Integrate+Reading+and+Writing

=Integrate Reading and Writing=

By: Lisa Pennington

"Current understanding in the field of literacy dictates that reading and writing mutually reinforce one another and rely on some of the same cognitive processes..." (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000; Shanahan, 2006; Tierney & Shanahan, 1996).

Reasons to Integrate Reading and Writing

 * Reading and writing together = LITERACY!!!
 * Students are more successful in each domain (reading and writing) when the two are enmeshed.
 * Effective literacy teachers consistently integrate reading and writing to produce highly achieving students.

The Important Relationship Between Reading and Writing

 * When students exhibit proficient writing skills, it directly and positively impacts their reading comprehension skills. Likewise, a student's reading comprehension skills directly impacts his or her writing skills. While there is not an enormous amount of experimentation in this area, results that have been studied indicate that the combination of reading and writing instruction greatly increased literacy levels in students. This is sometimes known as a bidirectional relationship and it is prompting more research in this area (Abbott, Berninger, & Fayol, 2010).

Ideas to be Considered

 * The integration of cross-curricular instruction (combining reading instruction within specific content area) is believed to promote reading-writing relationships in systematic ways.
 * Reading and writing integration has been shown to positively promote oral-language development in students.
 * When students are taught reading skills in conjunction with specific content area knowledge, they are more likely to use subject area related vocabulary when interacting with one another. They also tend to write better content-specific essays showcasing enhanced writing skills.

WIRC (Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension)
Collins and colleagues (Collins, Lee, Fox, & Madigan, 2011) developed, implemented, and evaluated an approach to improving fourth and fifth graders' **reading comprehension that focuses on directly linking reading and writing**. Driven by Kinstch's Construction-Integration model and Bereiter & Scardamalia's problem space model of writing, WIRC prompts students to use visual representations of key concepts within text.
 * WIRC "think sheets" are subsituted for traditional worksheets within state-mandated basal reading programs.
 * Think sheets are visually laid out to help students better represent the content of the text they've read. Students not only write about the text they've read, they also talk about it.
 * The think sheets enable students to easily convey what they are trying to say in an organized, concise manner.
 * When WIRC is used with fidelity and in an appropriate manner, it effectively helps students bridge reading and writing to improve comprehension, vocabulary, and writing skills in all subject areas.

In Conclusion
Talk and writing are aids to learning not only in reading and language arts classes, but all academic areas. Oral and written language reinforce one another just as reading and writing do. Students who are exposed to integrated reading and writing tend to demonstrate improved reading comprehension as well as writing skills, including use of appropriate grammar, text structure, and organization. In addition, students tend to better grasp ideas in specific subject area classes.