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.