Key questions
- What is the relationship between reading and writing (and talking and listening)?
- What role does reading play in learning to write?
- How can teachers integrate reading into the teaching of writing?
There is a reciprocal relationship between the teaching of reading and the teaching of writing.
The basis for students’ earliest literate experiences is, of course, their spoken language. As students progress through school, talking and listening remain important, but there is also an increasing emphasis on learning to read (or view) and write (or create), as curriculum areas become more specialised. Most primary teachers attend to both reading and writing across the school day when engaging with all subject domains, as well as through their designated literacy block.
Reading and writing draw on the same sets of linguistic and other knowledge (knowledge of the alphabet and grapheme-phoneme correspondence, grammar, spelling and punctuation, vocabulary, knowledge of text type and topic (field), and how to communicate with a particular audience). To capitalise on the interconnection between reading and writing, students need explicit instruction, and they need to read and write daily. For example, teachers can support their students to analyse text for structure and meaning-making techniques, and students can then draw on that knowledge to write about the content that they have read and understood. If undertaken in a contextualized manner, this process also helps students build knowledge about how texts work, and this in turn informs their skills in both reading and writing.
The role of both speaking and reading in learning to write is clear when we think about the knowledge that students draw on when they set about the task of writing. To write confidently, students need to have something to ‘say’. In other words, students need knowledge of their topic, which they build up through engaging with explicit teaching, as well as through collaborative and independent reading and viewing activities. For example,
- When students and teachers share topic or field-related information through class discussions, wall charts and displayed notes, the collective information is available to all students to draw on when creating texts.
- Reading and deconstructing texts are rich activities for classroom discussions and offer opportunities for the development of students’ oral language skills as well as their understandings about how language and other meaning-making resources work.
- Close reading using a text extract allows students to return to a text as they learn new content, vocabulary and structure. Teachers point out to students the literate resources the author has used (to persuade, inform, entertain etc) so that students can appropriate those resources for their own writing.
- Model texts provide students with examples of how language works depending on the field (subject matter), the tenor (relationship between the writer and their audience) and the mode (channel of communication). When these texts are deconstructed, students can identify and discuss how the text is organised to achieve its purpose, how it is structured and sequenced, how the author makes choices about language or multimodal elements, and how they can infer the intended audience from these choices.
Ultimately when teachers aim to integrate speaking and listening, reading (and viewing) and writing (and creating) instruction, there is a reciprocity between elements that leads to improvement in both students’ reading and writing.
Key Points
- Writing and reading (and talking and listening) are interdependent in the process of becoming literate.
- Students need to read in order to write confidently.
- Reading provides students access to models of the texts that they must write.
- Students must write in order to reflect, edit and refine their ideas.
References
Derewianka, B. & Jones, P. (2023). Teaching Language in Context (3rd ed.). Oxford.
Fisher, D., Frey, N. & Hattie, J. (2016). Visible learning for Literacy, Grades K-12: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning. Corwin Press, Inc.
Graham, S. (2020). The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), 35-44. doi:10.1002/rrq.332
Humphrey, S. & Vale, E. (2020). Investigating Model Texts for Learning. PETAA.
McDonald, L. (2023). A New Literature Companion for Teachers. PETAA.
Parkin, B. & Harper, H (2019). Teaching with intent: Scaffolding academic language with marginalised students. PETAA.
Shanahan, T. (2019). Reading-Writing Connections. In S. Graham, C.A. MacArthur & M.A. Hebert (Eds.), Best Practices in Writing Instruction (3rd ed.), (pp. 309-332). The Guilford Press.
Snow, C., & O’Connor, C. (2016). Close Reading and Far-Reaching Classroom Discussion: Fostering a Vital Connection. Journal of Education, 196(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/002205741619600102