S5 E10 Research to the Classroom - Connecting Reading and Writing Part 2 (Practical Application)

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Hello there and welcome back to our Research to the Classroom series on the Structured Literacy podcast. I'm Jocelyn and I'm recording here in Burnie, on the lands of the Palawa people. In our last episode we explored the research behind integrating reading and writing instructions, looking at models like the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model, and understanding the shared knowledge and strategic processes that underpin both sets of skills.

Today we're getting practical.

I'm going to share five key evidence-informed strategies for meaningfully connecting reading and writing across your school, and these aren't just add-ons to your existing practice. They represent shifts in how we conceptualise literacy instruction so that we can get stronger outcomes for all students.

Strategy Number One

So strategy number one is to integrate reading and writing in phonics instruction. This one is probably the easiest of them all. So this is about building foundational skills, essentially in word level reading and spelling. Traditionally, we've taught phonics primarily for reading, but research shows that integrating writing into phonics instruction creates a powerful reciprocal effect. When we have students write the words during a phonics lesson, we're not only helping them cement their phoneme-grapheme correspondence, but we're helping them to build patterns and recognition of those patterns in their mind for recognising words when they read.

To make this even more powerful, we put it into the context of simple sentences and that helps give us the full experience. When teaching new phoneme-grapheme correspondences, have students both read and write words containing this pattern. And before we do that, let's make sure that they're practicing both recognising and recalling to write the graphemes themselves. So if you're teaching the <AI> pattern, as in "RAIN", you will have students say /A/ when you show them the card with the A and the I on it, you'll have them write the A, and I like to have the students say A as they write it over and over, not for a hundred minutes, but just for a moment or two, maybe a minute, so that they get a full multisensory experience. Remember, multisensory does not have to involve shaving cream and sand. So we're going to recognise the A, we're also going to write it.

This is an opportunity for you to notice letter formation and where you might need to do some firming up of that formation for ease of writing as well. You'll also have students read words with this pattern and in decodable texts. So we're just going to have the words on their own and then they're going to practice them in decodable sentences that contain graphemes and high frequency irregular words they already know. We're also going to have students write these words and then build on this with some simple sentence application. These activities mean that you do not need to have a separate spelling program that sits differently from your phonics; your phonics program here is your spelling.

This two-way street between reading and spelling helps students develop stronger orthographic mapping. That means that they're mapping words to their long-term memory. And remember, the context is important, so we're going to have students deal with this at grapheme level, at word level and at simple sentence. As students write words, they have to segment them, segment the sounds or the phonemes, and then match them to the letters. So they have to say the word themselves, pronounce it, then attach the graphemes to the sounds that they say and write them down. All of this reinforces those very patterns that they need to recognise when they're reading.

Graham and Santagelo's 2014 meta-analysis found that spelling instruction improved not just spelling, but also word reading, and it improved comprehension. Ehri's research also showed that instruction in word reading via phonics enhanced spelling and vice versa.

So the take-home message here is don't separate phonics for reading from phonics for spelling. While they are different skills, they are two sides of that same coin and we've learned from the previous episode that they draw on the same knowledge for both. Integrating word reading and word spelling makes both of them stronger.

Strategy Number Two

Strategy two is use rich text as a foundation for text-based units, and this second strategy centers on the use of high quality texts. So when we're thinking about an updated approach to literacy instruction that responds to research, high quality text has a central place. It hasn't gone anywhere. We haven't done literacy because we've taught phonics. We must work with those high quality texts. Now these texts can form a foundation for both reading comprehension and writing instruction.

So, rather than teaching reading and writing as separate blocks, design text-based units where students read and analyse a high-quality stimulus text. They learn about the craft of writing, as well as things like text structure, by examining the text or using it as a jumping off point for learning, and then use that text as the stimulus for both comprehension activities and writing tasks that focus on those same similar structures or features. So the key difference from traditional mentor texts is that we're not just asking students to imitate what they see. Instead, we're explicitly teaching the elements of the text being studied and providing a gradual release of responsibility, explicit teaching model for students that guides them through the process of learning about how to write and learning to respond to texts.

So, for example, if you're studying a narrative text like the Velveteen Rabbit in Year Five or Six, you might analyse how the author develops characters through description and dialogue, explicitly teach techniques for character development and then guide students to incorporate similar techniques in their own writing. This approach creates natural connections between reading and writing at the text level, while ensuring students have the scaffolding they need to be successful.

If you're using our text-based units, you have this built in. It's the exact approach that we use in our work.

Strategy Number Three

Strategy three is to distribute writing across the curriculum and the school day, and I've spoken about this in a previous episode called Help! My Students Aren't Writing Enough! This third strategy addresses a common challenge: finding enough time for writing. Instead of confining writing to the literacy block and having the literacy block do all the heavy lifting, spread those writing opportunities across the curriculum and across the day. The research shows that writing about learning does two important things: it improves the quality of students' writing and it enhances recall and learning of the content that you want them to learn. So this gives you the double benefit: students improve as writers while deepening their understanding of content.

But I have to say here, it's not just about giving students time to have a pen or pencil in their hand. We can't expect them to get better at things we haven't taught them yet. So we need to be mindful that if we're asking students to use particular structures or features to write about learning, that we've actually taught those structures or features first, and know that the students are able to apply what they've learned independently. Practical approaches to this include: writing responses to learning situations across subject areas, summarising main points of lessons, writing to explore and develop thinking about content, and doing things that have been described as a brain dump. So write down everything you know. So when you do that, you're also getting in some retrieval there as well. So again, you're getting bang for your buck in your instruction. Students can answer short questions about content and take notes in age-appropriate ways. So we want to be careful that we're not just pushing down the note-taking we would expect in secondary school down into a Year Two classroom. But we can get students to represent their thinking throughout learning in a variety of ways.

When planning with teaching teams identify where writing can meaningfully support learning in different curriculum areas. This doesn't mean adding more to an already full curriculum, it means using writing as a tool to deepen the learning that's already happening. And, as I said before, the literacy block shouldn't do all the heavy lifting in reading and writing. By distributing writing across the day, you're breaking it into shorter, more manageable chunks that still provide substantial practice.

Strategy Number Four

Strategy four is ensure that we are teaching prerequisite skills to automaticity or fluency, depending on what they are. So the fourth strategy here focuses on developing automaticity in both reading and writing, in lifting words from the page and putting words onto the page.

In order for students to write well, handwriting and letter formation must be automatic, spelling must be automatic and sentence construction must be fluent, and the same goes for the reading side. We need to be able to effortlessly lift most words from the page and have robust strategies to figure out what's going on when we encounter words that we're unfamiliar with. When these lower level skills become automatic, cognitive resources are freed up for the higher level processes like comprehension and composition.

As Steve Graham notes, sentence production has to be fluent to attend to high level concerns. So, once again, just giving students the pencil or the pen and giving them time to write is not going to help them be a better multi-paragraph text level writer, and giving children opportunity to read silently to themselves is not the same as instruction in reading.

So we can build these foundational skills with regular brief practice sessions, systematic instruction, sentence level work, where students construct, combine and manipulate sentences, but also examine sentences to unpack their meaning and talk about them with a partner. It all starts with oral language, though, so we can build from vocabulary instruction through to oral sentence construction, with lots of talk before we ask students to write. The same goes for reading. So building vocabulary helps students in the comprehension and in the writing, and you don't need masses of time to do this. We just need to be intentional and hold space for it, and that might mean letting something go that you've been doing that's nice, but maybe isn't leading you to the same strong outcomes that we could be getting.

Strategy Number Five

The fifth strategy is to use a hierarchical framework for literacy development, understanding that we need to build on lower order skills to achieve the higher order skills. So drawing on models like the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model, we can conceptualise literacy development as a structure with the foundation of the domain general cognitive skills: working memory, inhibitory control and attention. So this is about how do I manage myself? How do I organise my thoughts? How do I manage to remember what's being talked about? Then there are the emergent literacy skills, and I spoke earlier in this episode about the phonics work being the foundation for reading and for spelling.

Frameworks like this that build from the simple to complex, help us identify where student skills might be breaking down, target instruction at the appropriate level and understand how different skills support each other. This makes looking at data a whole different ballgame, because we're not just looking for a final score. We're looking to see: does the student have similar skills in reading and writing in this area? So, are our students able to both recognise and recall graphemes? Are our students able to comprehend particular sentence structures and also produce them?

If we're seeing a mismatch, that gives us wonderful depth of understanding about where we can improve what we're doing in the classroom and beef up certain elements of instruction. So when students struggle with written composition, we can be looking at transcription skills, the handwriting and the spelling. If they're struggling with accuracy, then we can be looking at teaching those parts of words that they need, remembering that when we teach that content, both for recognition or reading and for spelling or the encoding, we're going to benefit all of it. When we teach spelling, we're not just making the students more accurate spellers, we're also making them more accurate readers. All of this enables us to provide targeted support at the appropriate level, recognising that strengthening the foundational skills and the pillars of oral language and syntax will support the development of the higher level skills.

What does it mean, then, to bring it all together?

Well, with these five strategies integrating reading and writing in phonics instruction, using rich texts as the foundation for text-based work, distributing writing across the curriculum, teaching prerequisites and using that hierarchical framework, we start to see how the literacy block is like a permaculture garden. Everything has more than one purpose and is interconnected. The key to success here is intentionality. So, rather than seeing reading and writing as separate subjects competing for time, we can recognise that the interconnectedness of this enables us to plan instruction that is way more efficient than having that hour of reading and that hour of writing. This can mean that we can align curriculum documents to highlight reading-writing connections, provide professional learning that builds teachers' understandings of these connections. We can create assessment systems that look at reading and writing development as connected rather than as separate. We can plan text-based units that integrate reading and writing in meaningful ways and we can establish consistent language and approaches across grades. The goal here isn't to try and do more. It's to work smarter by recognising the shared foundations of reading and writing and then designing instructions that build both at the same time.

It can feel a little confusing and teachers will often say, can you just tell me what to do? And if that's where you and your school are sitting in this right now, that's ok. You don't have to know everything, but you can take some simple steps to get started. If you've noticed that your phonics instruction has more reading than it does spelling, well, just beef up the spelling bit. If you're recognising that you're spending a lot of time reading and analysing text, but not necessarily spending a lot of time unpacking the elements of syntax and grammar that helps students not just understand text but also write better well you can just beef up the other element. You don't have to be perfect in this, you just need to have the idea in mind that we want to get better at integrating the two of these things.

In the next episode, we're going to hear from a school leader who has worked with her school to implement these approaches, and we're going to hear from her what it looks like in a real world context. Research to the Classroom is all about just that: helping us understand the why of what we're doing, the what we can be doing and the how of how to bring it to life in a realistic way. Remember, perfection is the enemy of progress. We're not looking for perfection in the next five minutes, in fact, I don't think we're looking for perfection at any time. But what we are looking to do is to take those meaningful steps that are going to help move our instruction, and therefore our student outcomes, in the right direction. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. Until I see you next time, happy teaching, bye.

Useful Links:

S5 E4 - Help! My Students Aren't Writing Enough!

References:

Ehri, L., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. A., & Willows, D. M. (2001). Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 71(3), 393-447.

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27(9), 1703-1743.

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