Strategies for making connections
between reading and writing (and oral
language!)
Sao Paolo
April-May 2012
Else Hamayan
ehamayan@gmail.com
“The best way to become a successful
writer is to read good writing,
remember it, and then forget where
you remember it from.”
Gene Fowler
Making the Connection between
Reading and Writing a Routine in the
Classroom
•What writing activities can stem from the text that
students are reading?
•How can I extend this piece of writing so that
students will read it for meaning?
•What oral language do I need to build as a foundation
for what students will be reading and writing?
Key Criteria for Activities that Connect
Reading and Writing
• Activities have to be meaningful and functional
• Activities have to be relevant and interesting to
students
• Activities have to build on oral language
• Activities must also expand students’ language
• Activities have to connect to the
curriculum and to students’ lives
A Strategy for Making the
Connections between Reading and
Writing and Oral Language: Only for
Students in the Very Earliest Stages
of Language Learning
•Very young children
•Older students new to English
Mimic Writing
Mimic Writing
Mimic Writing is copying, but with a
very specific purpose: what is being
copied must serve a clear function
and must somehow be useful to the
student.
Only for the earliest
stage of language
learning, and only
for a very short time!
Examples of tasks that lend themselves to
Mimic Writing
• Labels for the classroom
• Lists for special projects
• El cuaderno de comunicacion: Any messages to be
sent home, or things to remember to do at
home
What NOT to do with Mimic Writing!
•Do not make students copy new words five times each!
•Do not let students copy whole sentences (as in
messages to be sent home) with more than one or
two words they do not know!
•Do not give students copying exercises like copying
words into blanks or fill in blanks in sentences
that are not connected to one another!
•Do not let students copy anything that is not already
meaningful to them!
•Do not let students copy anything that does not have a
real function in the classroom or in the student’s
daily life!
Strategies to Use with Beginning and
Beginning-Intermediate Level Students
The Language Experience Approach
•Start with a shared activity
•Elicit an oral story of what happened during the activity
•The story gets written down
•Extension activities
Pizza
We bought the dough. Make the topping. Sauce. We cut the cheese into
slices……
We bought the dough. We made the topping.
Techniques that Reinforce the Connection between
Reading and Writing in Language Experience Activities
For beginning level students:
•When the students dictate the description of the activity for you to write
down, sound out the words as you are writing them.
•Take advantage of reading aloud by pointing out “strange” spellings of
words; that is, words with low enough symbol-sound correspondence.
•Point to key words as you read the text aloud.
•If students write their own version of the text into their individual
notebooks, encourage them to sound out words as they are writing
them down.
For more advanced students:
•Encourage students to read the text from the perspective of someone who
did not participate in the shared activity: How does it sound? Is it
comprehensible? Are any details missing? This same text can also be
used for assessing writing, using a tool such as the 6 + 1 Trait model
of writing (I will describe later).
Meditated Teaching
•Grabbing the teachable moment
•Being constantly aware of what students need
•Always being one step ahead of the student
•Predicting where the student is headed next
•Taking the perspective of the student
Re-reading
Writing
Oral
language
elicited
from an
activity
Re-writing
Reading
The complete cycle of reading/writing based on oral
language in a Language Experience Text
example
How can you apply what you just heard
about Language Experience Approach
(LEA) to your classroom?
Do you use LEA?
If yes, how?
Is there anything you know you should do
differently? If not, how come?
Do you think you might try LEA now that you’ve thought
about it?
Think of one Language Experience Activity that you
could do.
More strategies
Strategies to Use with Beginning and
Beginning-Intermediate Level Students
The Language Experience Approach
Storytelling Based on Photographs and Videos
Students create text based on a photograph (or a set of
photographs) or a video that they have taken.
By eliciting written text from visuals that belong to the
students, you are affirming their own value as producers of
ideas and text.
Personal photographs that are either labeled or
accompanied by text have a strong allure for others to
read, hence, the strong connection between writing (as
the first step) and reading (the next step).
Strategies to Use with Beginning and
Beginning-Intermediate Level Students
The Language Experience Approach
Storytelling Based on Photographs and Videos
Students as authors
•Students must see themselves as authors who write in the
foreign language and feel comfortable in that role.
•They must be acknowledged by others as authors in that
foreign language.
•Give students plenty of opportunities to write text that is
taken to the point of being produced as a book.
•Books developed by students adhere to high standards and
are treated with the respect that we afford regularly
published books.
Authors chair
A student author is featured in the
classroom
A student gets feedback
The constant flow between
about a particular
reading and writing when students
piece of writing
are engaged in these activities
strengthens students’ language
proficiency in ways that no drill or
grammar or vocabulary exercise
produced by an outsider can.
Cloud, Genesee &
Hamayan, 2009
Modeling using published books
Students use scripts and patterned language to
produce their own writing
Students write their own versions of a book they have
read
Students write a story they have read from the
perspective of one of the characters
Students write about what happened the following
day (after the published story ends)
Students write their own cookbook or travel guide
based on all the books they have read that have to do
with food or places
Strategies to Use with Beginning and
Beginning-Intermediate Level Students
The Language Experience Approach
Storytelling Based on Photographs and Videos
Students as authors
Dialogue Journals: A written conversation that takes
place over time between you (the teacher) and the
student. The purpose of this on-going conversation is
to find out things about the other person, NOT to
correct language.
Dialogue Journals
•For your first prompt: Ask the student about something that you
know he or she is passionate about.
•Modulate your language so that it is at or just beyond the
student’s proficiency level.
•Avoid generalizations such as “Very interesting”; rather,
individualize your response to what the student has written.
•Make your responses personal—tell a story from when you were a
child or adolescent that relates to the conversation you are having.
•If you feel the student needs prompting, ask a question, but avoid
asking too many questions. It is more important for the students
to ask you questions because then they will want to read your
response.
•Have fun “talking” to your students; this is a great opportunity to
get to know them.
Do you use Dialogue Journals?
Would you use Dialogue Journals?
What do you see as the biggest challenge with
Dialogue Journals?
What are some possible benefits for YOUR
students?
1. Think of an activity that you often do in your classroom
that connects reading and writing.
2. Share it with a neighbor.
3. Reflect on how effective that activity is:
• Is it meaningful and functional?
• Is it relevant and interesting to students?
• Does it build on oral language?
• Does it expand students’ language?
• Does it connect to the curriculum or the
students’ lives?
4. How can you change it to make it better?
Clearly, language skills are connected
with one another. The interaction among
the language skills is clear—one aids and
extends the other. With careful planning,
you can take advantage of these
interconnections and really promote the
growth of literacy as well as the
underlying language competence of your
students.
ehamayan@gmail.com
Resources
Making books:
vickiblackwell.com/makingbooks/index.htm
makingbooks.com/freeprojects.html
Authors talking about their writing:
www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Literature/Authors-Reading
www.readingrockets.org
Six + 1 Traits Model
www.nwrel.org
General ESL websites
www.esl-galaxy.com
www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/
www.tesltools.com/
www.webenglishteacher.com/esl.html