International Literacy Association | 2020
RESEARCH ADVISORY
Teaching Writing to
Improve Reading Skills
2
Writing and the teaching
of writing enhance not only
students’ comprehension
and flu ency when reading
but also their recognition
and decoding of words
in text.
R
eading is seen by many as an essential ingredient for
learning to write. American author William Faulkner
advised that the road to good writing is to “read, read,
read.” English poet and critic Samuel Johnson advo-
cated that one must turn over half of a library in order to write
a single book. Novelist Toni Morrison argued that writing re-
quires learning to read your own work critically.
These esteemed authors were not mistaken. Reading con-
tributes to learning how to write. Scientific evidence provides
ample support for this vital contention. Elementary and sec-
ondary students become better writers by reading as well as
by analyzing text. For example, when teachers guide students
in the analysis of mentor texts, students better understand the
purposes and construction of specific genres, including the
attributes of strong writing (e.g., ideation, organization, word
choice, sentence fluency, voice). This knowledge provides stu-
dents with schemas that help them read as well as produce bet-
ter text.
Is this relationship between reading and writing reciprocal?
Does the path to better reading involve becoming a good writer?
The answer to these questions presents a paradox. One does not
have to learn to write in order to learn to read, as learning how
to write or type words in order to read them is not necessary.
Even so, writing and the teaching of writing contributes to stu-
dents’ growth as readers. Collectively, writing and the teaching
of writing enhance not only students’ comprehension and flu-
ency when reading but also their recognition and decoding of
words in text.
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This connection makes writing an essential ingredient in
learning to read. “Write, write, write and teach writing” must
become a more integral part of the equation. We use writing
to communicate, persuade, learn, record information, create
imaginary worlds, express feelings, entertain, heal psychologi-
cal wounds, chronicle experiences, and explore the meaning of
events and situations.
Let Students Write
“Writing is really fun!”
This second grader’s enthusiasm for writing is not misplaced.
The more students write, the better they become at creating
their own text.
2
3
Creating text for others to read provides students with oppor-
tunities to become more thoughtful and engaged when reading.
When students create text, they need to follow the rules of logic
and make their assumptions and premises explicit to their au-
dience. This makes students more aware of these same issues
when reading text.
Writing also allows students to become more comfortable
with the act of writing and to hone their skills as writers. As
students write, they learn by doing. 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.
In the elementary grades, students should write for at least
minutes a day, and they should write for even longer periods
in middle school and high school. Students’ writing in middle
and high school should be across the subject areas and should
include longer and shorter writing tasks (e.g., brief response to
reading or a report on a specific topic synthesis). The effects of
writing are more likely to be maximized if students write for
real purposes and audiences. To master specific forms of writ-
ing, students need multiple opportunities to practice each type
of text.
Let Students Write About What They
Read
Writing about material students have read enhances their
comprehension and retention.
3
Writing can facilitate students’
comprehension of text through the following:
• Fostering explicitness
• Promoting integration of information
• Creating a personal involvement with text
• Encouraging thinking about ideas
• Facilitating new understandings
A range of effective writing activities can be used to improve
students’ comprehension of text, such as the following:
• Writing answers to teacher-posed questions about text
• Creating and answering in writing personal questions
about text
Creating text for others to
read provides students with
oppor tunities to become
more thoughtful and
engaged when reading.
4
• Taking notes about material read
• Creating a brief written summary of the text
• Producing a written story about the material read
• Describing in writing how to apply ideas from text
• Building an argument to support or refute ideas presented
in text
Students can begin using writing as a tool to support com-
prehension and learning as early as first grade. Teachers should
describe the writing activity and its purpose and demonstrate
how to use it. For many writing activities, such as summariza-
tion, students need additional guided practice.
Attention should also be devoted to helping students learn to
use the same writing activity across subjects. For example, stu-
dents typically apply the same structural elements (e.g., claims,
grounds, warrants, supports, rebuttals, qualifications) when
building an argument to support or reject an idea presented in
an English, a science, or a social studies text. Even so, these el-
ements of argumentation do not appear in the same form or to
the same degree in each of these subject areas.
Teach Writing
“I now know how to do it. Someone taught me.”
Reading and writing are complex activities. Both involve mul-
tiple skills and processes. As this comment by a fourth grader
illustrates, students benefit when they are taught how to read
and write.
4
Why does writing instruction lead to better reading (and vice
versa)? Although writing and reading are not identical skills,
they each draw on common sources of knowledge. Readers
draw on their knowledge of words, syntax, usage, and the fea-
tures of text to decode words and comprehend sentence and
longer pieces of text. Writers use this same knowledge to spell
words, craft sentences, and create compositions.
Readers apply what they know about the functions and pur-
poses of written language to help them interpret an author’s
message. Writers draw on this same knowledge to help them
construct their own text for others to read. Readers use their
knowledge of goal setting, accessing information, questioning,
predicting, summarizing, visualizing, and analyzing to make
Although writing and
reading are not identical
skills, they each draw
on common sources of
knowledge.
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sense of what is read. Writers take advantage of this same in-
formation as they orchestrate and construct their writing.
5
In the elementary grades, at least minutes a day should be
devoted to teaching writing. In middle school and high school,
the time devoted to writing varies depending on how frequently
teachers in different subjects use writing as a tool for learning.
The effects of writing instruction on reading depend on how
well writing skills or processes are taught and whether they
enhance one or more of the common sources of knowledge
previously described: words, syntax, usage, and text features;
functions and purposes of written language; and strategic pro-
cesses for creating and interpreting text.
Help Students Master the Process of
Writing
“Writing, working, worrying, wondering, who knows, and help.”
These were the processes a journalism student identified for
writing a newspaper article when asked about the “five Ws and
one H” of journalism. The correct answers to this test item are,
however, who, what, when, where, why, and how. These processes
provide students with a strategy to remind them that they need
to cover all the basic elements when writing a newspaper story.
The process of writing typically involves planning, drafting,
revising, and editing:
• Planning includes setting rhetorical goals as well as gath-
ering and organizing information to meet these objectives.
Plans guide writers as they draft their paper but are best
viewed as temporary guides that may be abandoned, ex-
panded, or reworked during writing.
• Drafting involves using the planned ideas, knowledge of
syntax, orthography, and genre to construct sentences.
When plans are clear and well designed, sentence con-
struction is supported. Typing and writing fluency can af-
fect productivity and quality of the written message.
• Revising focuses on evaluating and modifying plans, text,
or both as needed.
• Editing targets the correction of mechanical, spelling,
grammar, and other types of errors in text.
The effects of writing
instruction on reading
depend on how well writing
skills or processes are
taught and whether they
enhance one or more of
the common sources of
knowledge.
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These processes are recursive and can occur at any point
during writing. Writers often use strategies specific to a par-
ticular form of writing when carrying out writing processes,
such as the “five Ws and one H” strategy described earlier in
this section.
Learning how to navigate the writing process is not some-
thing that happens immediately. It requires a gradual release
of responsibility from teacher to students. When learning how
to plan, draft, revise, and edit their work, students need to see
teachers model these processes. Modeling by thinking out loud
makes these processes visible and audible to students. Then,
as students practice how to apply these processes in whole
group and small groups with guided support, students become
equipped with the necessary knowledge to plan, draft, revise,
and edit text effectively.
When students are taught how to engage in the process of
writing, their compositions become longer, full, and qualita-
tively better.
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Such instruction helps students develop pro-
ficiency in the basic thinking processes underlying writing,
including the following:
• Setting goals
• Accessing, organizing, and summarizing information
• Predicting what readers need to know
• Questioning, analyzing, evaluating, and making decisions
• Modifying plans and ideas as needed
Teaching students specific strategies for composing a partic-
ular type of writing has the added benefit of providing them
with information about the purposes and features of such text:
• Who are the main characters?
• What are their motivations?
• Where does the story take place?
• When does the story occur?
• What do the main characters want?
• What happens as they try to achieve their objectives?
• How does the story end?
• How do the main characters react to these events?
When students are taught
how to engage in the
process of writing,
their compositions
become longer, full, and
qualita tively better.
7
Strategies such as these are taught by explaining and discussing
their purposes, modeling how to use them, providing guided prac-
tice in their application, and helping students learn to apply them
in a thoughtful and flexible manner.
To make sense of what is read, students rely on many of the same
mental operations applied when writing, including setting goals
for reading, accessing information from memory, summarizing
material in text, and analyzing, evaluating, and rethinking what
is read.
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Make Sure Students Spell Correctly
“Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at
Napoleon’s flanks.”
Misspellings like the one in this brief description of Napoleon’s
Spanish Wars can lead readers to question the accuracy of the
message as well as the wisdom of the writer. The impact of spell-
ing extends beyond a writer’s audience and involves the writer as
well. Having to think about how to spell a word when writing can
lead students to forget ideas held in memory and not yet commit-
ted to paper. It can also lead students to choose a different word
that they already know how to spell, restricting word choice in stu-
dents’ writing.
Teaching students how to spell not only makes them better
spellers but also enhances multiple reading skills.
8
Phonological
awareness is improved when young students study how a word is
spelled. The examination of how sounds and letters fit together
in spelling words provides cues about the phonemic structure of
words to be read.
Phonics skills are strengthened when students are taught that
particular sounds stand for specific letters. This increases stu-
dents’ knowledge about the alphabetic principles involved in read-
ing words. Word reading becomes more accurate and fluent when
students learn how to spell individual words. This additional prac-
tice with spelling words makes it easier to recognize them when
reading. These gains in word reading and fluency lead to improved
comprehension of text.
Contemporary spelling instruction includes two fundamental
practices that positively impact students’ reading and spelling:
(a) teaching students how to spell words or spelling patterns they
frequently use when writing and encounter when reading and (b)
extending students’ understanding of the spelling system through
The impact of spell ing
extends beyond a writer’s
audience and involves the
writer as well.
8
word study. Instructional procedures such as word sorting (an-
alyzing spelling words to determine their spelling pattern; e.g.,
map and make) and word building (building as many words as
possible from a specific spelling pattern such as at) strengthen
students’ knowledge of spelling and reading.
Show Students How to Turn Ideas Into
Sentences
“Grammar is what the teachers learn us.”
Students spend much of their writing time converting ideas into
sentences that should be grammatically correct, make sense,
and use the right words to convey a their intended meanings.
As with spelling, sentence mishaps like the one in this opening
quote color readers’ perceptions of the message and the acu-
men of the writer.
Constructing written sentences is a complex process involv-
ing decisions about word choice, syntax, textual connections,
clarity, and rhythm. A limited knowledge about how to con-
struct written sentences diminishes students’ success in trans-
lating their thoughts into text and imposes a heavy mental load
on students, as they are still developing voluntary control over
written sentence production processes. Teaching students how
to construct written sentences reduces grammatical miscues,
increases sentence complexity, and results in qualitatively bet-
ter text.
Teaching students how to write more complex sentences has
an additional benefit: Students become more fluent readers.
As students practice producing specific types of written sen-
tences, they gain familiarity and facility with the syntactical
structures underlying each of them. This increased recognition
of sentence patterns allows students to process information in
similar sentences they are reading more quickly.
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Written sentence construction can be effectively taught
using sentence combining. With this approach, the teacher
models how to combine two or more simple sentences into a
single complex sentence. This can include providing students
with cues about which words should be used to combine sen-
tences (e.g., although) and can further involve highlighting the
words in the sentences that must be retained when creating a
new sentence from them. Students practice combining simple
Teaching students how
to write more complex
sentences has an additional
benefit: Students become
more fluent readers.
9
sentences into the more complex pattern until they can do this
correctly and easily. They should be encouraged to use newly
mastered sentence construction skills when writing and revis-
ing text.
Teach Reading and Writing Together
“I learned early in life that you can be a reader or writer. I de-
cided to be a writer.”
This missive from Erskine Caldwell, an American novelist, is
provocative but not correct. Students can become good writ-
ers as well as good readers. When reading and writing receive
equal emphasis in literacy instruction, students become better
readers and writers.
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They become more adept at decoding
and understanding individual words and comprehending text.
Further, they write qualitatively better text that is longer and
contains fewer errors.
Do Reading and Writing Always Need
to Be Tied Together?
The answer to this question is no. Students need time just to
read. They do not need to write about everything they read. In
fact, this would take much of the joy out of reading, making it
and writing a chore.
Students also need time just to write. Writing activities such
as creating a story or personal narrative, expressing feelings,
chronicling experiences, exploring the meaning of experiences
and events, and using writing as a tool for learning do not need
to be preceded by reading.
There are many effective practices for teaching writing that
need to be part of a strong literacy program, but they do not
need to be tied directly to the teaching of reading. This includes
establishing specific goals for students’ writing, encouraging
students to work together when composing, providing feed-
back on students’ papers, teaching handwriting and keyboard-
ing skills, engaging students in prewriting activities, and using
digital and multimodal tools for writing.
Likewise, not all reading practices need to be tied directly
to the teaching of writing. For instance, effective practices for
promoting reading fluency involve reading and not writing.
Although writing can be used to promote students’ thinking
When reading and writing
receive equal emphasis
in literacy instruction,
students become better
readers and writers.
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about material they are reading, so can oral discussion and
other modes of expression such as drawing, music, or physical
movement.
Overall, writing and reading share many similarities but
are not identical. Reading and reading instruction can im-
prove writing and writing and writing instruction can improve
reading. The goal is to provide time for their instruction, op-
portunities for integration, and authentic purposes for their
application.
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NOTES
1
The recommended instructional procedures for
promoting reading and writing were drawn from
meta-analyses of scientific studies where writ-
ing, reading, or both were taught.
2
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (). Writing to read:
A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writ-
ing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational
Review, 81(), –.
3
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (). Writing to read:
A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writ-
ing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational
Review, 81(), –.
4
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (). Writing to read:
A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writ-
ing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational
Review, 81(), –; Graham, S., McKeown, D.,
Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K.R. (). A meta-analysis
of writing instruction for students in the elemen-
tary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology,
104(4), –.
5
Graham, S., Liu, X., Bartlett, B., Ng, C., Harris,
K.R., Aitken, A.,…Talukdar, J. (). Reading for
writing: A meta-analysis of the impact of reading
interventions on writing. Review of Educational
Research, 88(), –.
6
Graham, S., McKeown, D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris,
K.R. (). A meta-analysis of writing instruction
for students in the elementary grades. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 104(), –.
7
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (). Writing to read:
A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writ-
ing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational
Review, 81(), –.
8
Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (). Does spelling
instruction make students better spellers, read-
ers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading
and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2
(),
–.
9
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (). Writing to read:
A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writ-
ing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational
Review, 81(), –.
10
Graham, S., Liu, X., Aitken, A., Ng, C., Bartlett, B.,
Harris, K.R., & Holzapfel, J. (). Effectiveness
of literacy programs balancing reading and
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Research Quarterly, 53(), –.
13
International Literacy Association Task Force on Writing
Chair
Zoi A. Traga Philippakos, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Principal Authors
Zoi A. Traga Philippakos, Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Steve Graham, Mary Emily Warner Professor, Arizona State University
Contributing Members
Lori Assaf, Texas State University
Sarah W. Beck, New York University
Erin FitzPatrick, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charles A. MacArthur, University of Delaware
Emily Machado, University of Washington
Kristen Pennycuff Trent, Tennessee Tech
Kathy N. Headley, Clemson University, President and Board Liaison, International Literacy Association
Bernadette Dwyer, Dublin City University, Ireland, Immediate Past President, International Literacy Association
Stephen Peters, Laurens County School District 55, Vice President, International Literacy Association
Marcie Craig Post, Executive Director, International Literacy Association
© 2020 International Literacy Association | No. 9462
This research advisory is available in PDF form for free download through the International Literacy Association’s website:
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Suggested APA Reference
International Literacy Association. (2020). Teaching writing to improve reading skills [Research advisory]. Newark, DE: Author.
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