Implications for teaching
When teaching writing skills at primary level, the following areas merit careful consideration:

• Planning – it is important that teachers (a) plan the writing curriculum holistically with a balanced coverage of vocabulary building skills, language skills and text types within and across levels; and (b) design meaningful and authentic writing tasks, and scaffold learning by using varied pre-writing activities to lower students’ writing anxiety.
• Implementation – it is vital that teachers (a) make effective use of relevant graphic organisers to teach students to recognise distinctive text type features, and so help them structure their own writing using the same organisers; and (b) demonstrate and discuss with the students how to turn ideas into sentences, paragraphs and texts.
• Evaluation – it is essential that teachers (a) explain how to use writing checklists to revise and edit written work and give timely feedback so as to cultivate students’ habit of revising; and (b) provide chances for students to practise revising own work and the work of classmates using writing checklists in class.
  
• Re-structuring – it is critical that teachers (a) keep track of students’ writing performance; and (b) adjust teaching pace and strategies to cater for students’ needs accordingly.