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Nichole Buchanan

Professor Jan Rieman

English 1103

December 2, 2010

The Interconnection of Reading and Writing

The bandage was wound around the wound. The soldier decided to desert his

dessert in the desert. The farm was used to produce produce. I’m sure you can imagine

one who is learning English as a foreign language might experience severe confusion as

they attempt to make sense of those tricky sentences. Even to a native English speaker

those sentences would be mind-boggling at first, but to someone who is not as fluent in

the language, associating the correct meaning with the correct form of the word would be

particularly difficult. The English language contains well over 200,000 words. It is not

easy to say the exact number of terms and absolutely impossible to find a dictionary

containing every single word, as new words are endlessly added and old words flushed

out of use. English is a very complex language; it is actually considered one the most

challenging languages to learn because of the heavy use of slang words and the

considerable amount of words with multiple, often polar opposite meanings. Depending

on the context, a word could possibly function as multiple grammatical parts of speech.

These few cases do not even begin to justify the complexity of the English language.

How does one even begin to learn this perplexing language? Is there a connection

between the skills of reading and writing? If so, how does this connection affect the

teaching of English? My curiosity of a possible reading-writing connection and whether it

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aids in the process of learning English as a foreign language influenced me to conduct

further research in hopes to find answers.

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course instructors use a variety of

strategies to introduce the language to their students. Observing the teaching and

development of reading and writing in an EFL course is often times done by studying the

two subjects separately. What most people fail to notice is the strong correlation between

the processes. Giovanni Parodi, head of the Postgraduate School of Linguistics at the

Pontificial Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile states that, “no attempt at linking

comprehension and written production was made before the 90s. Reading was essentially

conceived as a receptive skill, while writing was a productive one, so they were taught

independently” (227). I disagree with the identification of reading as a receptive skill.

Does the reader of a text absorb the meaning directly, or do they produce their own

meaning of the text through a process of combining what they know with what is in the

text?

Researchers, Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson studied the similarities of

both reading and writing practices to verify that both are productive skills. They began by

breaking each process down into what they call “the essential characteristics of effective

composing: planning, drafting, aligning, revising and monitoring” to demonstrate their

point that “readers also compose meaning (that there is no meaning on the page until a

reader decides there is)” (217). Though these steps are typically done subconsciously by a

reader/writer and are often combined or out of sequence, they are incorporated in both

composing processes. Throughout the article, detailed explanations and examples of each

step for both processes are present and clearly parallel, therefore concluding that reading
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and writing are similar methods of meaning construction (214-217). To restate, reading

and writing are in fact both similar skills and go hand in hand like milk and cookies;

hence the teaching of the two subjects should go hand in hand as well.

Since the idea of investigating the relationship of the processes is rather new,

there have been a limited number of studies. One of which was observed by Seiw-Rong

Wu, an EFL instructor at Taiwan’s National Yang-Ming University. Over the course of

four months, Wu’s freshman EFL students were included in a short-story project. This

project was created to observe the effect of journal writing on students’ cognitive skills

through reading activities. Students were assigned to choose a mystery or detective novel

of their interest and reflect upon what they read through writing in their new language,

English. They kept English journals to practice summarizing, inferring and predicting.

They also kept image notebooks where they practiced descriptive skills by recording

colors connotations and how the author uses them to describe objects and people in the

stories. By letting the students read their book of choice, Wu initiated intrinsic motivation

in hopes that students will be more engaged in their reading and in result have a higher

level of understanding. Goodman refers to reading as “a ‘psycholinguistic guessing

game,’ in which readers actively construct the meaning of the text based on minimum

textual information and the activation of his or her prior knowledge” (3). Again, we

revisit the notion that reading is a process of meaning construction. The students display

this concept through their journal entries where they reflect and make predictions on what

they have read in their novels so far.

The journal entries successfully demonstrated the interrelation of reading and

writing, and how the students used the knowledge they gained from reading to reflect that
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through their writing. This experiment resulted in noticeable improvements in not only

the students’ writing, but also their ability to comprehend, make predictions, and become

aware of their audience when writing their own stories (13). Wu’s study successfully

supports the idea that reading and writing are related and this strategy of teaching EFL

students is significantly effective.

In a similar study, thirty-four engineering students taking EFL courses at two

universities in southern Ontario were observed through a simulated test. In this

experiment, students were given two tasks in two conditions. The first task was one

where the reading passage and writing prompt had a related theme, while in the other task

they were not related. Students were to use the reading passage, along with their own

knowledge to compose written works in English (Esmaeili 604-605). Results showed that

students did significantly better on the task where reading and writing were related.

Esmaeili concluded that, “clearly, participants in this study benefited from a thematic link

between reading and writing tasks in an English language test,” and goes on to say,

“examining participants’ writing strategies, overall, reveals how writing involves reading.

In fact one can hardly view reading and writing as stand-alone skills” (614-615). The

relationship between both skills is apparent, but what exactly is the nature of this

correlation?

Esmaeili introduces Jodi Eisterhold’s, a language professor at Georgia State

University, hypothesis of three possible perspectives: directional, nondirectional, and

bidirectional. However, these are merely theories and are not 100% proven, but one can

create their own opinion from recent studies. I happen to agree with Eisterhold’s theory

of a bidirectional perspective in which reading and writing both function

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interdependently and interactively. The test resulted in favor of this theory in which,

“using reading resources in this context was not a ‘linear act.’ Rather, reading and writing

influenced each other in the condition when they were related thematically and

juxtaposed with each other as tasks on a test” (615). The uses of reading and writing

work together simultaneously and therefore have a bidirectional perspective.

Learning English as a foreign language is not a simple task, but can be tackled if

taught through use of effective strategies. Research has shown that there is in fact an

apparent relation between reading and writing. Reading and writing should not be seen

independently, but as a pair because one cannot exist without the other. Both are

productive skills and depend on one another to construct meaning. Evidently, the strategy

of connecting reading and writing instruction results in great progress among students’

performance in learning English and should be highly encouraged in EFL classrooms.

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Works Cited

Esmaeili, Hameed. "Integrated Reading and Writing Tasks and ESL Students' Reading

and Writing Performance." Canadian Modern Language Review 58.4 (2002):

599-622. ERIC. Web. 2 Nov. 2010.

Parodi, Giovanni. "Reading-Writing Connections: Discourse-Oriented Research."

Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20.3 (2007): 225-250. ERIC.

Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Pearson, P. David and Robert J. Tierney. “Toward a Composing Model of

Reading” Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Wardle and

Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2011. 216-228. Print.

Wu, Siew-Rong. "Journal-Writing in University Pleasure-Reading Activities." (2000):

ERIC. Web. 5 Oct. 2010.