Writing Matters! Teaching Writing Development to First-Year Early Years Students

This article reports on a current piece of action research designed to explore how the writing skills of first-year early childhood students can be developed in proactive and innovative ways. It describes how the research/tutor team worked with colleagues to produce and deliver a series of activities which were embedded in first-year core modules on the Early Childhhod Studies degree. The activities were designed to stimulate discussions about writing in higher education and provided students with opportunities to write and receive feedback about their writing throughout the first year of their programme. The research discusses the rationale for such activities and describes the reactions of staff and students to the activities.