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Toward a Composing Model of Reading
Abstract
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 21-24) Supported in part by the National Institute of Education under contract no. NIE 400-81-0030
... Those candidates who had an explicit declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge about the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in reading and writing tasks performed better than their peers who lacked this explicit knowledge. As a result of the extensive research in the area, there are several models describing the strategy use of students in reading and reading-into-writing tasks (Hayes & Flower, 1981;Olson, 2003;Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991;Tierney & Pearson, 1983;Tompkins, 1997). Despite the minor differences in these taxonomies, they all seem to agree that experienced and successful readers and writers use metacognitive strategies consciously, manipulate them freely, and apply them recursively instead of using them in a fixed order. ...
... In a later study, Olson and Land (2007) claim that professional readers are successful because of their capability to access and confidently apply a wide variety of strategies, while also going back and forth between these strategies instead of insisting on a strict order of application (Olson & Land, 2007). Olson's taxonomy (2003) is based on the works of Hayes and Flower (1981), Paris et al. (1991), Tierney and Pearson (1983), and Tompkins (1997), and it gives a very detailed inventory of reading strategies. For this reason, the coding scheme used for data analysis in the present research was also built based on this taxonomy. ...
Guided summarization skills are widely used in tertiary education. Despite the more than five decades of research on summarization, information available about the reading sub-skills necessary for successful guided summary writing is still sparse. The aim of this article is to remedy this deficiency by exploring how reading strategies are used by English major BA students who have received explicit training in reading strategies and guided summary writing. Based on the reading strategies the participants applied, the analysis attempts to identify possible underlying reading sub-skills. The findings indicate that those students who can successfully solve a guided summary writing task use a variety of reading strategies and apply them very consciously. The reading sub-skills mostly involved in guided summary writing were skimming, search reading, scanning, and careful reading. The results suggest that in order to enhance students’ reading abilities, explicit instruction of reading strategies is needed.
... The attention to reading comprehension, which became a major interdisciplinary effort in the 1970s, helped facilitate connections with writing, since comprehension was being viewed as the making, instead of the reception, of meaning. As explained by Tierney and Pearson (1983), the emphasis on comprehension as a constructive process made theoretical links with writing more apparent: The two could no longer be viewed as simple inverses with one strictly generative and the other strictly receptive. ...
Writing-reading relations, which are at the core of written communication, deserve their central role in writing research. This chapter reviews research into four major ways in which writing and reading are connected. For the “constructing meaning connection,” the review focuses on cognitive research into reading and writing, which since the 1970s has examined the constructive nature of both processes and has countered portrayal of reading as the inverse of writing, or vice versa. For the “intertextual connection,” attention is on studies into transformations that are made when writers compose their own texts from one source text, as in summarizing, translating, or critiquing, as well as when they perform discourse synthesis from multiple extant texts. For the “knowledge resources connection,” emphasis is on relations between reading and writing abilities and on the acquisition of genre knowledge. And, for the “social and cultural connection,” the review addresses research into audience influence on writing, citations of other authors, collaborative writing, response to writing, and author-oriented reading. The international bodies of work reviewed in the chapter, which come from different disciplines and are associated with different traditions and epistemologies, can be viewed as an ongoing collaborative quest to understand these four kinds of relations that are so important in communication through written language.
... En este sentido, la dimensión cognitiva de la lectura y la escritura juega un rol central (Kern, 2009). De hecho, la producción y comprensión se pueden considerar actos de construcción de significado en los que los individuos hacen conexiones entre los elementos textuales y su conocimiento previo (Tierney & Pearson, 1983). A nuestro entender, esta perspectiva contempla también, tácitamente, la dimensión metacognitiva de la alfabetización que incluye procesos de planificación, automonitoreo y autoevaluación tanto en la lectura como en la escritura, y la dimensión social que ofrece la posibilidad de la cooperación durante los procesos cognitivos a través del andamiaje del docente y la retroalimentación de los pares. ...
... Writing is a learned skill that extends beyond simple message transmission, requiring mastery of various stages. Authors [8] argue that writing is a recursive process involving continuous interaction between the writer's inner thoughts and audience expectations. The writing process consists of several key stages: planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring, each crucial for effective communication. ...
Students must learn to write to succeed in school, work, and personal life. This essential skill does not develop naturally and requires sufficient practice and instruction. One of the core goals of education is to teach students to use writing effectively and adaptively. However, many schools worldwide fail to meet this goal, leaving many students without the writing skills necessary for success in today's society. A major contributing factor is the lack of appropriate writing instruction for students. This chapter explores the development of students' writing skills, mainly focusing on grammatical units, through peer and teacher correction strategies. It also identifies key barriers to effective writing instruction, such as limited instructional time, insufficient teacher preparation, and the influence of national, state, district, and school policies, along with historical, social, cultural, and political factors. The chapter offers insights into addressing these obstacles and transforming classroom writing practices globally. By increasing the knowledge of relevant stakeholders about writing, it aims to foster a vision for improving writing instruction at the policy, school, and classroom levels through peer and teacher correction strategies. Specific recommendations help school administrators, teachers, and students realise these changes.
... Considering higher education aims to develop students into professional writers within their disciplines, instructors should deem text planning an essential skill when assigning written tasks. Researchers have long recognized planning as a strategy that fosters goal setting and the generation of new ideas via brainstorming (Tierney & Pearson, 1983). Moreover, planning offers writers a moment to pause and make decisions about language use and structure, considering the intended audience of their texts (McDonald & Salomone, 2012;Ramírez Balderas & Guillén Cuamatzi, 2018). ...
The purpose of this article is to characterize how writing is taught and integrated within an undergraduate program in Communication Studies at a private research university in Colombia. The relevance of this task is connected to the crucial role that writing plays in college as a facilitator for learning that enables students to think and communicate as experts in their disciplines (Ávila Reyes et al., 2021; Navarro et al., 2022; Thompson et al., 2021). To carry out this project, all faculty members were interviewed and asked to share the materials they use to support and assess student writing; this information was later contrasted with the perception of a group of alums that were polled. The results gathered provide an insightful perspective on how writing teaching and learning occur in an undergraduate program. This characterization aims to align with faculty and alums expectations regarding the role of writing within their discipline, shedding light on the complexities of teaching, learning, and applying writing skills in both academic and professional contexts.
... The strong theoretical basis for the underlying cognitive similarities in reading and writing processes (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000;Shanahan, 2016;Tierney & Pearson, 1983;Tierney & Shanahan, 1991) is also supported by a growing body of evidence that integrating reading and writing instruction improves comprehension, writing transfer, and content knowledge (Graham & Hebert, 2011;Graham et al., 2018;also Applebee, 2008;Lockhart & Soliday, 2016;Wiley & Voss, 1999). ...
Teachers, researchers, and curriculum specialists are giving increased attention to the relationship between reading and writing. Although researchers have found supporting evidence for a moderate relationship between reading and writing, this relationship may be even stronger in classrooms that utilize educational approaches to teaching and learning that integrally tie reading to writing. Vygotsky's socio- historical theory of education fosters these connections both in terms of shared knowledge and processes. Based on this theory, quality literature can serve as a powerful tool in guiding students as they develop greater understanding and skill at writing and authoring. It provides students with the opportunity to think and respond to literature that is more complex in terms of writing style and other characteristics than the students are currently generating. Several teaching strategies which use quality literature to facilitate writing and authoring are presented. Teacher resources and sample text sets are also provided.
In this study, we report findings from a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial designed to replicate and scale up an existing successful professional development program that uses a cognitive strategies approach to text-based argument writing. The Pathway to Academic Success Project worked with partner districts recruited by eight sites affiliated with the National Writing Project in seven states. Informed by a wide body of research on the efficacy of cognitive strategy instruction, the intervention aimed to help culturally and linguistically diverse students in low-socioeconomic status, high needs middle and high schools to improve their argument writing. The study sample includes 4,136 students (n = 2,232 treatment; n = 1,904 control) in Grades 7–11 in the classes of 174 teachers (n = 86 treatment; n = 88 control) in 46 schools. Treatment teachers participated in 28 hr of training and learned how to apply cognitive strategies to help students understand, interpret, and write argument essays about complex texts. Despite disruptions to program implementation during the pandemic, multilevel models revealed that the intervention had a significant positive effect on student writing quality (d = 0.13), content (d = 0.12), structure (d = 0.14), stance (d = 0.12), conventions (d = 0.11), and productivity (d = 0.23). The intervention did not have differential impacts on students’ writing quality for demographic subgroups, underscoring the intervention’s potential to provide equitable learning opportunities for all participants.
Long recognized as a significant integrated task in major English proficiency tests, reading-to-write tasks have been researched from dimensions mainly concerning its testing validity. A further exploration into the process is essential for a better understanding of the construct and instructions of the integrated task in different cultural and educational contexts. The present study investigated the process of a response writing task by collecting data of interviews and reflective journals from 36 Chinese learners. These data were analyzed qualitatively to identify the main phases and sub-stages occurring in the reading-to-write process. The results disclosed three main phases: pre-reading, reading for writing, and writing from reading. Besides, among a set of sub-stages, planning and rereading recurred and were embedded with each other in the main phases, and therefore, bridged reading and writing. The purposes of the occurrence of the main phases and recurring sub-stages presented the dynamic agency that learners exercise. Accordingly, a new model was constructed to account for the nuanced processes as well as their connection and interaction in a reading-to-write task, providing new insight into the recursive and reciprocal nature of reading-to-write tasks for learners in the Chinese context and furthermore, into the construct of integrated academic tasks. Pedagogical suggestions for L2 learners were provided in the end.
This experimental research study was conducted to determine the effects of literature circles on 2nd year baccalaureate students’ reading comprehension skills. The sample consisted of two classes of second year baccalaureate Arts stream students studying at the same public high school. The classes which were chosen for either the experimental and control group were pretested using a reading comprehension text test. The treatment lasted for a period of eight weeks. After the experiment, participants were then post-tested using the same test scale. Students who underwent the treatment (literature circles) were randomly assigned to groups of seven or eight students, and were given a role to assume and a short story to read. After reading the story independently and completing their role sheets, students discussed the story within their small groups. The data collected were subjected to descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. The results of the study indicated that there was a positive effect of literature circles on reading comprehension skills (summarizing, inferencing, and paraphrasing); the experimental group gained higher scores on the short answer-test compared to the control group. The results were interpreted using the t-test for independent samples. The t-test revealed that the difference between students who were exposed to the use of literature circles and those who were taught in the ordinary way was significant.
Thirty physical education students and 30 music education students read a passage that could be given either a prison break or a wrestling interpretation, and another passage that could be understood in terms of an evening of card playing or a rehearsal session of a woodwind ensemble. Scores on disambiguating multiple choice tests and theme-revealing disambiguations and intrusions in free recall showed striking relationships to the subject’s background. These results indicate that high-level schemata provide the interpretative framework for comprehending discourse. The fact that most subjects gave each passage one distinct interpretation or another and reported being unaware of other perspectives while reading suggest that schemata can cause a person to see a message in a certain way, without even considering alternative interpretations.
Unfamiliar information is often introduced to readers through analogy. The effect of this practice was investigated by examining three possible explanations of analogy's function: to activate specific analogous knowledge, to activate generally related knowledge, or to supply information which readers use to fashion their own comparisons. American high school students attempted to learn about the game of cricket from prose materials which were variously augmented with analogies drawn from the game of baseball. The students subsequently read and recalled newspaper accounts of cricket matches and made predictions and discriminations about open-ended cricket match situations. Across seven different dependent measures subjected to regression analysis, the consistent finding was that two factors--student prior knowledge about sports and baseball, and the provision of instructional texts about either baseball or cricket--explained more variance than any other factor or combinations of factors. In some instances, the more specific provision of analogies proved beneficial, especially for groups with differing levels of prior knowledge, or in conjunction with an informational text about baseball. These data were interpreted as providing strong support for a general knowledge activation hypothesis and modest support for a specific knowledge activation hypothesis, both of which were interpreted as consistent with recently emerging schema theoretic notions./// [French] On introduit souvent aux lecteurs des informations peu familières à travers l'analogie. On a étudié l'effet de cette pratique en examinant trois explications possibles de la fonction de l'analogie: activer la connaissance analogue spécifique, activer la connaissance habituellement rapportée, ou fournir des informations que les lecteurs utilisent pour élaborer leurs propres comparaisons. Les lycéens américains essayent d'apprendre le jeu de cricket à partir de documents en prose qui ont été complétés de manière variée par des analogies provemant du jeu de baseball. Les étudiants subséquemment ont lu et se souviennent d'articles de journaux concernant les matchs de cricket et ont fait des prédictions et des discriminations dans des situations de match de cricket non programmé. A travers sept mesures dépendantes différentes sujettes à des analyses de régression, la découverte consistante a eu pour résultat deux facteurs - la connaissance préalable des étudiants concernant les sports et le baseball, et la fourniture de textes d'instruction de baseball ou de cricket - qui ont expliqué plus de variante que n'importe quels autres facteurs ou combinaisons de facteurs. Dans certains cas, la fourniture plus spécifique d'analogies s'est avérée être bénéfique, surtout pour les groupes dont les niveaux de connaissances préalables différaient, ou en conjonction avec un texte non formel concernant le baseball. On a interprété ces données comme étant un grand support pour une hypothèse d'activation de connaissance générale et un faible support pour une hypothèse d'activation de connaissance spécifique, ces deux ont été interprétées comme étant consistantes avec des notions théoriques de schéma se dégageant récemment./// [Spanish] Con frecuencia, lectores son introducidos a información desconocida por medio de analogía. Se investigaron los efectos de este método, examinando 3 posibles razones de la función de analogía: el activar conocimientos concretos analógicos, el activar conocimientos generales relacionados, o contribuir información que lectores utilizan para realizar sus propias comparaciones. Alumnos estadounidenses de secundaria trataron de aprender el juego de criquet por medio de descripciones en prosa, aumentados con analogías del juego de béisbol. Los alumnos posteriormente leyeron y repasaron descripciones de juegos de criquet en artículos de periódicos e hicieron predicciones y análisis de modelos de competición del juego de criquet en progreso. A través de 7 diferentes medidas dependientes sometidas a análisis de regresión, el resultado consistente fue que 2 factores--el previo conocimiento del alumno de deportes y del béisbol, y la inclusión del tema del béisbol o criquet en los textos de instrucción--revelaron más variaciones que ningún otro factor o combinación de factores. En algunos casos, la inclusión de analogías concretas demostró ser de beneficio, especialmente para grupos con diferentes niveles de conocimiento previo, o en conjunción con un texto de referencia sobre el béisbol. Estos datos se interpretaron de respaldar firmemente una hipótesis de activación de conocimientos generales y de dar cierto apoyo a una hipótesis de activación de conocimientos concretos, ambos interpretados de ser nociones teóricas consistentes con el "schema" (sistema conceptual) emergiendo recientemente.