Reading Writing Skill Builders Reading Writ...
Many preschool teachers recognize the importance of early writing by making writing materials available in their classrooms and providing opportunities to write during the school day (Gerde & Bingham, 2012). However, for teachers like Mrs. Jackson who want to offer explicit writing instruction to their students, the diversity of skill levels in a typical classroom presents a real challenge. Preschool teachers receive limited practical guidance about how to apply the research on early writing to help individualize instruction for children. Not surprisingly, recent research indicates that few teachers understand how to appropriately scaffold instruction to help children take the next step in their writing development (Gerde & Bingham, 2012).
Reading Writing Skill Builders Reading Writ...
In this article, we offer a straightforward framework that teachers can use to easily evaluate children's writing and help children take the next step in development. We address why it is important to foster early writing skills, how writing typically develops in young children, and how teachers can actively support this development. We discuss in detail four different students who might appear in a typical preschool classroom and how teachers can use their understanding of early writing to shape instruction for these students.
We also provide examples and concrete suggestions for fitting individualized writing instruction into common classroom contexts, including centers, journaling, and morning message. This article will help teachers individualize early writing support for all students and at the same time foster other important early literacy skills through writing.
Early writing is one of the best predictors of children's later reading success (National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2008). Specifically, early writing is part of a set of important foundational literacy skills that serve as necessary precursors to conventional reading (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), including developing understandings of both print (i.e., print concept and alphabet knowledge) and sound (i.e., phonological awareness).
Print knowledge includes general understandings of how print works (e.g., left-to-right directionality) and the names and sounds of the alphabet. Knowledge about sound, or phonological awareness, includes the ability to attend to and manipulate sound structure of language, progressing from awareness of larger chunks (e.g., sentences, rhyme, beginning sounds) to blending and segmenting individual units of sound (i.e., phonemic awareness), for example, understanding that the word cat is made up of /c/, /a/, and /t/. These early skills work together to lay a foundation for later reading success (NELP, 2008).
Children who are drawing and scribbling usually do not yet understand that writing is related to speech. Similarly, when listening to a storybook being read aloud, children at this level may not understand that the text carries its own meaning, and that the words the teacher is saying to tell the story come from the text (Justice, Pullen, & Pence, 2008). Their alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness skills are at the beginning points in development. They may know a few letter names, such as the first letter in their name. They may also be working on phonological awareness skills that attend to larger units of spoken language, such as rhyme.
Children's invented spellings mirror their early reading ability very closely (Morris et al., 2003). At this level, they are able to finger-point accurately to the words of a memorized rhyme and make self-corrections if they get off track. They actively use their knowledge of letter sounds and letter names to help them identify words, but often guess based on the first letter and sometimes last letter of a word, not yet attending to the vowel sounds; cat and cut would be most likely read the same way (Ehri, 2005). Over time, children's spellings become more conventional as they learn to represent all the sounds in words.
Her writing skill reflects her other literacy skills; Carmen knows all the letter names and letter sounds and has excellent awareness of the beginning sounds in words. However, when finger-pointing to a known text, such as a nursery rhyme, she often gets off track when she encounters two-syllable words. She generally cannot distinguish between written words that begin with the same sound. For example, she may identify the same word as mom or mother.
Jayden knows virtually all letter names and letter sounds. In terms of vowels, he is most familiar with the long sounds, which match the names of those letters. For example, he writes snow as SO. He is also able to track a memorized rhyme, self-correcting as he attempts to make the speech-to-print match. He is also actively using his knowledge of letter names and letter sounds to help him sound out words, but this process is slow and labor-intensive for him. He has trouble distinguishing between similar words such as bed and bad, as he does not always attend to vowel sounds in words. When reading, he relies heavily on contextual clues and picture supports to guess the right word when he is unsure.
Because Jayden is working at the fourth level of writing development, two goals are appropriate for him: consistently representing middle vowel sounds in his writing, and writing some simple, complete words. Achieving these goals will also support his reading development by helping him sound out words more accurately.
Effectively incorporating support for children's varying writing skills provides a gateway to developing other critical literacy skills and significantly contributes to later reading achievement (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). The knowledge teachers gain from assessing children's writing samples can be used to select appropriate, individualized strategies for scaffolding and expanding children's writing efforts. Individualizing writing instruction provides meaningful and approachable writing experiences for all children, setting the stage for reading and writing success for years to come.
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This article investigates the relationship between reading and writing. We assume that these skills share a number of subskills as can be inferred from models of reading and writing. A set of these subskills are studied for the extent to which they can explain the common variance (correlation) between reading and writing. Data from a sample of Dutch students performing reading and writing tasks in Dutch and English as a foreign language, as well as tests for various Dutch and English subskills, both declarative knowledge and processing fluency, were analyzed using structural equation modeling to estimate residual correlations between reading and writing, controlling for subskills. Results show that declarative linguistic knowledge is a more likely source for the common variance between reading and writing than processing fluency, and the subskills seem to play a larger role in EFL reading and writing than in L1 reading and writing. However, the EFL patterns seem to develop in the direction of the L1 results in the course of three grades.
Language use is often categorized into one of four modalities: speaking, listening, reading or writing, and we like to think and talk about these four modalities in terms of four different abilities. It is commonly acknowledged that these four abilities are interrelated, and a large number of studies have investigated these relationships, especially the relationship between the two literacy skills, reading and writing, has been studied extensively (Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, Graham, & Richards, 2002; Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000; Shanahan, 2006). In these studies, the core issue has been whether reading or reading development has an influence on writing or writing development, or vice versa, or whether there are bidirectional influences (Abbott, Berninger, & Fayol, 2010; Ahmed, Wagner, & Lopez, 2014; Shanahan & Lomax, 1988). This issue is particularly relevant for the design of literacy education. However, taking a more theoretical perspective, it is most likely that both reading and writing use partially the same cognitive, linguistic and discourse resources a language user has at his or her disposal. When we think of models of reading and writing, we can expect the same building blocks or constituent components to play a role in the cognitive processes of reading and writing. We can assume that the individual differences in reading and writing are caused by individual differences in these constituent processes (see Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & Van Heerden, 2004; Schoonen, 2011), and therefore that the correlation between reading and writing, at least in part, may be caused by individual differences in these resources.
To summarize, we will investigate the extent to which the relationship between reading and writing ability can be explained by language resources they both appeal to, and we will do so for reading and writing in L1 and EFL, and at three stages of development, respectively.
In search of potentially overlapping building blocks of reading and writing, we can compare cognitive models of reading to similar models of writing. However, these models come from different research traditions and are seldom formulated in terms of required subskills. Still, we could try to derive relevant subskills from these processing models (Schoonen et al., 2003; Van Gelderen et al., 2004).
To summarize, both reading and writing models recognize the role of topical knowledge in language processing, in addition to that of linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge includes lexical-semantic knowledge at the word level, morpho-syntactic knowledge at the sentence level and pragmatic-discourse knowledge at the above sentence level. This linguistic knowledge can be expanded with orthographic knowledge to decode script into language or to encode language into script. Furthermore, the language user must know how to approach the task and how to act strategically in performing a language task. This kind of knowledge is in part related to discourse level knowledge (knowledge of text characteristics) and can be viewed as metacognitive knowledge as well, especially the strategic part. The knowledge sources can be conceived of as declarative knowledge. However, reading and writing both require the language user to have some fluency in accessing theses knowledge resources, especially the lower order knowledge at the orthographic, lexical and sentence level. 041b061a72