Why Is It Important to Increase Reading and Writing Fluency

Larry Ferlazzo

Larry Ferlazzo is an English and social studies instructor at Luther Burbank High Schoolhouse in Sacramento, Calif.

(This is the showtime mail in a two-role series)

The new question-of-the-week is:

In what ways can writing back up reading instruction?

All of us obviously want to help our students become better writers. But are there ways we can "double-dip," likewise—in other words, help them improve their writing AND besides use writing instruction to meliorate reading skills?

We'll explore that question today with Tony Zani, Mary Tedrow, Mary Beth Nicklaus, Colleen Cruz, and Pam Allyn. You tin heed to a ten-minute conversation I had with Tony, Mary, and Mary Beth on my BAM! Radio Evidence. You tin can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Giving kids the 'write stuff' makes them amend readers

Tony Zani is a literacy autobus in the Salt Lake City school district. He has a bachelor'due south caste in elementary education and a main's degree in instructional leadership. Tony is a national-board-certified teacher with a specialization in early on-childhood education:

Writing is often the overlooked content area. After the National Reading Panel left it out and No Kid Left Backside focused on reading achievement, there seemed to be a refuse in educational activity writing. After the Common Cadre State Standards came out, there was an increase in writing pedagogy. Simply, if your state is similar mine, writing is merely tested in a few grades. So, guess what? Those are the grades when writing is taught like crazy. In other grades, it often becomes a nice affair "if there's time." There's rarely time.

This mentality is prevalent because every level of the educational activity organization focuses on making sure students do well on cease-of-year, high-stakes assessments. Jobs are at pale. Money from the authorities is at stake. Sky forbid your schoolhouse does and so poorly that an exterior group comes in to help y'all "turnaround."

Never fear, though. Writing directly benefits students' reading skills. For case, if you accept students write about what they've read or learned (for virtually any content or historic period), y'all'll dramatically improve reading comprehension. Students are often forced to reread and think more deeply about what they've read. When students accept to consider a controversial question and use texts they've read to defend their point of view, reading comprehension is off the charts. In our schoolhouse, nosotros've emphasized writing about what we read. Information technology took almost two years for almost teachers, and students, to really embrace the concept. It was most that time that our end-of-twelvemonth reading scores had a huge jump. Our highly impacted Title I school made enormous growth merely because students were ameliorate at thinking almost what they read.

Writing also improves students' reading fluency. When students have to stop and recall about what spelling patterns to use when they write, they are making a deeper connection in their brains near sound and spelling patterns. This deeper connection makes it easier, and faster, for students to think those same patterns when they read. Written language is literally a secret code that someone made upwards to represent spoken sounds. The more than students remember about and practice the code in written form, the better they will be at understanding the same code in writing. Again, in our high-needs school, we saw students' scores on tests like DIBELS and our end-of-level examination rise dramatically. Fluent readers more securely understand that code.

Writing besides improves reading comprehension as students go better at formatting their writing. When students write argumentative essays, they learn how authors often lay out their arguments and prove. This, in turn, gives students a framework for reading others' argumentative writing. Having a framework in your listen helps you lot fill up in the blanks and improves comprehension. When students write narrative pieces, they develop an agreement of how authors typically lay out graphic symbol development, setting, plot, problems, turning points, and resolutions. Again, students accept a framework to build upon when they read others' narrative texts. In a bit of irony, our schoolhouse focused on writing informative and argumentative pieces—those are emphasized in the mutual cadre, right? Our students had very high scores when reading informational texts. However, students scored lower when reading literature. Reading literature was a strength for most other schools. Writing in all genres is of import. Don't lose that balance!

Writing is a disquisitional communication skill. Universities and employers often complain that writing is an underdeveloped skill. Information technology's no wonder, when we accept an pedagogy system that frequently relegates writing to the country of "I wish we had time" and "That'southward not on the test." What a tragedy. Pedagogy students to be constructive writers is important by itself. Nonetheless, writing also provides big gains in reading comprehension and reading fluency.

'Reading is the inhale; writing is the breathe'

Mary K. Tedrow, an award-winning high schoolhouse English language instructor, now serves as the director of the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project. Her book, Write, Recollect, Acquire: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across the Content Expanse is available through Routledge:

Writing and reading are intricately intertwined. I is the inverse of the other: Reading is the inhale; writing is the exhale. They depend on each other, and when we notice time to practise both, the students are the winners.

In the earliest readers, writing is a natural way to ingest and experiment with a growing noesis of letters and their function in symbolizing the sounds we speak. Encouraging students to write, even before they know all the rules, builds a deeper understanding of how reading works. In kindergarten, the inventive spelling students utilise to compose early writings allows children to represent on the page what they are hearing in the world. Children more than clearly understand the letter/audio relationship as they compose thoughts and stories in writing. Recent research has revealed that students who are given latitude to use inventive spelling get better readers (Oulette & Senechall, 2017).

But the interplay between writing and reading goes well beyond just learning to read. When students are asked to write for their own purposes, they intuitively understand the choices authors make as they create a piece of work that moves a reader.

Teachers who accept students writing authentically—that is, the way existent writers write—can interrupt the process and teach craft lessons. Show students how to develop several good beginnings and ask them to cull the one which serves their purpose best. Show how to incorporate the senses in description, how to move a plot forward through dialogue, how to manipulate sentences for dial and clarity.

All of these writing skills are the within/out version of analyzing writing by others. When nosotros clarify the books, poetry, and essays we read, we are merely describing the choices an writer made on their road to composing a piece. When students are heavily involved in creating those pieces themselves, they will more easily see what authors are doing and understand the messiness required in producing constructive communication. Writing brings the author and his or her skill to life.

Students who write are meliorate, more observant, and appreciative readers in general. And students who read are improve, more than competent writers. Be sure your students have the risk to breathe in and out throughout the 24-hour interval.

Ouellette, Yard., & Sénéchal, Thousand. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten equally a predictor of reading and spelling in Form ane: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(one), 77-88. http://dx.doi.org/ten.1037/dev0000179

'Lure' students into reading through working with their writing

Mary Beth Nicklaus is a secondary-level teacher and literacy specialist for the Wisconsin Rapids public schools in Wisconsin:

I have found it possible to lure secondary-level students into the reading globe through working with their writing. I work with 6-9th grade struggling readers equally a reading specialist and literacy coach. By the time they are referred to me, they have not been reading for years—which accounts for much of their struggle. When we teachers work through the power of written self-expression with and for these students, we can also tinker with content-specific academic vocabulary, text structure, and mechanics of writing. We can also prime and build bones reading and comprehension skills. Even researchers have found that use of reading-response writing, explicitly educational activity writing procedure, and engaging students in broad writing practice enhances basic reading skills and comprehension in Chiliad-12 readers. Here are some strategies I accept found to be successful working with secondary-level students based on the same three areas:

• Create reading-response writing opportunities focusing on opinions and feelings of the reader. By the fourth dimension they are in 6th grade, well-nigh students want to share information about interests and opinions. How can we connect that interest into reader response? To begin with, nosotros don't always have to piece of work with published text. We can create our own texts in the classroom. We teachers tin get-go the procedure by writing a letter to students sharing some general information and interests. The teacher so guides the students to write a letter back to them with like information. This experience encourages students to begin sharing and expressing themselves in writing. Get into the habit of crafting student-writing response assignments for which we are asking about students' feelings and opinions regarding classroom reading—even soliciting poesy writing if that genre works all-time for some students. Students may also find starting with a salutation hailing a specific audience helps them focus their thoughts in their writing. "Dear teacher/form/partner, I think that____." They tin can likewise focus on sharing their writing with a partner or small grouping.
• Teach the writing process relative to classroom text. Teach students a few writing structures to conspicuously communicate thoughts and ideas. Teach the main structures of the text you use in your content—be information technology narrative or expository structures. Let'due south say nosotros desire to teach students to compare and contrast within a classroom text on the running of restaurants. Nosotros might use a Venn Diagram graphic organizer to compare and contrast the information near restaurant operation with them on the smartboard. Allow the form to help fill in data. So together, mankind out a comparison-dissimilarity response with a question like, "Based on our reading today, what might be a more than difficult eating place to run, Culver's or Buffalo Wild Wings?" Use a template to gather student input to flesh out a response. Teach students to support viewpoints with evidence from the text and prove them a specific style y'all will always want them to use to cite bear witness. Permit the class to help design or co-create a rubric for evaluating writing, which volition help students internalize the elements of the specific writing. Steer the strategy to a like text where you might use the aforementioned kind of structure and response.
• Appoint in wide practise of written response: Continuing both "big" and "little" writing in our classes, based on the structures and types of texts we teach, can increment reading comprehension. Working on mechanics of writing improves basic reading skills like fluency and word recognition. In improver, proceed to exercise reading, writing, and reflecting and sharing in whole-group, small-group, and partner contexts. Have students create "Why?" questions to enquire almost text. Supply judgement stems to assist students focus their text response with their writing such as, "I think ___________ did what he did considering in the story_______." Brand it a habit of requiring written response in the form of go out response slips where students inside a limit of 3-five minutes, quickly write a response to an inquiry regarding what they learned through the reading. Wide practice of writing helps students' classroom reading become second nature, and it helps clip their focus on text.

I know the strategies I have elaborated upon work, considering my students made enormous, lasting gains in their reading through focusing on writing. Also, the gains secondary-level students tin can make through focusing on feelings and opinions in their reading-response writing foster livelier conversations during classroom discussion. Students' overall gains even prove students that content texts across the curriculum can pique their interests outside of the classroom. It'south a win-win all around!

Having students annotate their writing with the Strategies they use

Colleen Cruz is the author of several titles for teachers, including The Unstoppable Writing Teacher, likewise as the author of the young-developed novel, Border Crossing, a Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Volume Award Finalist. She was a classroom teacher in general education and inclusive settings earlier joining the Teachers Higher Reading and Writing Projection, where as the manager of innovation, she shares her passion for accessibility, 21st-century learning, and social justice. Near recently, Colleen authored Writers Read Better: Nonfiction (July 2018) and Writers Read Better: Narrative published by Corwin:

As an educator who works with teachers and students in grades 2 through viii, I discover that I often look at the practices of primary-grade teachers and wish we upper-grade folks borrowed more than heavily from them. Whether it be a focus on individual development, an emphasis on play, or just an overarching focus on the whole child, there are pedagogical treasures we demand to bring more than to our big-kid classrooms. At nowadays, the virtually pressing for me is the desire to use writing to back up reading didactics more ofttimes.

Every kindergarten and 1st grade teacher I know asks students to write as before long as they enter the classroom. This is long before students know the entire alphabet or how to read whatsoever words. In fact, most of us who accept had little ones at abode can adjure to how often kids pick up a mark or crayon and write their names, strings of letters, or familiar words. Our youngest learners often produce words before they consume them. And when they do that, they are setting themselves up for success every bit readers considering they learn early on, if they can write their proper name they can read it. If they tin can write whatsoever word, they tin can read information technology.

Besides, many of us grew up as educators with the cognition that reading supports writing. I start learned how this conventional wisdom applies to children's writing from Katie Ray and her seminal book Wondrous Words. So, it should not be all that revolutionary to discover that those early-writing and -reading connections all the same employ when students motility into more circuitous reading.

Aye, they might have moved by simple decoding and literal comprehension work. But the role of writing and reading reciprocity nevertheless applies. For every comprehension move a reader makes, in that location is an writer on the other side of the desk. If a young reader is besides a writer, they volition be well-positioned to see the mirror moves they have made as a writer in the texts they are reading by other authors. Studies accept shown this, of grade (Graves, Calkins, Chew, Graham & Hebert to name a few). But in my work with young readers and writers I have seen time and again that if something is challenging to a reader, ane of the most accessible paths to overcoming that challenge is through writing. It's a transferable understanding that can terminal a lifetime: Show students that every reading skill has a reciprocal writing skill, and if they have written something like it, they are able to read it well, too.

Ane of my favorite ways to do this is to ask students to annotate their writing with the strategies they tried every bit writers and the reasons why. For instance, "I used evidence-don't-tell in this paragraph to help brand a flick in my reader's heed." I then ask them to read a book of their choice with their own writing nearby. When they come to a spot in the text they discover challenging, they can look back to their own writing to come across if they made a like move and why. A few common writing/reading reciprocal moves I teach students include:

• Testify-not-tell in writing helps readers to infer in reading.
• Plotting in writing helps readers to brand predictions in reading.
• Developing objects as symbols in writing helps readers interpret symbols in reading.
• Defining a discussion in writing helps readers to understand the pregnant of an unknown discussion.

In that location are, of course, countless more than.

We know the power of modeling. And I believe for many years, rightly and so, we have taught students how to mine the ability of the published word for ideas for their own writing. For many of us, information technology'south fourth dimension to endeavor to teach the power of modeling by request students to look at their ain writing as their mentor for their reading lives. I am difficult-pressed to retrieve of more empowering reading work.

Writing 'is a powerful lever for helping our students learn to read profoundly'

Pam Allyn, senior vice president, innovation & evolution, Scholastic Didactics, is a leading literacy proficient, writer, and motivational speaker. In 2007, she founded LitWorld, a global literacy system serving children across the United states of america and in more than lx countries, pioneering initiatives including the summer reading program LitCamp and World Read Aloud Day:

Writing and reading are non just two sides of the same coin; they are greatly related and entwined. I have frequently said that reading is similar animate in, and writing is like animate out—the child is taking new breaths in this new globe, feeling her power and her potential.

Surrounding our children in the sounds of language from literary and informational text is crucial to their understanding of linguistic communication. The child who is read aloud to multiple times per day, week, month, and year is already realizing the sound and feel of linguistic communication. Then, likewise, the kid who is given the opportunity to put her first marks on the folio is already offset to make pregnant in the world. When reading a book, she sees it equally something constructed from a world she already knows because her scribbles connect to those of others and requite her the powerful idea that she has a vox.

Writing early and constantly, in and out of school, is a powerful lever for helping our students acquire to read profoundly. Here are five means writing supports reading and vice versa:

1. Edifice a deep sense of the beauty of grammar, sound, and vocabulary

The pupil who writes becomes alarm to the structure of sentences, the rhythm of multiple words together, and words that surprise. Considering our students are using the tools of language to build their ain stories, they are awake to the qualities of texts. When students share works past authors such as Jacqueline Woodson or Naomi Nye, they're astounded and endeavour to emulate them in their own writing.

ii. Understanding the purpose of and use of genres

Students who write quickly learn the necessity of genre. My 1st graders were writing informational texts and choosing their own topics. One wrote about nursing homes because that's where her grandpa was. Later, I saw her scouring a volume with a glossary in it. She explained, "I desire to add a glossary to my story. My readers might need to know some of the big words I utilize to describe where my gramps lives." Genre is already embedded inside her at the age of 6.

3. Recognizing the ability of writing to connect us

Students who write sympathize that past telling their stories, they're making their thoughts permanent, which leads to a hearty respect for the text, the authors who write them, and the uses we make of them. When our student writers are finishing works to put into the classroom library, they take an opportunity to meet themselves side by side with published works, which feels celebratory. Writing, theirs and others, inspires and connects them.

4. Becoming aware of the means writing can alter someone's heed or change the world

Even the smallest writer has big ideas. My 2d course class once wrote letters to the entire neighborhood inviting them to come see our play. People immature and old came, and students saw how they could change their communities with the power of their own words. Then, when they read, they consider all the means writers can change people.

five. Knowing and deepening one's own writing and the vocalism of an author

The student who writes is building confidence, courage, and a sense of cocky. She is learning how to evoke emotion, keep someone in suspense, and persuade while developing her ain vox, which volition serve her in the future whether she's writing a narrative or an email. When she turns to her reading, she is now more aware of the author'due south phonation and knows the risks the author takes. She is one herself.

Thanks to Tony, Mary, Mary Beth, Colleen, and Pam for their contributions.

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this mail service.

Consider contributing a question to exist answered in a future post. You can ship i to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can utilise your real name if information technology'south selected or if y'all'd adopt remaining anonymous and take a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an eastward-book class. It'south titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

If you missed any of the highlights from the first eight years of this weblog, you lot tin see a categorized list below.

• This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts
• Race & Gender Challenges
• Classroom-Management Advice
• All-time Means to Begin the Schoolhouse Year
• Best Ways to End the School Year
• Implementing the Common Core
• Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning
• Education Social Studies
• Cooperative & Collaborative Learning
• Using Tech in the Classroom
• Parent Engagement in Schools
• Education English language-Language Learners
• Reading Teaching
• Writing Didactics
• Pedagogy Policy Problems
• Assessment
• Differentiating Instruction
• Math Instruction
• Science Teaching
• Advice for New Teachers
• Author Interviews
• Entering the Didactics Profession
• The Inclusive Classroom
• Learning & the Brain
• Administrator Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Relationships in Schools
• Professional Development
• Instructional Strategies
• All-time of Classroom Q&A
• Professional Collaboration
• Classroom Organization
• Mistakes in Instruction
• Project-Based Learning

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

Look for Part Two in a few days.

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(southward) and practice not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Instruction, or any of its publications.

duncanrecithe.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-writing-directly-benefits-students-reading-skills/2020/01

Share this post