Effective literacy needs to foster growth in both reading and writing.
To have an effective literacy curriculum, reading and writing need to be
taught in an integrated manner, which can foster readers to write well and
writers to read well. Teachers need
to provide daily integration of reading and writing instruction so that students
will have the opportunity to read literature and write in response to their
reading. The introduction to
challenging texts will enhance students' interest in literature and students
will read more critically and responsively and develop an understanding of how
writers write which will impact their writing skills.
Through reading different forms of literature, students gain an
understanding of how texts are structured and the literature provides examples
of these structures, techniques, and genres.
The more a reader interacts with the text, the better the skills of the
writer becomes. Teachers need to
provide students opportunities to focus on texts in more depth and detail and
give ample time for rereading and writing.
By combining reading and writing together in the curriculum it will lead
to different learning and thinking outcomes which will foster better attitudes
towards learning. Reading empowers
students' writing.
Since research revealed important
implications for the teaching of reading and writing together, then reading and
writing should be integrated in the curriculum to maximize the possibility of
using information acquired from both reading and writing.
The challenge for educational programs is to provide students with
opportunities to gain knowledge through the connection of reading and writing.
More research in the reading/writing connection is needed especially
across instructional disciplines and it must consider the implications of
instructional methodology.
Future research should address the
differences in the uses of reading and writing as a function of topic, task, and
content. Studies are needed that
focus on the many functions of reading and writing and focus on the
metacognitive awareness of the reading-writing connection.
If the effect of reading upon writing is to be demonstrated, then other
related studies need to be conducted to contribute to the support of the
relationship of reading/writing.