursued over the years, and on the nature of the research conducted in the field. Today school writing risks being considered an obsolete and too difficult request for our students, because it is not practiced, and because perhaps it is required to fulfill only a final evaluation function and not as a path and resource to better organize thought and communicative skills. In the last twenty years, there were many changes in the forms of writing, including those required by the pandemic situation caused by Covid-19. But the teaching of writing still presents many shadows, both from the point of view of innovations and assessment of written tasks. The monitoring conducted so far failed to offer perspectives for a teaching of writing that leads to a real curriculum of school writing. School writing must be rethought no longer in terms of the student’s general motivation for learning at school, butin terms of attitude towards the writing activities proposed at school. In the digital age, students require to develop and practice other forms of writing to increase the communicative and creative dimensions. The task of teachers, then, does not consist in making writing exercises pleasant or in simplifying them, but in giving a value to school writing, to its various forms, to its usefulness for communicative, expressive and social purposes.