Learning how to write well can make students better readers. Study after study has shown that when children are taught how to write complex sentences and compose different kinds of texts, their ability to read and understand a wider variety of writing improves too.

鈥淲e need to be thinking about reading and writing reciprocally,鈥� said Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech.

Robertson spoke about the research base behind reading-writing connections during an Education Week forum last week, featuring researchers, teachers, and district leaders, about writing and the 鈥渟cience of reading.鈥�

The term refers to a movement toward more explicit, systematic approaches to reading instruction鈥攁pproaches that studies have shown can help students become better readers.

Researchers say that there are connections between evidence-based methods in reading and writing. 69传媒 can also benefit from structure in writing instruction, too鈥攅xplicit teaching about how to construct sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

鈥淲e can use text structure and these graphic organizers to understand our reading process, and we can use this same kind of processes for thinking about how we鈥檙e planning our writing to organize our ideas in a logical way,鈥� Robertson said.

Christina Cover, a high school special education teacher in New York City, discussed in last week鈥檚 forum how she teaches some of these structures. The lessons have helped her students 鈥渢alk about writing in a specific and focused way,鈥� she said.

Read on for practical tips and takeaways from the forum discussion. And check out the video of the panel above to watch the conversation in full.

In the early stages of reading and writing, word chains can help link letters and sounds

In a word chain activity, a teacher says a word that students then break down into phonemes, or individual sounds. The students encode these phonemes into letters, writing down the word. Then, they reverse the process, reading the word aloud by blending the sounds together. Finally, the teacher asks them to change one sound in the word鈥攃at into bat, for example. And the process repeats.

The activity helps link spoken sounds to written letters, but also the processes of reading and writing words, said Robertson. 鈥淲e need to be thinking both [about] linking sound to letter but also letter to sound,鈥� he said.

As students gain fluency with fundamentals, make sure they also have opportunities to apply them

69传媒 need to be fluent with foundational writing skills鈥攍etter formation, handwriting, and often typing. They need direct instruction and repetition, said Robertson. 鈥淏ut we can鈥檛 do that without also giving them ample opportunity to apply it in writing with lots of practice, for actual purposes to create meaning,鈥� he said.

Cover, the special education teacher, teaches at a transfer school鈥攄esigned for students who have dropped out or need to make up credits. Many of her students need support with sentence-level writing, so she has started doing 鈥淢echanics Mondays.鈥� Every week, she teaches a specific sentence-level writing skill: avoiding fragments or run-on sentences, posing questions, using conjunctions and appositives鈥攏oun phrases that modify other nouns.

鈥淚 introduce those topics, talk about why it鈥檚 important to learn them, share definitions, examples. I model, work with the students, and then they go off to practice the skills on their own,鈥� Cover said.

So far, she鈥檚 already noticed some changes in students鈥� shorter writing samples鈥攖here are fewer students ending sentences with prepositions, for example. 鈥淲e hope that will transfer into their longer-form writing,鈥� Cover said.

Writing assignments should be tied to the 鈥榩urpose of learning鈥�

When students are writing about text, different types of assignments bear different dividends for students鈥� reading comprehension, Robertson said. For example, when students summarize, they can recall a wider range of ideas about the text, but their understanding is more superficial. When they do analytic tasks, like comparing arguments, they鈥檙e working with a narrower range of ideas鈥攂ut they鈥檙e exploring them in more depth.

One isn鈥檛 necessarily better than the other, said Robertson. It depends what teachers want students to achieve.

鈥淭he writing tasks that we鈥檙e asking students to do in response to texts have to [align] with the purpose of learning,鈥� he said.