Reading into writing as a separate skill

This section considers whether reading into writing ability reflects a combination of reading skill and writing skill or whether it represents a third, separate skill. Consideration of this matter affects the approach that the researcher adopts when conducting research.

Some researchers have suggested that reading and writing share cognitive processes and both rely, at least in part, on the same knowledge; therefore, better readers make better writers. For example, Stotsky (1983) investigated the correlation between reading and writing ability in participants’ first language and concluded that ‘better writers tend to be better readers… better writers read more than poor writers and better readers tend to write with greater syntactic maturity than poor readers.’ Stotsky (1983:636)

Whilst these findings could be interpreted as evidence of shared knowledge and processing they are far from conclusive. Stotsky’s (ibid.) review of research seemed to suggest that development in one skill could be transferred to the other but only when students were directed to reflect on the shared knowledge and processes; the transfer from read to writing (or vice versa) could not be said to be automatic.

Whilst others have endorsed the idea of shared processes. Spivey and King (1989:p7) concluded that…

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general reading ability and success at synthesizing overlap to a great extent, and suggest that success at synthesis may be related to cognitive factors commonly associated with comprehension, such as sensitivity to text structure

Fitzgerald and Shanahan’s (2000:p40) review of reading-writing relations also suggests that readers and writers make use of considerable amounts of shared knowledge which they classified as follows grouped into the following categories:

Categories of Knowledge That Readers and Writers Use

Metaknowledge (Pragmatics)

Domain knowledge about substance and content (prior knowledge, content knowledge gained while reading and writing)

Knowledge about universal text attributes

Procedural knowledge and skill to negotiate reading and writing

Fitzgerald and Shanahan (ibid) conclude that:

Various forms of research have supported the theoretical contention that reading and writing rely on analogous mental processes and isomorphic knowledge. However, the total amount of shared variance among a number of reading and writing indicators has never been documented to be more than about .50. Consequently, it is also important to acknowledge the separability of reading and writing.

The concept of shared or common processes has been supported by other studies. Parodi (2007) conducted tests to assess the extent to which microstructural, macro structural and super structural levels of comprehension and production rely on shared processes and shared knowledge-based strategies. Parodi concluded that his study supplied quantitative data to support the hypothesis of shared basic strategies for reading and writing. However, he went on to suggest that more research of a qualitative nature needs to be conducted to further define the extent and nature of the commonality.

Although the literature above suggests that reading and writing share many basic processes several studies contest the assumption that the skill of reading into writing is simply

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an amalgamation of an individual’s reading skill and an individual’s writing skill. Instead they propose that reading into writing is a skill in its own right.

In her 2008 study Asencion-Delaney ‘explored the extent to which the reading-to- write construct is the sum of one’s reading ability and writing abilities or an independent construct’ (2008:140). Asencion-Delaney concluded that reading-to-write was a unique ability only weakly related to reading comprehension skill and completely separate from the ability to write without referring to source material.

Asencion-Delaney’s conclusion accords with the work of Cumming, Kantor, Baba, Erdosy, Eouanzoui and James (2005) who found that there were significant differences between texts written for independent writing tasks and reading to write tasks. Cumming et al.’s study compared the writing produced by 36 L2 candidates when writing independent essay tasks, reading into writing tasks and writing in response to a listening. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the discourse that examinees wrote for the independent essays and the integrated reading-writing or listening-writing tasks in respect to:

• Lexical sophistication (in terms of word length and different words produced), • Syntactic complexity (in terms of words per T-unit and clauses per T-unit), • Argument structure (in terms of propositions, claims, data, warrants, and oppositions),

• Voice in source evidence (in terms of specifying the self or other sources as evidence), and

• Message in source evidence (in terms of proportions of declarations, paraphrases, and summaries).

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Examinees tended, in the integrated tasks compared to the independent essay, to write briefer compositions, to use longer words, to use a wider range of words, to write longer clauses and more clauses, to write less argumentatively oriented texts, to indicate sources of information other than oneself, and to paraphrase, repeat verbatim, or summarize source information more than to make declarations based on personal knowledge.

It is evident that theories based on shared processes have their failings, not least because communicative and functional aspects / influences are not taken into account sufficiently and these may play a strong role in reading into writing. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that whilst reading and writing may share some basic processes these explanations lack a level of sophistication that helpfully distinguishes between writing without reference to a source and reading into writing. This conclusion inevitably leads us to ask how reading into writing can be defined in terms of cognitive processes.