How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?
Writing in the early grades is often segmented off from reading. Research suggests teaching them together is both efficient and effective.
According to a special report writing is not assessed as frequently as reading in elementary grades with principals directing teacher to focus on one at the expense of another.
“Sometimes, in an early-literacy classroom, you’ll hear a teacher say, ‘It’s time to pick up your pencils,’” said Wiley Blevins, an author and literacy consultant who provides training in schools. “But your pencils should be in your hand almost the entire morning.
”Writing is naturally important for all students to learn with settled science showing that reading and writing draw on shared knowledge, even though they traditionally have been segmented in instruction.
To read more about how writing fits into the “Science of Reading”: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-does-writing-fit-into-the-science-of-reading/2023/01
Author: Stephen Sawchuk, Assistant Managing Editor
Source: Education Week – How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?
Date: January 17, 2023
How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?
How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?
Tower of Babel
A life Tower of Babel experiencehttps://worldliteracyfoundation.org/ How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?
Tower of Babel
read and write
In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful: States are passing legislation supporting evidence-based teaching approaches, and school districts are rushing to supply training. Publishers are under pressure to drop older materials. And for the first time in years, an instructional issue—reading—is headlining education media coverage. In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing. Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective. Yet writing is often underplayed in the elementary grades. Too often, it is separated from schools’ reading block. Writing is not assessed as frequently as reading, and principals, worried about reading-exam scores, direct teachers to focus on one often at the expense of the other. Finally, beyond the English/language arts block, kids often aren’t asked to do much writing in early grades.
“Sometimes, in an early-literacy classroom, you’ll hear a teacher say, ‘It’s time to pick up your pencils,’” said Wiley Blevins, an author and literacy consultant who provides training in schools. “But your pencils should be in your hand almost the entire morning.”
Strikingly, many of the critiques that reading researchers have made against the “balanced literacy” approach that has held sway in schools for decades could equally apply to writing instruction: Foundational writing skills—like phonics and language structure—have not generally been taught systematically or explicitly. And like the “find the main idea” strategies commonly taught in reading comprehension, writing instruction has tended to focus on content-neutral tasks, rather than deepening students’ connections to the content they learn.
Education Week wants to bring more attention to these connections in the stories that make up this special collection. But first, we want to delve deeper into the case for including writing in every step of the elementary curriculum. Why has writing been missing from the reading conversation? Much like the body of knowledge on how children learn to read words, it is also settled science that reading and writing draw on shared knowledge, even though they have traditionally been segmented in instruction.
“The body of research is substantial in both number of studies and quality of studies. There’s no question that reading and writing share a lot of real estate, they depend on a lot of the same knowledge and skills,” said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Pick your spot: text structure, vocabulary, sound-symbol relationships, ‘world knowledge.’” The reasons for the bifurcation in reading and writing are legion. One is that the two fields have typically been studied separately. (Researchers studying writing usually didn’t examine whether a writing intervention, for instance, also aided students’ reading abilities—and vice versa.) Some scholars also finger the dominance of the federally commissioned National Reading Panel report, which in 2000 outlined key instructional components of learning to read. The review didn’t examine the connection of writing to reading. Looking even further back yields insights, too. Penmanship and spelling were historically the only parts of writing that were taught, and when writing reappeared in the latter half of the 20th century, it tended to focus on “process writing,” emphasizing personal experience and story generation over other genres. Only when the Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010 did the emphasis shift to writing about nonfiction texts and across subjects—the idea that students should be writing about what they’ve learned.
