Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction

Chapter 1. An Overview of Reading-Writing Connections

Chapter 1 An Overview of Reading-Writing Connections We believe that at the heart of understanding reading and writing connections one must begin to view reading and writing as essentially similar processes of meaning construction. Both are acts of composing. (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 568) This quotation, from the seminal article “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” in a landmark issue of the journal Language Arts (which contained several influential articles about reading-writing connections), represents an ideal starting point for this book. In particular, the statement that “both [reading and writing] are acts of composing” captures the essence of what Connecting Reading and Writing is about. What we need to understand about the Tierney and Pearson quote is the departure from conventional thinking and teaching practice it represented at the time of its publication. While it was obvious that writing is an act of composing, it wasn’t common in 1983 to think of reading in such terms. Then, reading was generally conceptualized as a passive act of decoding meaning and information in accordance with the intentions of the author of a text. Furthermore, it was common practice then to teach reading separately from writing because of the way in which the two skills were divided: writing as an active skill and reading as a passive one. Let me now make a confession that also points out the desirability of beginning with what Tierney and Pearson said. My career as a writing teacher began in the 1970s in a community 9 college setting where I was teaching native speakers of English. As a writing teacher, I thought only of writing; it didn’t occur to me that reading could be factored heavily into the writing equation, except in the sense of providing models of what essays should look like. My hope, like that of probably most writing instructors at the time, was that students would basically imitate the rhetorical structures of the models. Though this use of source texts was in fact an act connecting reading and writing, with reading being used to support or shape writing, it didn’t occur to me to construct the use of model essays as an activity linking reading and writing. My focus was on the writing that would be produced; reading was secondary to that process. Here, again, I was following commonly established practice and belief: writing teachers teach writing, and reading teachers teach reading. Like my colleagues at the time, that’s the way I thought about writing instruction, and that’s how I was taught to think. Nothing in my graduate school training had encouraged a conscious linking of reading and writing. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when I was teaching in Hong Kong and working with L2 writers, that I began to wonder about possible connections between writing and reading. At the time, I was assigning a fair amount of reading that the students were supposed to write about in various ways. As I saw many of my students struggling with the essays they were writing, I was thinking, as I had in the 1970s, that they were experiencing writing problems (as well as language-related difficulties). And then, for one particular assignment that was proving problematic, I asked the students to bring their copies of the assigned readings to their writing conferences with me. We began looking at them to find ways to move material from the readings to the essays being written. That’s when I became more aware of the reading problems many of the students were having and when I recognized, in a half-formed way, that some of the writing difficulties I had observed were in fact reading difficulties. Or, to be more accurate, they were composing difficulties . Locked into the language of the texts at the word and sentence level, many of the students were engaged in bottomup reading that involved mechanical decoding of the texts. 10 Connecting Reading and Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction There was no real effort to link the texts to what the students were writing; they were too busy checking their dictionaries to figure out what the words in the texts meant. And I was equally busy reinforcing that kind of reading behavior by not talking at all about the reading side of writing. Indeed, I was still separating reading from writing, as if the two acts had to take place at separate times...