Modelled writing is part of the genre approach to writing, which developed through arguments propounded by Rothery (1984) and Christie (1990) (cited in Green and Campbell, 2003, 133) for a weakness in the process writing approach - specifically that students were producing a surplus of the narrative genre to the detriment of developing writing competency in other genres, and further, that these subsequent genres needed to be taught explicitly. The genre approach promotes a selection of text types that are "modelled, jointly constructed with the teacher and then independently written by the children" (Derewianka, 1990, in Green and Campbell, 2003, 133). This is a useful approach to take, because when planning a writing program for students, many aspects of writing need to be considered, including "the nature of writing, the relationship between writing and reading [and] the way the social purposes of writing change for different groups in our culture." (Green and Campbell, 2003, 132).…
