Vocabulary Ship and Anchor

activities, nor is it just writing activities. Instead, literacy is all those things, connected across the content areas. When a teacher plans a lesson so students will engage in authentic, relevant, interconnected, and rich reading, speaking, listening, and writing opportunities, that teacher is growing students’ literacy skills better than any program, workbook, or disconnected reading and writing assignments can.

Circa 1945, author William Faulkner said:

Read, read, read . Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it . Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master . Read! You’ll absorb it . Then write . If it’s good, you’ll find out . If it’s not, throw it out of the window . (as cited in Gilks, 2002)

Even then, great writers knew the power of reading to improve writing and vice versa. The research advisory team of the International Literacy Association (ILA, 2020) has shown that reading and writing are interdependent, and although they are not identical skills, they draw on common sources of knowledge. The more direct the instruction of reading skills and writing skills are in the classroom, the more reading and writing interact and strengthen each other. The following skills are mentioned throughout the research (table I.1).

Table I.1: Reading Skills and Writing Skills

Reading Skills

Readers draw on knowledge of words, syntax, usage, and features of the text to decode words and comprehend . Readers interpret an author’s message and purpose by using what they know about the text features and functions .

Readers use their knowledge of setting goals, accessing information, generating questions, predicting, summarizing, visualizing, and analyzing the text for meaning making . Students become more fluent readers after learning the structure of complex sentences and using them in their writing .

Writing Skills

Writers use this same reading knowledge to spell words, craft sentences, and create a manuscript . Writers use this same knowledge to construct their sentences and paragraphs for their readers .

Writers use these same skills to organize and construct their thoughts for their writing .

Writers learn how to write more complex sentences via mentor texts and teachers’ explicit instruction .

Source: Graham, Liu, Bartlett, et al., 2018; ILA, 2020.

Reading affects writing and writing affects reading. Like the chicken and the egg—which one came first? What’s more important to know is that reading (without writing) and writing (without reading) cannot bring about high-impact literacy: “Elementary and secondary students become better writers by reading as well as by analyzing texts” (ILA, 2020, p. 2, via meta-analyses of scientific studies where writing, reading, or both were taught). Explicit writing instruction and students’ crafting of writing both enhance students’ comprehension and fluency while reading and also their decoding of words in text (Graham & Hebert, 2011). “Creating text for others to read provides students with opportunities to become more thoughtful and engaged when reading” (ILA, 2020, p. 3). Furthermore, while students are writing and practicing new skills, “they try out different forms of writing, apply different strategies and approaches for producing text, and gain fluency with basic writing skills such as handwriting, spelling, and sentence construction” (ILA, 2020, p. 3). We also know that writing is much easier after having discussions with and feedback from the teacher or peers.