Reading and Writing are Not Connected – Ellen C. Carillo
Reading is Not Essential to Writing Instruction – Julie Myatt Barger
I chose “Reading is Not Essential to Writing Instruction” by Julie Myatt Barger out of pure interest. The other reading choice also seemed interesting, but this one pulled me in for some reason. I have never really considered being a teacher, but I wanted to see Barger’s explanation for the argument.
Summaries
In Reading and Writing are Not Connected, Carillo explains that there is a much better outcome when students are taught to read and write together, verses learning them separate or teachers focusing on one over the other. Carillo gives examples and is backed up with data, and emphasizes what the effect of students not being strong readers creates for society. Reading is Not Essential to Writing Instruction, written by Barger, explains similar ideas from the view of what teachers should be doing. She gives lists of ways for teachers to encourage reading and writing together, and how students benefit from this style of teaching. They also explain that there is a lack of recent research in this topic, and that more current is needed for the argument.
Prompts
#2 – One sentence in Carillo’s Reading and Writing are Not Connected stood out to me. It states, “Without explicit attention to reading and the relationship between reading and writing, students will not have strategies for making sense of new or difficult texts, arguments, images, and ideas they encounter” (42). This resonated with me for a few reasons. In my early education years, I can’t remember having dedicated times for reading after a certain grade. We were still encouraged to read, but rarely had time. I remember specifically my 6th grade teacher (shout out Mrs. Posey) challenging some of us to read Romeo and Juliet. She had a version of the book in “today terms”, and once we finished that we had to read the original version. It was a lot easier to read the original version after reading the common version, and I am thankful that she gave me the opportunity to read it in that way. Then, in 7th grade English, we were assigned Fahrenheit 451. I remember it being one of the hardest books I have ever read, and I felt extremely discouraged that I wasn’t understanding it. I had to have my mom help me, and there were times that she wasn’t totally sure what the review answers were. I do not remember reading this book with the teacher or class, it was basically review the questions and take a test on it. Having the extra resources to help me understand it made reading Shakespeare in 6th grade easier than a book everyone was expected to read in 7th.
What I am trying to get to is that, with the “explicit attention to reading” I was given by my 6th grade teacher, I was more comfortable and confident in reading higher level texts and fully understanding them. Looking back, I was more confident in my writing abilities, and thus more willing to experiment more with new genres, in 6th grade than I was in middle school. Carillo’s statement encapsulates this idea, and extends it to the world around the student. How can you be expected to grasp and understand complex texts, ideas, arguments, etc. if they never learned how to read about them. Maybe that is the reason there are so many people who refuse to see arguments from a deeper and different view than what they initially think, they were never taught to.
#3 – Barger makes an interesting point in saying, “reading is not linear or straightforwardly sequential but instead demands that readers revisit various points in their reading multiple times throughout the process”. This idea has never been brought to my attention, so it made me (ironically) stop and reread the section. I have always been instilled with the idea that good readers are fast readers. I experienced that opposite side of the quote in early elementary school. They would do tests to time how fast you read where we would go into a room with one teacher and read a paragraph out loud. If you did not read the given passage in a certain amount of time without so many errors, you were taken out of the classroom during the reading lesson with a few others and taken to another room and received more one-on-one reading assistance. While the idea is good, it forced me to learn to read faster and more accurately but did not encourage me to understand what I had read. I was eventually reading fast enough that I was able to say in the regular reading class, and then they stopped doing the tests once we got old enough. But, to this day, I still feel insecure about reading too slow, get so anxious when I have to read aloud in class that my throat feels like it is closing and I can’t breath, and in general just have a bad association with reading, which has led to me becoming more of an auditory learner, preferring to listen to other people read and talk. But, hey, at least the school can say they helped me become a better reader, right?
The idea that you can, and should, go back and reread and analyze things from different angles makes me feel better about my reading capabilities. I know that I should take my time, try to figure out the meaning and context, and learn something from reading, but the thought of taking too long keeps coming back sometimes. It is hard to relearn how to read, but I am trying to think of it in a different way now, a way that I can actually enjoy it. Like Barger suggests in this quote (and the entire reading), it is vital to teach young kids to read and write effectively without putting too much focus on one or the other.
Comments