S5 E9 Research to the Classroom - Connecting Reading and Writing - Part 1 (The Research)

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Hello there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I'm really pleased to be bringing you the first episode of our new Research to the Classroom series. I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania.

Research to the Classroom is about bridging the gap between research and practice. In each series, we explore a key topic over three connected episodes. First, we unpack the research in an accessible way, then we provide practical guidance for taking action in your classroom, and finally, we chat with a practicing teacher or leader about their real world experience of implementing these ideas. Today we're diving into a topic that I think has enormous potential to transform literacy instruction, and that is the integration of reading and writing for stronger learning outcomes. If you've been following the suggestions of evidence-informed practice, this idea of connecting reading and writing may not be new to you, but what I would like to do is to unpack it a little bit more so we understand the why.

The History

Before we jump into the research, let's reflect on traditional approaches to literacy instruction.

Historically, literacy blocks have been divided into separate reading and writing hours, often leading to quite decontextualised instruction in these areas. In reading, the focus was typically on levelled texts and comprehension strategies, frequently through literature circles or small group reading instruction. In the older grades of reading, the focus of instruction usually centered on levelled texts and comprehension strategies. Often, literature circles were used to engage students. This involved them assuming roles to discuss texts and share responses. And while this looked engaging, this student-driven approach actually contradicts what cognitive science tells us about how novices learn best through fully-guided instruction. It doesn't mean that student discussion can't be an important part of our approach, but just that the teacher needs to lead.

In the earlier grades, levelled texts were used in group rotations for reading groups and, again, comprehension strategies were often the focus. Writing instruction commonly followed a workshop model, a brief mini-lesson, independent writing with teacher conferences and then sharing time. Though labelled as explicit teaching, these 10-minute mini-lesson demonstrations that are then followed by independent practice fall far short of what we now understand explicit instruction to be.

Now, both approaches that I've described, or all of them, were founded on the assumption that exposure to quality text and adequate practice time would naturally develop students into skilled writers, but research in this space has shown this assumption is inadequate for meeting all of students' needs.

The Research

So let's explore what research tells us about how reading and writing are connected.

Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000)

In their comprehensive review, Fitzgerald and Shanahan in 2000 summarised work on reading-writing relationships and three views or approaches: shared knowledge, a functional view and rhetorical relationships. The shared knowledge approach, which has received the most research attention, indicates that reading and writing are related because they draw on the same underlying knowledge and cognitive systems. We're not saying that reading and writing are the same thing, but they are definitely related.

Fitzgerald and Shanahan identified four categories of knowledge that we use when reading and writing.

Number one is meta-knowledge. This includes understanding the purposes and functions of reading and writing, knowing that readers and writers interact and monitoring our own meaning making.

The second idea is about domain knowledge. This covers both content knowledge and vocabulary: what you know about the world and the topics you're reading and writing about.

Third, we have knowledge about universal text attributes, and this includes understanding things like phonics or letter-sound relationships, syntax, grammar and sentence structure and text format.

Number four is procedural knowledge, and that's knowing how to access and use the other types of knowledge during reading and writing.

Kim (2020)

Building on this foundation, Young-Suk Kim in 2020 proposed the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model. This framework argues that reading and writing are interrelated and developed together because they share a large number of skills and knowledge, same as we've just heard.

Kim's model is represented as a structure with a foundation with two pillars supporting a roof of higher level literacy skills. The foundation of the structure consists of language, foundational literacy skills and cognitive skills like working, memory and executive functioning. The two pillars represent, on the left-hand side, word-level literacy, so reading and spelling, and on the right-hand side, discourse-level oral language, which is, in written terms would call that text-level. So this is about conversation, how do we have a discussion and a dialogue with other people? At the very top is the discourse-level literacy, so the roof is the reading comprehension and the written composition.

Four ideas come from Kim's model.

Number one is a hierarchical structure, and this reflects what we know from the Simple View of Reading. Skills are organised hierarchically, with higher level skills building on lower level ones. We can't just start right in at the text level, we need to start at the lower order skills.

Number two is interactive relationships. Skills develop interactively, with bi-directional relationships between many components. So that means that reading and writing have effects on each other, they don't sit separately.

Following from this is this idea of co-occurring difficulties. So students with reading difficulties often have writing difficulties and vice versa. And this is because those underlying skills come from a foundation of shared knowledge.

Fourth is dynamic relationships, and this is about the relationships between skills changing as a function of development, learner characteristics and assessment methods.

So I'll just run through those four points briefly again. Hierarchical structure, where we build from simple to complex, the interactive nature of reading and writing, therefore, we have co-occurring difficulties very often with students who struggle, and then the relationships between all of these things changing as students develop in skills and knowledge and as their own development happens in terms of their cognitive thinking.

Kim's research found that the same language and cognitive skills that predict listening comprehension also predict reading comprehension. That's not new for us from the Simple View of Reading, so this is affirming what the Simple View of Reading found, suggesting these skills serve similar functions across modes.

Anderson and Briggs (2011)

Let's think about a different side of research now, and that is strategic processing. In 2011, Anderson and Briggs took a different but complementary perspective on this issue of connecting reading and writing, and they focused on the reciprocal cognitive operations or strategies that readers and writers use. They emphasised that the cognitive processes used in reading are identical to those involved in writing, so the strategies or strategic operations they identified were these...

Number one is searching, so the mental action of seeking out information in print. So when we're reading or we are searching for ideas to express.

The second strategy is monitoring, so you check yourself through your process of reading and writing when you're effective. So when you're reading, does what I think I'm reading make sense? And when you're writing, does what I'm writing make sense to a reader?

The third strategy, and final one, is self-correcting, so independently fixing errors when something doesn't look right, sound right or make sense.

These strategic operations draw on the same sources of information, which are meaning. In reading, we use meaning to understand text and in writing, we compose to convey meaning. We also have structure, or syntax, so in reading we use structure to group words together, and in writing, we draw on our knowledge of how language sounds and construct sentences that make sense. And then we've got that phonics information. So we use letter-sound patterns to decode, and in writing, we use that same knowledge to encode.

Their research suggests that teaching children to make connections between these strategic processes, as in reading and writing, accelerates learning, particularly for struggling readers. We also have shared knowledge that spans different developmental stages. We heard about this in the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model from Young-Suk Sook Kim from 2020.

Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000) part 2

Now let's hear about this same idea from Fitzgerald and Shanahan from 2000. Their research revealed that the nature of reading-writing relationships change over time, and they identified six developmental stages, each with its own critical markers of knowledge that readers and writers use.

Stage one is about the literacy roots, focusing on basic concepts like functions of reading and writing, phonological awareness and concepts of print. The ages they put on this is birth to around age six.

Stage two is learning about initial literacy, focusing on phonics, basic word recognition and spelling and simple syntax, and we see this sitting across here in Australia, the Foundation Year and Year One.

Stage three is about confirmation and fluency, so emphasising fluency, automaticity and morphology of big words, so understanding how they work and being able to read and write fluently, and so we're developing this, really taking that next step in grades two and three.

Stage four is reading and writing for learning, and we've heard this before we learn to read and then we read to learn. Now we continue to build on our reading capacity, but we do it differently, both for reading and writing in grades four to eight, because the focus here is not on the nuts and bolts foundational skills, but rather on vocabulary, discourse, level comprehension, so that's comprehending of a whole text and comprehending what other people say, and the building of subject-specific knowledge to be used for both reading and writing.

Stage five is about multiple viewpoints and this is where we get into that year nine and beyond element, which is about developing critical thinking, perspective taking and analysis.

And then stage six they've identified as construction and reconstruction, which is in the university ages, where we're emphasising synthesis, evaluation and worldview development.

This developmental perspective helps explain why the relationships between reading and writing skills differ at different grade levels. And it helps our team to understand why they're doing what they're doing in the early years as opposed to what they're doing in grades five and six. For example, correlations between word reading and spelling are stronger than those between reading comprehension and written comprehension, likely because higher level skills draw on a wider array of knowledge and abilities. So we know that building spelling proficiency improves reading dramatically, and so when we're talking about the earlier grades, the result of that instruction is that we're going to have a greater outcome between the word level reading and spelling and a greater synthesis. But as students get older there's the possibility that those skills and those differing levels of achievement tend to widen. And I think we see this in our schools when I'm speaking with Year Three to Six teachers and ask which students do you have who appear to be actually really quite strong readers, but their writing is weak. They can name them. So we see this in action in our classroom. This makes sense.

The Implications for Instruction

Now the implications for instruction here is that the research is clear: even though reading and writing are not the same thing, they draw on largely the same underlying skills and knowledge, and this is where those important implications sit. So here's some of those implications.

Number one, one we need integrated instruction because it's more efficient and effective than separated instruction. It allows students to apply shared knowledge and strategic processes across the context. Of course, the sensible conclusion about this is that it doesn't tax working memory as much when you're sharing the knowledge to apply to two different areas of skill.

The second implication is about explicit connections. Now, having those explicit connections between reading and writing strengthens both abilities and accelerates learning, especially for struggling readers and writers.

Third, think about that hierarchical skill development. That means we need to ensure foundational skills are strong before expecting high level performance in either reading or writing, regardless of the student's age. If you are teaching older children who do not have strong, automatic and fluent foundational skills, it is unreasonable to expect that they are going to be able to write you a really strong multi-paragraph text. They can engage in the conversation for sure, but if we want strong multi-paragraph level text from our older writers and comprehension of longer text for readers, then we have to make sure that they have all of those lower order skills and knowledge.

The fourth implication is sitting around strategic processing, which says that this processing should be taught explicitly both across reading and writing, and this helps students apply the same cognitive operations in both contexts and remember that those strategies were around searching, monitoring and self-correcting, and I'll say that again. So when we're thinking about the connecting and teaching children to use those cognitive processes for both reading and writing, we're talking about searching, monitoring and self-correcting, and that's important across both domains of reading and writing.

Finally, there are developmental considerations. A Year Two student is not just a smaller Year Five student. So we have to be very careful that in our ambition for quality practice we're not pushing down the content. We're remembering that from Foundation to Year Two is still early childhood and we need to be sensitive to the type of instruction that is most valuable as students progress and remember that there are different skills emphasised at different stages. So, thinking about how does this reflect the overall development and age of my students? I'm not talking about dumbing down expectations, just making sure that the instruction we're providing is most suitable for the students in front of us.

Graham and Nusrat (2023)

The implications of reading and writing integration extend beyond just efficiency. Graham and Nusrat, in 2023, found that when students write about text they've read, not only do they enhance their comprehension of those texts, but they also improve their writing skills, and there's more about this in the next episode, which is focused on the practical elements of integrating reading and writing. Similarly, reading instruction leads to improvements in writing quality. So there are these reciprocal positive effects that we see and, as I said, we'll get into the practicalities of that in the next episode.

Here's my closing thoughts for now.

Integrating reading and writing in all layers of language, integrating reading and writing in text, layers of language (that's words, sentences and text) reflects what research tells us about the nature of these two skills and how we can maximise learning. Using rich text as the stimulus for development, for both comprehension and writing, and applying core principles from cognitive science in our planning means that we're setting students up for success. This is the focus of every text-based unit that we write. This integration isn't about doing more, and if you use our units, you'll know that. One of the concerns about what people find in our text-based units is that there's not enough in there. But actually we're about working smarter, recognising that we must support student cognitive load and provide many opportunities to revisit content and practice skills in slightly increasing levels of complexity so that students can get to that multi-paragraph level text in a confident way. By recognising the shared foundations and processes of reading and writing, we can create more efficient and effective instruction that benefits all students.

In the next episode we'll explore practical ways to implement these research findings in your classroom. I'll share specific strategies, lesson structures and planning approaches that make integrated reading and writing instruction both manageable and powerful. Then, in the following episode, we'll hear from a real-life teacher about how this is coming to life in their school.

Until then, I hope this exploration of the research has given you some food for thought. Check out the reference list, it is there for you to access, so that it you can do some follow-up reading of your own, or find the transcript on our website. Take a highlighter and explore that even further. Remember, small shifts in our instruction can lead to significant gains for our students, but we need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm really happy to be bringing you another Research to the Classroom series and I'm excited to hear about how you have implemented some of what you've heard in your own practice. Until next week, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References

Anderson, N. L., & Briggs, C. (2011). Reciprocity between reading and writing: Strategic processing as common ground. The Reading Teacher, 64(7), 546-549.

Fitzgerald, J., & Shanahan, T. (2000). Reading and writing relations and their development. Educational Psychologist, 35(1), 39-50.

Graham, S., & Nusrat, A. (2023). Writing to promote better reading comprehension. In Z. Philippakos & S. Graham (Eds.), Writing and reading connections: Bridging research and practice.

Kim, Y.-S. G. (2020). Interactive dynamic literacy model: An integrative theoretical framework for reading and writing relations. In R. Alves, T. Limpo, & M. Joshi (Eds.), Reading-writing connections: Towards integrative literacy science (pp.11-34). Netherlands: Springer.

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