The Reading Writing Connection

Reading and writing are two concepts of literacy instruction that are vital to students becoming critical thinkers.  Reading and writing are co-dependent yet we seem to be cemented in the idea of teaching them separately.  According to Tierney and Parsons (1983), these acts of composing, writing and reading involve continuous recurring transactions among readers and writers who are trying to perceive each other’s intentions, purposes and probable meanings.  Students when they write, read and when they read, they write. According to Ediger (2002), connecting reading and writing has become an important trend in the instruction of language arts and that poetry as a salient facet of the reading curriculum, integrates well with the purposes of writing.  He further intimates that poetry read aloud to students can assist their learning to enjoy reading activities and assist them in enjoying reading activities and to develop the feeling and aesthetic dimension of learning among other things. 

I found these ideas to be quite interesting after reading the articles. They certainly highlighted and diffused the cemented misconceptions that I had about the instruction of reading and writing.  As the saying goes, one tends to teach as one was taught. I realise my students were certainly disadvantaged for this reason because reading was always taught as a separate entity.  Additionally, I always went into the classroom with assumptions and I realise now that I should have paid more attention to them.  It is imperative that teachers realise that in order to teach reading and writing, they need to be proficient in the oral aspect of the language (Tierney and Parsons (1983). Furthermore, the children need to be surrounded by literature in order for them to live the literature (Graves 1983). Teachers must try to move away from the practice and drill methods of teaching reading and writing and instead seek to make their instruction as real as possible to the students.  

An article by the Jefferson County Public School provides effective strategies that teachers can use to supplement their instruction of the reading and writing connection.  To get away from the talk ad chalk method, we can use activities like:

1.      1. Think Aloud- where the students go through a choices made in oral reading out loud

2.      2.   Fluent Oral Reading: where the children perform poems by using appropriate tones and inflections

3.      3. Paraphrasing: having the students retell whatever they have read

These activities would better prepare the students to make the reading and writing connection in literary pieces.

Planning for Writing

Pre-writing strategies have been hailed as the best introductions to teach the students the process approach.  We know that the majority of our students rely on background knowledge that we provide in order to efficaciously analyse and interpret a question especially when it comes to writing.  Our responsibility then lies not in just providing the students with the knowledge in isolation to enable the students to be able to apply these concepts in their real life situations.  The articles under unit four address a need that has become one that is in high demand and that is the need to instruct the children on the different pre-writing strategies that the students can use in order to generate more thought and to be able to organise the information that they are thinking of so that the piece that they are writing will flow and have meaning for the reader. Our task as teachers lies not only in instructing the students on the strategy but choosing the best strategy that caters to the needs of the students.

As teachers, we have at our disposal several strategies that can be used to help the students to master the writing process. Our focus should not be to have the students write only for a product and then dismiss the information.  We must strive to mould our students into critical thinking beings. Prewriting strategies such as free-writing, brainstorming and questioning, together with the use of graphic organisers all help to sustain and nourish the students’ information about the writing process.  The use of these strategies helps to engage the students in their learning and helps them to become cognizant of the benefits if using these strategies as a form of pre-writing. The provision of these strategies helps provide the students with a bank of information on strategies that they can use to help them get started when one strategy that they are using does not work.

I am particularly fond of the blind writing strategy.  This strategy, a form of free-writing, allows the students to write down their thoughts without interruptions such as spell checks and grammatical and punctuation errors.  This is done on the computer (another plus because students use the computer much more than the traditional paper and pencil in completing assignments).  Through this means, the students are able to write down the thoughts as they come and then to edit, re-order or truncate as necessary.  This strategy would be an effective tool in the classroom because I think that the students would not feel burdened by writing proper sentences or complete thoughts. Furthermore, I realise that this strategy can be used with having the students count their ideas from the free-writing- (Sloan 2010)- (after they have edited of course).  This serves as an excellent motivational tool for the students because it is very rewarding to be singled out for good constructive ideas that one makes in a classroom.

Furthermore, I never really realised how effective using graphic organisers can be.  I realise how much I use it as a writer when brainstorming on what I want to cover in my discourse but it seems as if I never remembered to impart the knowledge of this wonderful organiser to my students to help them brainstorm and generate thought on the information that should be in their written piece as advocated by Gatz (2004). I sometimes feel that perhaps my students are not advanced enough to make use of such a strategy never realising how much I was belittling the students in my underestimation of their abilities as writers.  I have come to realise that it is imperative that we, to the best of our ability, provide opportunities for the students to build on their schema of writing strategies if we want to teach them how to become good writers. They must be able to and have opportunities to practice, practice, and practice! (Sloan 2010).  According to Lee (2007), using graphic organisers will help them students to better organise their thoughts on a particular topic.  This would allow them to see the necessary relationships between the concepts they have written down if any exist and to use the organisers to develop these concepts like with the use of the fishbone graphic organiser or the spider organiser.  I believe that these organisers are ingenious in their design to aid the students.  These organisers should be taught in the classrooms to help the students think for themselves and to self-regulate their writing.  I must admit that I have been delinquent when it comes to using this strategy in my classroom.  In fact, I was only exposed to these graphic organisers at advanced level and to some degree at Teachers’ College. I simply thought that my students were not ready to use this.  After reading these articles and seeing what the students can benefit from their use, I am certainly singing a different tune.

Another key point that the articles highlighted and that I found to be rather interesting and very suitable to my experience as a teacher is that of having to have a plan of action to have the students participate as much as possible in the writing process and having the national standards as the floor for instruction.  As teachers, we have a tendency to put the instruction of the English curriculum in a box and teach the children for an exam.  From my readings, I have realised that this is the worst kind of instruction because we only end up teaching the students how to write a product instead of teaching them how to be critical lifelong writers.  We must move away from the banal aspirations and expectations of the traditionalists who advocate for a continuance of the traditional means of teaching.  New advances in research into student performance reveal that students learn differently and as a result, we must learn to be flexible in the methods that we choose for instructing the students. I know that previously, I would set the stage for writing by choosing the topics instead of integrating the students’ personal interests and choices.  I now realise that an inclusion of this would motivate the students to write especially students in a classroom of mixed ability.

To conclude, the strategies presented in the articles have changed my thinking so much so that I am eager to go back to the classroom and correct my erroneous beliefs.  It is time to realise that instructing writing should not be static but provide avenues for dynamic and interesting lessons.  As teachers, we must refrain from teaching for an exam but instead teach the students to be critical lifelong writers.  As much as possible, in the construction of our units and lesson plans, we must try to incorporate the students’ interests and take into considerations their differing abilities.  We must be flexible enough to know what strategies can be used to ensure maximum student internalisation and utilisation of knowledge of strategies. However, it is impossible to teach what we do not know. We must be able to be good writers and have adequate knowledge of the different writing strategies if we are to help the students to become good writers.  The onus is on us to brush up on our knowledge of teaching and to keep abreast with the new and current trends in writing instruction if we want to ensure that we instruct the students to the best of our ability. We must be able to collaborate with other teachers and professionals in the field so that we can gain the needed knowledge to instruct the students.  This MUST be done in order to help our students succeed as lifelong critical writers.

Reviewing and Evaluating a Descriptive Prose

The writer’s purpose in the writing of this descriptive piece is simply to invoke a connection between the place being described and the writer. The main purpose, though, is to thoroughly and efficaciously describe Lou’s café, the activities that take place in the café and the types of characters that frequent the café. Additionally, the writer seeks to build on our imaginative processes with the use of several literary devices like imagery and metaphors. The writer’s explicit use of sentence complements, that is the use of adjectives and simple and compound sentences, enhances the flavour and connectivity of the piece. Finally, through his discourse, the write aims to illustrate how unchanging the place has remained despite the decades and advances in technology. He portrays this through the implication that the younger generations continue the mannerisms of the older generation (almost in a cyclical manner) and that seeks, almost advertently, to convey to the readers that Lou’s café will remain the same for a long time to come.

Rubric for Evaluating a Descriptive Piece

Category	Excellent	Fair	Poor
The writer’s purpose can be clearly identified
The writer demonstrates knowledge of descriptive devices
The writer uses interesting language
The readers can relate to the information being described
The audience for the piece is clearly identifiable
The piece provides opportunities for middle and high order thinking (for example analysis and evaluation)
The sentence structure of the piece is appropriate
The writer provides enough details to support the purpose of his piece.
The writer demonstrates knowledge of the content of the piece.
There is appropriate organization and cohesion in the piece.

Grading Scheme:

Excellent= 3 marks

Fair= 2 marks

Poor= 1 mark

Score Level	Comments
28-30	Excellent: The piece of literature is very comprehensive.  There is excellent fluency between the different parts of the descriptive piece.  There is very clear use of descriptive devices and words and the piece is very cohesive.
25-27	Very Good: There is demonstrated knowledge of the components of a descriptive piece. Readers can relate to the piece but the piece lacks sufficient interesting language and opportunities for middle and high order thinking.
20-24	Average: There is some cohesion to the piece but the piece lacks sufficient supporting details to convey meaning to the reader.
12-19	Poor: The piece is disjointed and the ideas are stated but not developed. The language used is not interesting and there is no demonstrated knowledge or awareness of audience and very few opportunities for high order thinking.
0-11	Unsatisfactory:  The piece is not coherent.  There is poor organization and the piece does not have proper sentence structure and variety.  The ideas are not relevant or not related to the topic. There is no definitive purpose and little use of literary devices- as such it is unremarkable.

Types of Writing in Schools

 

Rhetorical Modes

	Description	Narration	Exposition	Argument
Purpose	Descriptive prose is used to express what a thing looks like, smells like or tastes like.  In short, it portrays how we perceive the world through our five senses (sight, hearing, touch smell and taste).	It recounts a personal or fictional experience or tells a story. Narration is concerned with actions in a temporal sequence, with life in motion. It seeks to present an event to the reader, a sense of witnessing an action.	This discourse is concerned with making an idea clear, analysing a situation, defining a term, giving instructions and the like. Its primary function is to inform and explain.	An argument is an attempt to convince or persuade an audience that a claim is true by means of appeals to reason or to emotion.
Audience	Reader- to help create a mental picture of what is being written about.	Reader- to recreate an incident for readers rather than to simply tell them about it.	Reader- conveys information to the reader so that a level of understanding can be achieved.	Reader- It moves the readers to take an action or to form or change an opinion.
Content	It answers the question ‘what’. For example: What is it like? What is he/she like?	This mode answers the question of what. For example: what happened?	This mode has the types of questions that a piece of expository may answer. Some of these are: Hoe does it work? What are the constituent parts? What is its importance?	Answers the question why is this so?
Style	Explicit use of adjectives, data that appeals to sensory faculties and descriptive sequence.	Apparent use of action or dynamic verbs, dialogue. The point of view if the narrator is usually first or third person narrator. It should include story conventions such as plot, setting, characters, climax and resolution.	The distinguishing features and style of exposition incorporates the following functions: analysis, classification, definition, illustration, cause and effect, comparison and contrast and analogy	For the presentation of evidence, arguments use facts, authoritative opinion, and personal experience for its development whilst the rebuttal or refuting side uses persuasion in the form of repetition, rhetorical questions and emotional appeals.
Voice	Description uses details that appeals to the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch).	To convey a particular mood (feeling) or to make an incident come alive, narratives employ the use of the first person or “I” narration and the third person or he/she/it persona.	In exposition, the writing is engaging and reflective of the writer’s underlying commitment to the topic.	The voice of argument has a strong and definite position on an issue from the beginning of the piece and has enthusiasm from start to finish.
Organisation	The organising principle of description is spatial as it creates a virtual image in the minds of readers.	The organisation principle of narration is temporal in nature meaning that its events are sequential.	There is not one single method of organising exposition but rather a variety, with majority being based on logic: analysis, clarification, definition, illustration, cause and effect, comparison and contrast and sometimes analogy. The method chosen dictates the organisation of the piece as each method has its own distinguishing characteristics.	Argument is organised by way of formal elements and logic. The formal elements include at least two claims, the first of which being the conclusion and the other, the remaining claim or claims that are the grounds which support or justify the conclusion