Reading and writing development begin in early childhood and are linked in daily function and in classroom activities from kindergarten or prekindergarten through high school and beyond. There is little research addressing that relationship, or when and how best to integrate these two critical areas instructionally. The report presents an experts…

Dialogue journals are recommended in this digest for teachers who want to involve every student in a literacy practice that unites reading and writing and encourages thinking and reflection. The digest first explains that dialogue journals are useful because they use writing as a genuine means of communication between student and teacher. Dialogue…

Describes a study of the use of an integrated communication arts instructional strategy to facilitate comprehension in a high school history course indicating that subjects who wrote following brainstorming activities and text readings generated higher quality ideas and synthesized acquired information better than the groups that did not write.…

Examines the tasks of authors, of readers, and of teachers in assisting readers to make use of prior information as they read. (FL)

Reviews research on effective strategies for teaching reading comprehension; written composition of narrative and expository text; and strategies for integrating reading and writing. Provides a set of teaching guidelines after each research review. Argues for teaching reading and writing as connected processes that have similar structures. (RS)

Grounded in schema and generative theories, this research suggests a theoretical framework and a task-specific procedure for integrating reading and writing. Fourth grade students were given a text-related generative writing task and reading recall test. Results support the notion of using writing as an orienting task prior to reading. (DST)

This yearbook contains 59 selected articles from the National Reading Conference for 1988 which represent a diversity of topics explored through a variety of research paradigms designed to increase understanding of the critical issues of language and literacy. Included in the collection are "Political and Economic Dimensions of Literacy:…

A study compared the teaching methods of basal readers to writing/reading integration as they effect reading comprehension. Forty fourth-grade students from an urban area of New England completed the Reading Comprehension Subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) for grade 3 as a pretest. A control group of 20 students were…

Noting that role playing and writing as prereading activities have the potential to improve reading comprehension, a study tested the efficacy of a role playing method for improving reading comprehension. Students in three college developmental reading classes were asked to assume the role of author of a selection that they were about to read and…

In response to teachers' requests for specific information about implementing the curriculum in the Expository Writing Program (EWP), this manual presents the instructional methods and materials used during the Teaching Expository Reading and Writing Project. First, the lines of research that formed the basis for the instructional program are…

A study examined whether writing instruction focusing on organizational patterns has a significant effect on reading comprehension. Writing samples were obtained from 18 second graders, nine of whom received no instruction, while the other nine received instruction on the purpose and use of the topic sentence, adding details to the topic, and…

Reflecting current themes that researchers, by their selective attention, have indicated are important in the field of reading/language processing and instruction, this yearbook presents a collection of 51 selected research articles from the National Reading Conference for 1983. Included are the following articles, listed with their authors: (1)…

Explains the details of a method of teaching text structure that proved successful in improving both reading comprehension and summary writing of fifth graders. Reports that students quickly learned how to attend to and remember main ideas from problem-solution passages in their textbooks and how to write summaries. (MG)

This digest is intended to help and inform those teachers who are contemplating using children's literature to teach reading, and provides a brief review of material in the ERIC database on literature-based reading instruction. The digest includes sections on recent research, basic resources, assessing literature based reading, diverse methods…

Noting that both comprehension and decoding are used by effective readers and that both processes should be taught, this concept paper focuses on effective strategies for reading instruction. Following an introduction, the first section focuses on the conclusions drawn about word identification by reading researchers. Subsections include…