Margin Notes

This is the first post in the series From Research to the Classroom, designed to bridge the gap between educational research and classroom practice. Each post will feature a key study and offer practical, research-backed strategies for immediate classroom use. Our aim is to provide educators with clear, actionable insights that translate the latest findings into effective teaching practices, directly supporting student learning and enhancing instruction

The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated by Steve Graham (Reading Research Quarterly, 2020)

“Science has greatly enhanced what we know about reading and writing. Drawing on this knowledge, researchers have proffered recommendations for how to teach these two literacy skills. Although such recommendations are aimed at closing the gap between research and practice, they often fail to take into account the reciprocal relation that exists between reading and writing. Writing and writing instruction improve students’ reading and vice versa.”

Summary

Steve Graham contends that the sciences of reading and writing are too narrowly focused on how to teach either reading or writing rather than how they can be used to support one another. He argues that recommendations for literacy instruction drawn from science often fail to take advantage of the reciprocal relationship that exist between reading and writing.

Graham provides theoretical support for reading and writing connections by drawing on three perspectives:

1. Shared Knowledge Theory: readers draw on knowledge while reading that overlaps with knowledge they draw on when writing and vice versa.
2. Rhetorical Relations Theory: the purpose of both reading and writing is communication and both processes involve a conversation between the reader and writer (the reader with the writer and the writer with the assumed reader).
3. Functional Theory: reading can be used to facilitate writing and vice versa and both can be used to facilitate learning.

Graham also presents empirical evidence of the impact of reading and writing connections by sharing the findings of two meta-analyses that confirm reading and writing are connected and mutually supportive:

Writing and Writing Instruction Improve Reading

A meta-analysis of 95 true and quasi-experiments exploring whether writing and writing instruction improve the reading performance of students in grades 1-12 revealed that reading comprehension is enhanced by:

• writing about the material read
• increasing the amount of time students spent writing their own texts (journal entries, self-selected topics, personal experiences, emails, etc.)
• writing instruction on process, functions and features of text, paragraphs, and sentences

Reading and Reading Instruction Improve Writing

A meta-analysis of 92 studies designed to identify whether reading and reading instruction positively impact the writing performance of students in preschool to grade 12 concluded that writing performance is made better by:

• increasing students’ interactions with texts
• devoting more time to reading instruction, including phonological awareness, phonics, and reading comprehension

Conclusion

Although Graham is clear that he is not advocating that we abandon studying reading and writing separately, he is proposing that researchers contributing to the current discourse around the sciences of reading and writing place a greater emphasis on the relationship between reading and writing and how it can support students’ development as readers and writers.

Takeaways For the Classroom

• Increase time for students to read and write.
• Increase time spent on reading and writing instruction.
• Explicitly identify for students the ways reading and writing processes are mutually supporting. For example:
  • After a lesson on writing with clarity, remind students when they are reading independently to attend to the strategies they notice the writer using to make their ideas clear.
  • Follow up a lesson on using text structures to support comprehension with an opportunity to practice using similar structures to organize their writing.
  • Create lessons that combine reading and writing by having students notice and name the craft of a mentor text, discuss how it impacts their reading, and then experiment with the same techniques in their writing.
• Encourage students to explore the conversation between reader and writer by reflecting on the intentional craft moves they made in their writing to engage their reader and by reading text through the lens of what it says and how it says it.
• Integrate writing and reading by inviting students to write about their reading (notemaking, summaries, response, reflections, etc.)
• Design larger units such as text sets and form, craft, and process studies that combine reading and writing.