How Can Writing Improve Reading Comprehension? Discussion

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to today's discussion on How Can Writing Improve Reading Comprehension? Please feel free to participate by asking questions and making comments throughout the day!

Leading today's discussion is Dr. Charles "Skip" MacArthur. "Charles A. MacArthur is a professor emeritus in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. His major research interests include writing development and instruction for struggling writers, development of self-regulated strategies, adult literacy, and applications of technology to support reading and writing. He is currently principal investigator (PI) of a $3 million 5-year project to evaluate Supporting Strategic Writers, a writing curriculum for college basic writing classes . . . 

"He is co-editor of The Journal of Writing Research, previously served as editor of The Journal of Special Education, and currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has published over 100 articles and book chapters and edited several books, including The Handbook of Writing Research, Best Practices in Writing Instruction, and Adult Education Literacy Instruction: A Review of the Research" (University of Delaware).

Thank you so much for being here today Dr. MacArthur! I will start today's discussion with the first question. 

We more often think of writing as something that requires reading skills, rather than thinking about how writing activities could improve reading. How is it that writing can support reading?

Thanks again so much for leading today's discussion! 

Steve Schmidt, Moderator

LINCS Reading and Writing Group

Comments

Let me start by pointing out the deep connections between reading and writing. 

In a practical sense, most writing activities, at work and in school, involve reading. School writing includes taking notes, answering questions about reading, book reports, and reports. Work writing includes memos, letters, forms, simple and complex reports. All of these writing tasks involve reading. In many of the school examples, the purpose of the writing is to support comprehension of reading and learning content. 

Workplace writing doesn’t have any instructional purpose, but it involves interactions between readers and writers. In some cases, this interaction is fairly direct when people know who will be reading what they write – much work writing is like this. The sharing is about content; reading what a co-worker wrote and writing back improves understanding of the content. In everyday life, texting, emailing, and other social media depend on interactive reading and writing for communication. 

Engaging in writing about reading affords opportunities to improve comprehension skills. Consider how your reading process changes when you write about what you read. You don’t just read it once. You go back and re-read to find important ideas to write about. You may need to integrate ideas from the text and organize them for your own purposes in writing. The time and effort involved leads to more reflection.  In addition, you may connect the ideas to your own background knowledge.  It is common to say that teaching something improves your own understanding. In a similar way, explaining ideas to a reader in writing can improve your own understanding. 

Thank you for this discussion, Dr. MacArthur and Steve! I agree strongly with the idea that writing about our reading material usually prompts us to go back and look more closely at the text, and it leads to more reflection. This definitely improves learning! But I have had some students for whom the increased attention and reflection also brought increased fear - some of my students are afraid of writing. The fear of the 'blank page' is real for many people. I had a student once who would not put a word to the page unless I sat with him and walked him through his ideas word by word, almost. I wonder if you have suggestions for how to approach students who have a fear of writing.  I have tried using sentence starters, but I'd be curious to know what other strategies might work. Thanks! Anita

Anita,

Thank you for this question. Writing anxiety is a very real and common problem. Students confidence in their writing ability is a strong predictor of writing quality. Many students experience fears of failure in writing courses, and it can lead to self-defeating behaviors like not turning in assignments to avoid assessment or dropping the writing course. Usually, students are fearful because they have not had successful experiences in the past. Perhaps, they never had a teacher that provided effective instruction, or a teacher who marked all their errors for correction. 

One of the best solutions is to provide clear, explicit instruction that gives students strategies for writing that they can follow. Explain the writing task and the strategies, and then model how to use the strategies to plan a paper, draft, and revise it. Think-aloud as you model so students can see your thought process. Then perhaps, plan and write one collaboratively with the class. Then when students tackle one on their own, they will have a pretty good idea of how to do it. When they have completed a draft, help them evaluate it so they can see their improvement. Seeing one's improvement is the best way to gain confidence.

You described an extreme case of writing anxiety of a student who could not write anything without you at his side. It would be important to understand the student's writing skills and problems to plan an approach. Students who have great difficulty with spelling and grammar often find it difficult to write anything. One approach to try is to have the student compose orally first. Have them generate one sentence orally and repeat it several times so they don't forget it. Then they can struggle with your help to write it down. As they see this routine work, they can begin to compose orally and write sentence-by-sentence on their own. 

Hope these ideas help.

Charles

Dr. MacArthur, thank you for sharing concrete examples of how reading and writing are deeply connected and how writing about what we read shows how well we understand what's read.

What kinds of writing activities can improve reading comprehension?

Many writing activities have been found to improve reading comprehension. Perhaps, the simplest kind of writing about reading is answering questions. The questions help guide reading by directing students to important information; they also require more effort by the students. It improves comprehension of the particular reading assignment. In addition, practice answering questions about reading has been shown to have a small positive effect on reading comprehension in general. 

Some more challenging writing tasks are taking notes and writing summaries. Both of these activities ask students to find the most important ideas in a text and put them in their own words. If students can do that, well, that is what we usually mean by comprehending a text. 

But how can we teach learners to take notes and write summaries?  One way is to teach them about the elements of different types of texts. For example, stories have a character with a problem or goal, actions to try to solve the problem, complications, and a conclusion. Arguments have a controversial issue, a position, reasons with evidence, opposing reasons with rebuttals, and a conclusion. Research has found that teaching these text structure elements enhances both reading and writing.  For example, teaching students about story structure improves both reading and writing of stories. Or when students are learning to read and write arguments (or persuasive texts), they can look for the issue and the author’s position and then search for reasons and evidence on both sides. They can use the elements to take notes and then to write a summary or their own arguments. 

 

Reading and writing draw on common skills at every level of reading skill. For students at low levels of reading skill, spelling instruction can support their learning to decode words. As students work on spelling a word, they need to hear the sounds in sequence in their heads. This develops the phonological awareness needed for decoding. Spelling instruction also helps as students learn to use prefixes and suffixes to make more complex multisyllabic words.  This might be a good place to plug Making Sense of Decoding and Spelling, a curriculum my colleagues and I developed a decade ago. It’s available with all materials on LINCS (https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/making_sense).

Thanks for joining us for this valuable discussion, Dr. MacArthur.  The Making Sense resource you linked us to emphasizes the importance of explicitly teaching spelling rules. It's clear to me that learners at all levels want to learn how to spell correctly. 

I learned about a method for teaching spelling that gives learners practice writing words they have learned. Do you see benefits to the Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check-Rewrite approach as either led by the teacher and/or for self-study? (Here's a video featuring engaging in this activity for self-study.)

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition Group

I do think that the "Look-say-cover-write-check-rewrite" routine is a good way to study spelling words.  The method for memorization is especially relevant to common sight words that are not spelled according to regular phonetic or syllabic patterns: house, could, light, people, mother.  

But at the same time, students need to learn how to decode and spell words that do have regular spellings -- words that can be decoded or spelled phonetically and words that use common prefixes and suffixes, for example. That's why our curriculum was called "Making Sense..." 

 

Thanks so much for all the great information you have provided in this discussion so far Skip!

You've touched on this a little bit so far indicating that research shows how teaching text structures enhances reading and writing.  What else does the research have to say about how writing improves reading comprehension?

Your contributions are greatly appreciated!

Steve Schmidt, Moderator

LINCS Reading and Writing Group 

About 10 years ago, Graham & Hebert (2011) did a thorough review of research on the effects of writing instruction and writing practice on reading comprehension. 

They also found that writing instruction and writing practice, in general, had positive effects on reading comprehension. 

Some specific writing activities that were found to be helpful for reading comprehension:

  • Answering questions about text not only helped with comprehension of that text but over time improved general reading comprehension.
  • Taking notes and writing summaries enhanced comprehension for middle school and high school students. 
  • The effects of writing were greater for poor readers/writers than typical readers. 

They found that teaching spelling had a strong impact on word reading and on reading fluency.

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing to read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81, 710-744. 

Less work on writing instruction has been done with adults. My own research with adult learners has always combined writing and reading instruction. The study I mentioned earlier about Decoding and Spelling found positive effects on decoding skills but no effects on broader reading measures.

Another example is In my research with college developmental writers using strategy instruction with self-regulation, done in collaboration with Zoi Traga Philippakos at U Tenn. The writing/reading strategies are based on types of writing, or genres, for example an argumentative essay.  We teach students the elements of argument: controversial issue, position, reasons with evidence, opposing reasons with rebuttals, and conclusion. Then we teach strategies for critical reading and planning based on those elements. We teach students to look for the elements of argument as they read, take notes about them in their own words, and use those notes to write a summary. They also use the elements to plan and write their own arguments. We found positive results in several studies on writing quality and also on the accuracy of summaries of source texts, a measure that taps both comprehension and ability to write clearly. We did not find gains on standardized tests of reading though. For more information, check the website: supportingstrategicwriters.org.

We are currently working with Cynthia Puranik and Daphne Greenburg to develop a similar strategy instruction approach in adult education. 

Thank you for this discussion, Dr. MacArthur and Steve! I agree strongly with the idea that writing about our reading material usually prompts us to go back and look more closely at the text, and it leads to more reflection. This definitely improves learning! But I have had some students for whom the increased attention and reflection also brought increased fear - some of my students are afraid of writing. The fear of the 'blank page' is real for many people. I had a student once who would not put a word to the page unless I sat with him and walked him through his ideas word by word, almost. I wonder if you have suggestions for how to approach students who have a fear of writing.  I have tried using sentence starters, but I'd be curious to know what other strategies might work. Thanks! Anita

Hi Everyone,

Thank you to all who participated in our discussion on how writing can improve reading comprehension! A special thanks to Dr. Charles "Skip" MacArthur for leading the discussion. We so appreciate your time and expertise Dr. MacArthur! The community looks forward to future opportunities to interact with you.

The LINCS Reading and Writing group hosts monthly events which might be webinars, informal "coffee break" Zoom talks, or asynchronous discussions such as this one. We'll see you at future events!

Thanks again,

Steve Schmidt, Moderator

LINCS Reading and Writing Group