Learning to Read and Write Are Complementary

Learning to read and write are complementary skills. While in the younger years, writing depends on reading skills, by middle and high school, they are complementary skills: reading is necessary to do writing assignments, while writing about what has read increases comprehension of the reading materials. For this reason, separating reading and writing instruction from content areas is arbitrary and will eventually interfere with the students' progress in those content areas.

From the day children are born, parents are told by doctors, teachers and other experts to read to them, and to read to them every day. They are told to do this because hearing language that contains story lines, rich language and vivid imagery facilitates language development and develops a desire to read. From "The Poky Little Puppy" to Rudyard Kipling, children's literature exists that uses language in exciting and colorful ways.

Good children's literature doesn't sound the same as the conversations the child hears around himself, and thus broadens the child's experiences with language. As a child gets older, he or she learns to read. While adults are still encouraged to read to children at all ages, and good classroom teachers continue to do that, as the child learns to read he has more and more ability to increase his exposure to the many ways language can be used.

He gets exposed to a wider circle of knowledge than he could collect if his only source was from other people. This background of knowledge and familiarity with written language is a necessary foundation for any writing the child does. The child who does not read widely will have a markedly smaller set of information to draw from when writing.

This link between reading and writing becomes even more important as the child enters middle and high school and is expected to read new information, digest it, and organize it in a way he (or she) feels demonstrates an understanding of the material. While writing poetry and fiction can be valid assignments as well, well-educated students are expected to be able to produce written reports of what they have read. They are expected to be able to gather new information and share it in written form with others.

One important way to develop the skill of reading content information and using it in written form is to teach reading and writing across the curriculum. Such skills as critical thinking can be applied to subject textbooks as well as extra reading assigned to the students. Erickson (1998) used the example of girls researching the lives of famous scientists. As they put together a timeline, and report, they read critically and realized that women were markedly under-represented.

They went back and read their materials critically, looking for details about women scientists, and found information about the struggle of early women scientists for the recognition due them. By applying reading and writing skills in science, they developed skills and information in all three subjects. Erickson calls this "informational literacy." As Nourie, et. al., say, "Many preservice teachers do not recognize the extent to which content area subjects and language use are correlated.

Language is central to all learning, regardless of the discipline." These authors also point out that when reading and writing are incorporated into content learning, instruction becomes multi-modal. In addition to a lecture format, reading critically provides intra-personal learning. Group activities that require the students to read critically and then produce a report allows for inter-personal learning. These reports can be presented to the class in oral form. Hands-on learning can be included in the form of displays illustrating what the student or students have learned. Nourie, et.

al remind their readers that some students will need support throughout the reading and writing process, but when content-area subjects are recognized as classes in reading and writing as well as in the content material, this becomes a natural and important part of the class. Over time, can learn to recognize the reading strategies they use, and why, and become aware of the processes they use while reading - metacognition (Nourie, et. Al., 1998).

Gardill and Jitendra (1999) researched the effectiveness of teaching a specific reading strategy -- story mapping --to reading material, using a population of learning disabled students. While they used fiction, similar strategies could be used to teach critical reading skills, including the skill of extracting what is most important from text. This would represent a skill of "active note-taking," where the student knew why he was reading selected material and was able to pull out the information he needed without missing important facts.

This study included details about instructional method, which included a period of modeling for the students, a period of teacher-led instruction, followed by independent work. The research demonstrates that for instruction in specific critical reading skills to develop, students will benefit from direct instruction. It should not be assumed that students can just be told what to do and then do it independently in a successful way.

While their study did not extend the process to writing, it is a given that students cannot write well about information they did not comprehend well. Authors Wood and Harmon (2002) have noted this. Their book complies an extensive selection of strategies that can be used with middle and high school students to effectively combine reading and writing instruction with content instruction. Their approach begins with an assessment of the students' literacy.

Since content area reading requires special reading skills such as the ability to pull out important information from the surrounding text, the ability to critically analyze the content, the mastery of new vocabulary while reading complex material and the ability to draw accurate conclusions from what has been read, it is important to establish the students' reading and writing skills related to content instruction first. Then the book gives a variety of approaches for improving both reading comprehension and writing skills.

The authors include opportunities to incorporate the arts into content learning. Each chapter contains multiple strategies and sample lesson plans. Such books may be of great value not only to new teachers but to more experienced teachers new to including literacy skills in their content area instruction. Foley (2001) researched the effectiveness of teaching specific reading and writing skills to teens being held in juvenile correctional detention centers.

They found that effective instructional techniques in this difficult instructional group included the types of skills fostered in curriculum-based reading and writing instruction: guided note-taking, cooperative group assignments, as well as other innovative approaches. When strategies were employed that required the students to be more active participants, achievement rates rose.

The instructional methods used with our parents and grandparents, where the teacher gave information and made assignments, and students completed their work in an isolated and largely unguided way, will not work in an era when society expects teachers to teach all students. Fifty years ago there was no special education within mainstream.