Note: Normally, I do not publish my blog, English
Updates, on weekends. However, I publish several other blogs during the
week having to do with ideas in English education that are not current, but
still useful. On weekends, I will publish samples of these ideas. RayS.
Question: How are
reading and writing connected?
Answer/Quote: “Reading and
writing are intimately and inextricably bound. Serious efforts to examine and
improve students’ writing can be informed by careful inventory of the kinds of
texts to which they have been and continue to be exposed. It seems clear, then,
that teachers at all levels should give careful attention to the selection of
reading material—particularly for non-or reluctant readers for they are the
very students who have the most catching up to do. Students who rarely read anything more challenging than popular
magazines cannot be expected to write as well as students who have had exposure
to more complex and varied texts.” P. 188.
Comment: As noted in previous research, even young
students when writing books, copy the formats of the children’s literature
books read to them by teachers, with text on one part of the page and pictures
on the other part of the page. My experience has also been that people who have
not been formally taught to write have become writers because “they were never
without a book in their hands.” The formats of narrative and expository writing
can be taught, but there is no question about the value of reading to the
ability to write. RayS.
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