Writing Frames for improving literacy outcomes: a teacher's guide

What Are Writing Frames and How Do They Work?

Writing frames are skeleton outlines that provide sentence starters and rhetorical phrases to scaffold student writing. They help students concentrate on expressing ideas while learning the structure of different text types and genres. Unlike simple templates, writing frames act as thinking tools that guide students through the writing process while building their confidence.

Writing frames and templates provide a great source for scaffolding and explicit instruction and building students’ confidence in writing, especially in writing tasks and genres in which they have limited prior experience. A writing frame comprises a skeleton outline provided to the students to scaffold their written work. By giving some sentence starters and a few rhetorical phrases common to the genre or task, frames provide students with a structure that enables them to concentrate on expressing their ideas, achieving learning objectives, and developing reading comprehension.

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Writing frames also assist learners in using the vocabulary they have learned about any specific topic and help them compose more sophisticated paragraphs and sentences. For example, in a writing frame with a story setting description learners are provided with a picture, keywords to use and they are demonstrated how to set out their written work.

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Why Should Teachers Use Writing Frames in Their Classrooms?

Writing frames help struggling writers by providing structure for organizing ideas and using subject-specific vocabulary effectively. They enable students to compose more sophisticated paragraphs while focusing on content rather than format. Research shows that writing frames improve literacy outcomes across all curriculum areas by making complex writing tasks more accessible.

There are many benefits of using different kinds of frames in writing. Writing frames:

• furnish a structure for hanging ideas.
• provide appropriate sentence starters.
• support struggling writers.
• Can be advanced to make someone a more competent writer.

Academic tasks carried out in this way can help students enhance their reading comprehension skills and start to foresee and pursue the academic writing style.

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How Do Teachers Introduce Writing Frames Step by Step?

Teachers should follow a four-step progression: first demonstrate using the frame, then guide students through shared practice, followed by supported independent work, and finally full independence. This gradual release model ensures students understand how to use frames effectively without becoming dependent on them. The key is explicitly teaching when and why to use specific frames for different writing purposes.

The model of teaching useful for applying writing frames in a classroom can be summarised as follows:

Demonstration(Teacher modelling)

Collaborative writing

Scaffolding

(Supported writing)

Independent writing

Using a writing frame must always start with the discussion and teacher modelling before starting collaborative writing (learner and teacher together) and then the student will write with the writing frame's support. This collaborative pattern of teaching/ teacher modelling is crucial as it does not only involve the words that signal transitions and connections and model the generic form but it also offers opportunities for enhancing language function and thinking of learners.

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Addressing Concerns: Can Writing Frames Hinder Learning?

Using writing frames or templates as teaching resources for teaching complicated ideas is not cheating. It is just like learning to dance with a mentor. It enables the learner to pay attention to the right moves in his/her individual style. Writing frames will be used only as long as they are needed. Writing coaches, and dancing coaches, understand when they can remove the scaffolds. They remove the scaffolds when learners begin to combine moves in effective ways that indicate their understanding of the fundamentals and their personal expression.

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How Do Writing Frames Support Cross-Curricular Learning?

Writing frames reveal the hidden organizational patterns that exist across subjects like science, history, and mathematics. They help students recognize common text structures such as cause-effect, compare-contrast, and problem-solution regardless of the subject area. This transferable framework enables students to apply their writing skills across the entire curriculum.

Using graphic organisers and writing frames gives children access to the underlying structure of the content. These cross-curricular resources enable students to see how ideas are organised. This provides shape and order to our thinking. Within the English language, there are a finite amount of ways of organising ideas. Once children become comfortable with these frames, the language structures fit neatly around the ideas. For example, if a child is going to write about a historical event they might organise their ideas chronologically, such as a timeline. Once the student has plotted out the events in a concrete resource they can then begin to think about the language function that explains the organisation of the ideas. In the case of a timeline, we might use conjunctions such as, before, then, after, subsequently etc.

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The writing frame or graphic organiser acts as a tool for scaffolding language around the students' ideas. Once the learner has a clear understanding of a body of knowledge and they can see the curriculum context, they are in a much stronger position to be able to articulate their ideas onto paper. The national curriculum has opportunities to use writing frames all the way through each curriculum topic. The key task is to identify how to organise the ideas. This will then help the pupil to identify the type of text they will be writing. When this type of pedagogy is most effective, the resource is not used in a dedicated lesson. Their ubiquitous use becomes a basic literacy skill that the whole school embraces. They will always serve as a strong tool in English lessons but their utility holds value across the entire curriculum in school. Our collection of resources have helped teachers identify where to use visual tools when engaging in the curriculum design process.

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What Should Teachers Do to Make Writing Frames Effective?

Teachers must select appropriate frames that match both the learning objectives and students' developmental levels. They need to model frame usage explicitly while gradually reducing support as students gain confidence. Most importantly, teachers should help students understand that frames are temporary scaffolds designed to develop independent writing skills.

Teachers play a crucial role in helping learners to use a collection of writing frames to improve writing for the learners. Teachers must:

(a) challenge the learners by involving them in analysing the elements of text, fiction and non-fiction both;

(b) model a large variety of techniques for responding to the details by paying attention to the writing; and

(c) ask learners to review and modify their responses after a guided reading of the content.

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Using a frame in writing is suitable for guided writing in which the instructor assists a small group of learners in learning international languages or/ and writing a variety of text types. In guided writing, the educator models by way of mini-lessons and learners use the knowledge they acquired from shared and modelled sessions of writing with varying levels of teacher support. The teacher would help learners how to use writing frames in the following steps. The teacher would:

1. Discuss the type of writing while highlighting the critical elements of the text.
2. Introduce the writing frame and model how to use it.
3. Review the responses of students about the writing frames with the class and invite learners to ask questions.
4. Use a writing frame to provide guided practice.
5. Use an informal assessment using simple sentences / everyday sentences to check student understanding about using the writing frame.
6. Ask learners to use the writing frame to write individually.
7. Help learners to understand the structure of any specific type of writing (i.e. expository, narrative).
8. Ask learners to show their paragraphs, and clarify what they wrote and why.
9. Check if students can write one paragraph comfortably. If yes, the teacher would encourage students to expand their writing to more paragraphs.
10. Post examples of written paragraphs in the classroom for learners to refer to if they are writing texts without using frames. 



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When Should Teachers Use Different Types of Writing Frames?

Teachers should use narrative frames for story writing, explanation frames for science reports, and persuasive frames for opinion pieces. Each frame type includes specific sentence starters and transition phrases appropriate to the genre. For example, a story setting frame might include prompts like 'The scene opened with...' while a scientific explanation frame uses 'First...then...finally' structures.

Following are some examples of writing frames for students.

1. Writing Frame For Science Writing: A writing frame is usually a teacher-made resource that is helpful in the challenging task of building scientific literacy in the classroom. The features of writing frames, with its basic elements (sentence beginners/ starters, sentence modifiers, connectives/cohesive links and key language information) and leads can be altered to prepare skeleton outlines for a variety of genres of scientific writing for the science classroom. In this way, educators can help learners to learn the stylistic conventions which are frequently employed by the scientific community. Writing prompts, sentence beginners/ starters, sentence modifiers, and connectives/cohesive links can demonstrate the kind of activity (interpretative, discursive or/ and knowledge-transforming) to the students used for any particular genre of writing. Also, the key language structures provided in the writing frames help in activating prior knowledge of that area of study in both young and adult learners and help instructors introduce learners to the scientific language inherent to that area of study. Below is the diagram exemplifying the use of writing frames for scientific literacy in the classroom.

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Prompt Question Writing Frames: Just like classroom posters, a Prompt Question Writing Frame is an eye-catching writing frame mostly used for creative writing tasks in the English classroom. Prompt Question Writing Frames include a picture, lines for writing and an open-ended question to spark learners’ imagination. Below is an example of Prompt Question Writing Frames.

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Speaking Frame: It is a kind of sentence frame that contains models and sentence starters for English language learners who are lacking English language proficiency and have limited knowledge of standard sentence structure needed for creating sentences independently. A speaking frame is a helpful frame that provides the desired support, and the support is gradually removed. Below is an example of a speaking frame.

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Trophy Writing Frame: It is primarily used in primary schools in several ways. A Trophy Writing Frame provides a fun way for school aged children to write about someone who they consider a champion. Or, it is a frame to record memories as students can write a match report or any other big sporting event using a trophy writing frame.

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Writing frames provide a great source for creating an engaging lesson. Writing frames are not only useful for language learning, but teachers can choose any lovely writing frame from a huge variety such as drawing frame, autumn frame, yellow doodle frames, blue doodle writing frames, book frame, fun frame and many more, to teach other subjects as well. Also, learners and teachers can create their own printable frame / additional writing frames according to their needs. Classroom discussion, key language structures and argument moves made by the discussion participants, all can be used to generate the most relevant and useful writing frames. However, it is suggested to connect writing frames with summarization for the tasks involving an opinion or critique of texts.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly are writing frames and how do they differ from simple templates?

Writing frames are skeleton outlines that provide sentence starters and rhetorical phrases to scaffold student writing, acting as thinking tools rather than fill-in-the-blank exercises. Unlike simple templates, they guide students through the writing process whilst helping them concentrate on expressing ideas and learning the structure of different text types and genres. They provide a structure that enables students to focus on content and learning objectives rather than just format.

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What is the correct four-step process for introducing writing frames to students?

Teachers should follow this progression: demonstration (teacher modelling), collaborative writing (teacher and student together), scaffolding (supported independent writing), and finally full independence. This gradual release model ensures students understand how to use frames effectively without becoming dependent on them, with explicit teaching about when and why to use specific frames for different writing purposes.

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How can writing frames be used effectively across different curriculum subjects?

Writing frames reveal the hidden organisational patterns that exist across subjects like science, history, and mathematics by helping students recognise common text structures such as cause-effect, compare-contrast, and problem-solution. For example, in history, students might organise ideas chronologically using timeline structures, then learn language functions like conjunctions (before, then, after, subsequently) to articulate their understanding. This transferable framework enables students to apply writing skills across the entire curriculum.

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Will students become too dependent on writing frames and lose their ability to write independently?

Writing frames are designed as temporary scaffolds, much like learning to dance with a mentor who provides support until the learner masters the fundamentals. Teachers act as coaches who understand when to remove the scaffolds, doing so when students begin combining moves effectively and showing understanding of basic structures alongside personal expression. The key is using frames only as long as they are needed whilst explicitly teaching students that they are stepping stones to independent writing.

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What specific benefits do writing frames offer for struggling writers and students with limited experience?

Writing frames provide structure for organising ideas and enable students to use subject-specific vocabulary effectively whilst composing more sophisticated paragraphs and sentences. They help struggling writers by furnishing a framework for hanging ideas, providing appropriate sentence starters, and allowing students to focus on content rather than format. Research shows they improve literacy outcomes across all curriculum areas by making complex writing tasks more accessible and building student confidence.

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How should teachers select and implement writing frames to match their learning objectives?

Teachers must select appropriate frames that match both the learning objectives and students' developmental levels, ensuring the frames align with the specific text type and genre being taught. They need to model frame usage explicitly through demonstration and collaborative writing before moving to supported practice. Most importantly, teachers should help students understand the connection between the organisational pattern of ideas and the language functions needed to express them effectively.

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Can you provide a practical example of how writing frames work with specific content?

In a story setting description task, students are provided with a picture and keywords to use, with teachers demonstrating how to set out written work using sentence starters and rhetorical phrases common to descriptive writing. For historical writing, students might use a chronological frame where they first plot events using a concrete timeline resource, then learn appropriate conjunctions and transitional phrases to connect their ideas coherently. This approach helps students see how language structures fit neatly around their organised ideas.