Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction

Introduction

Introduction An illuminating experience in the professional lives of many L2 writing teachers is the recognition that their students’ difficulties while writing in the L2 are not necessarily or not predominantly writing problems per se. Upon closer examination , they can often be traced to problems in reading. At the postsecondary level especially, where, as Carson and Leki (1993a) note, “reading can be, and in academic settings nearly always is, the basis for writing” (p. 1), students’ ability to write is heavily dependent on and influenced by their ability to read, and vice versa. For example, academic writing often requires incorporating material from source texts—statistics, ideas, quotations, paraphrases, and so forth—into written texts. Students who read well know where to locate and how to identify the most relevant content in the source texts, and that information is then transferred to their writing. If the writing that follows reading is poor, the problem may be in ineffective reading that failed to properly access necessary source text information, not in writing ability itself. As such, attention needs to be paid to how students composing from such sources of information are reading those sources. When we begin to investigate a situation like that and concentrate on the reading, we may find that the core problem is in fact the reader’s inability to use writing to shape reading. To read well, the student needs to know where to look for information and how to identify it as relevant or useful. Where does such knowledge come from? Our answer in this book is that it comes in part from writing; that is, the knowledge necessary to obtain such material may come at least in part from what students know about texts as writers. That knowledge tells them how, rhetorically and linguistically, texts in the target language function, just as a road map tells a driver how to reach Point B from Point A. Thus, their writing knowledge informs their ability to read. Conversely, exposure to texts through reading has probably contributed to their acquisition of understanding about writing and those features that constitute writing: the rhetorical strategies, cohesive devices, and other tools of writing that writers use to present their ideas. Acquiring such knowledge from reading should eventually assist students while writing by equipping them with helpful knowledge of writing strategies and techniques. And it should, in turn, assist reading by providing some of the equipment necessary to process texts. We see, then, that there are complex ways in which reading and writing interact. What we know about reading comes partly from writing, and what we know about writing comes partly from reading. It is this kind of scenario that has inspired such oft-made comments as “good writers are good readers” and “good readers are good writers.” On the other hand, bad writers may be bad readers, in that they are unable, as readers, to successfully process or make use of source texts, leaving them ill prepared for the act of writing about those texts because their reading has not effectively informed their writing. Though L2 writing instructors may intuitively sense that there are important connections between the acts of reading and writing as they arrive at the understanding just described, they are not necessarily prepared to fully appreciate or recognize the various relationships that exist between the two skills, such as the key idea that writing and reading depend on many of the same composing processes. For one thing, it’s easy to conceptualize the writing course as just that: a course about writing. As Kroll (1993), among others, has pointed out, reading has traditionally been seen as a skill to be taught separately from writing, as well as something students are somehow expected to already know about when they reach the writing course. Teaching reading in a writing course may seem like an odd idea, if not an entirely unnecessary one. It may also be the case that L2 writing teachers feel ill prepared 2 Connecting Reading and Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction to teach reading, especially in connection with writing. How many have actually been taught to teach the two skills together ? They may also feel that teaching writing is hard enough as it is and that adding reading to the equation will make the task too difficult to perform well. Then there’s the time factor. Writing classes are busy places with no room to...