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Purpose – Our purpose in this chapter is to argue for the importance of integrating reading and writing in classrooms and to provide examples of what integration of this nature looks like in classrooms across content areas and grade levels.Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter we provide an overview of the argument for reading–writing integration, highlight four common tools (skill decomposition, skill decontextualization, scaffolding, and authenticity) that teachers use to cope with complexity in literacy classrooms, and describe four classrooms in which teachers strive to integrate reading and writing in support of learning.Findings – We provide detailed examples and analyses of what the integration of reading and writing in the service of learning looks like in four different classroom contexts and focus particularly on how the four teachers use scaffolding and authenticity to cope with complexity and support their students’ literacy learning.Research limitations/implications – We intentionally highlight four noteworthy approaches to literacy instruction, but our examples are relevant to specific contexts and are not meant to encompass the range of promising practices in which teachers and students engage on a daily basis.Practical implications – In this chapter we provide classroom teachers with four concrete tools for coping with the complexities of literacy instruction in classroom settings and highlight what instruction of this nature – with an emphasis on scaffolding and authenticity – looks like in four different classroom contexts.Originality/value of chapter – Teachers and other educational stakeholders must acknowledge and embrace the complexities of learning to read and write, so that students have opportunities to engage in rich and authentic literacy practices in their classrooms.

To describe the connections between reading and writing and to discuss new ways of understanding the nuisances associated with their development beginning with consideration to language appreciation.

Theoretical advances related to the complexity of reading, thinking, and writing are discussed alongside an ongoing description of how wide reading, interventions, language study, and risk taking are foundational to language creation.

The linkages between reading and writing are inseparable. Reading and writing must be developed in unison. The best writers are avid readers and vice versa. Generally speaking, students will have preferences regarding which they enjoy partaking in more but this just gives the motivation to utilize an appreciate approach to grow, that is utilizing existing strengths of the student in either reading or writing toward improving the other.

A host of instructional practices can extend from these new theoretical understandings of language creation including free verse journals, usage of non-examples to jolt previous understandings, language play, feedback, diverse literature, and finalization processes related to writing development.

This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction.

This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers’ dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students’ writing. An expanded version of Rainey’s (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used.

The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practices may be attributed to institutional characteristics of the teachers’ contexts.

This study illustrates how the concept of prolepsis can be productively used as a lens through which to understand teachers’ instructional choices.

The descriptive findings show how individualized coaching of students’ writing about literature can also support literary reading. Teachers of English need not worry that they have to choose between teaching writing and teaching reading.

This study presents dialogic assessment as a useful way to guide students through the writing process and literary interpretation simultaneously.

To gain a better understanding of the impact of students’ home languages and cultural experiences on reading and writing instruction, the instructional methods and materials that best supported these students’ emerging bilingualism, and the contributions of their families in their utilization of their home languages and cultural experiences in a school setting. Mixed methods provided data on the literacy development in both home and school languages of three first-grade Latino students who were non-native English speakers enrolled in a school literacy intervention program for 12 to 20 weeks. The students’ confidence and motivation within their reading and writing instruction improved greatly with the encouragement of the use of their home languages and cultural experiences. All three students showed gains in speaking, reading, and writing in both their home and school languages. They made solid and useful connections between the languages and the texts, and drew upon their cultural experiences, which strengthened their reading and writing strategies in both languages. Involving the children’s families in lessons and in activities at school, and supporting their use of reading and writing at home, helped build relationships among the participants, families, and school faculty. This contributed to the beginnings of new understandings on the part of the school’s teachers and administration. Students need to have the space to use their home languages and cultural experiences in school, and I describe how educators in varied educational settings can replicate the same kinds of methods, materials, and support I offered to these students. I also describe suggested ways that teachers and administrators could include the knowledge of emergent bilingual families within the life of the school to further expand all students’ learning and promote social justice in the classroom setting.

The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive literature survey on dyslexic learners and to propose a model for integrated assistive technology of dyslexic learners.

The use of the proposed model through real-life scenarios categorized as “phonological, reading and writing scenarios”. We have also surveyed some systems for use with dyslexic learners currently in use and have compared them on the basis of number of barriers, technological innovation, age group and fostering.

Dyslexic learners are characterized by slow learning, poor handwriting, poor spelling skills and difficulties in planning, organizing, revising and editing texts; technology plays a major role in the educational environment; it has become crucial in impacting knowledge across the globe; and open research issues and challenges that have to be addressed in the design of the current dyslexic system have been presented in detail.

Full implementation of the proposed model and its application in developing countries.

The system improves the phonological awareness, reading and writing skills of dyslexic learners and it provides a solution for children as well as adults with dyslexia.

This survey can be used as a reference guide to understand learning barriers and intelligent systems for dyslexic learners and to promote the use of these in schools for those with learning disabilities who need assistive technologies.

Development of a newly proposed integrated intelligent assistive system for dyslexic learners; knowledge generation as a reference guide to understand dyslexic learning ability in general and an intelligent assistive dyslexic system in particular; and survey of open research issues and challenges to further research in intelligent dyslexic systems.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a study set up to investigate and map the landscape of digital writing today. A holistic perspective has been adopted involving writers, readers and publishers alike.

The research uses a qualitative approach and combines interviews and direct observations. In in‐depth interviews 13 participants (four writers, four publishers, three readers and two on‐line readers) were questioned for their opinions on issues related to writing, publishing and reading digital fiction. The three readers were also observed while interacting, for the first time, with three digital stories.

Results show that the area is still unsettled though much excitement surrounds experimentations and freedom of publishing online. Readers seem uneasy with the role of co‐creators that writers want to assign them and prefer linear stories to more deconstructed ones. Writers like to experiment and combine multiple media and readers like to interact with multimedia stories; this seems to open interesting perspectives over interactive narrative. Publishers are not yet involved in digital writing and this is seen simultaneously as a blessing (unfiltering of innovative ideas) and a curse (lack of economical support, lack of quality selection). Despite disagreement and ambiguity all interviewees agree that digital fiction will come, likely prompted by new reading technology.

This paper is the first attempt to understand the phenomena of digital writing taking into consideration the perspectives of writers, readers and publishers simultaneously and comparing their different views.

Writing as a hot topic in literacy has recently gained a foothold in terms of importance to academic and career success, finally receiving the attention it warrants and thus, this chapter provides timely information about how to teach writing products and processes in the 21st century.

Through a historical examination of writing instruction, this chapter provides a contextual lens for how writing has not always been a priority in the field of literacy; how writing and reading are interconnected; and how differing theories aim to explain writing development.

Writing has taken on a balanced approach between writing for product and writing as a practice. Teacher pedagogy has been heavily influenced by the advent of high-stakes assessments. Other factors such as maintaining motivation and engagement for writing affect student performance. Writing and reading benefit from an integrated instructional approach.

Elements of writing instruction are deconstructed to provide information for teachers to support students’ confidence in their writing abilities, build their identity as writers, and promote individualization and creativity to flourish through independence.

Writing is an act of expressive communication achieved through the medium of print. It is but one of three modes of linguistic communication. The other expressive mode is speaking, while listening and reading comprise the two receptive modes. The purpose of this chapter is to present the impact of a study in which students read and discussed expository poetry. Then they exchanged ideas relating to scientific concepts in the poems with students in a different group via pen pal letters. We analyzed these pen pal letters over four weeks to determine the influence of writing opportunities in an atmosphere rich in all four aspects of linguistic communication, involving authentic communication between students and within a community of learners.

Six of Brod Bagert’s unpublished poems concerned with science concepts were read by students in Collaborative Discover Groups (CDG) in two third-grade classes. After the groups discussed the poems, a mini-lesson on one of the Six Traits of Writing followed, and the students responded individually to a teacher-generated prompt related to the specific poem. The responses were in the form of pen pal letters to students in another class who had just read the same poem, received the same teacher-directed mini-lesson, and had had a similar discussion in their respective CDG. The data gleaned from these letters provide information demonstrating the effect of emphasizing all linguistic facets synergistically in a social, communicative setting. Both the processes and the findings will be discussed.

Analysis of the pen pal letters third-grade students wrote over four weeks showed the following patterns. (1) There was an increase in the discursive nature of the writing. (2) The incidence of rhetorical questioning, using A + B = C reasoning, and evaluative thinking was present in the fifth set of letters, and not in the first. Additionally, the number of sentences per letter increased from the first to the fifth, and the number of words per letter increased from approximately 50 words per letter to 75 words per letter. It appears that the linguistically synergistic communicative processes employed in this study are reflected in the increased sophistication and communicative nature of these writings.

The data revealed the importance of including the sociocultural tenants in the classroom, emphasizing that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all a part of the same phenomenon. Together they strengthen and support each other.

This paper reports a sub-set of results from a mixed-method ethnographic study of literacy among female graduates and undergraduates of a United Arab Emirates public university. With reference to survey data and two in-depth interviews, the paper focuses in particular on the predispositions and preferences of these women with regard to reading and writing in English and Modern Standard Arabic. Employing a New Literacy Studies theoretical framework along with a number of concepts developed by Bourdieu, the paper finds that literacy practices in this context are developing rapidly, influenced by the diverse transnational linguistic marketplaces in which these women grow up. Suggestions are made with regard to possible directions for curricular development in higher education in this region based on the opinions expressed by these young women.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of instruction in information problem solving within the world wide web (the web) environment. The participants were 20 seventh and eighth grade students with a learning disability (LD) in reading. An experimental pretest‐posttest control group method was used to investigate the effects of intervention in which the treatment group was instructed in information problem solving with the Big6 Skills model. Both groups utilized an essay map organizer. The students researched science and social studies topics on the internet and the web and wrote reports over a three‐month period.

Experimental pretest‐posttest control group study, with a repeated measures design, and a repeated measures ANOVA analysis.

Both groups significantly improved in the quality of writing, text length, and navigation. The treatment group significantly outperformed the control group on the measure of text length and text organization. There were no significant differences between the two groups in prior knowledge, motivation, or gender.

The study was conducted predominantly with the researcher as the instructor in a number of individualized sessions, which limits the generalizability of the study.

This study reveals that students with a reading disability in reading could be taught information problem‐solving skills within the web environment. As technology reshapes our notion of what constitutes “basic skills”, learning with the web calls for instruction in which reading, writing, and information skills should be viewed as interconnected. This interconnection might be especially important for students with LD who are often engaged in practicing various skills in isolation.

This study experimentally examined information problem solving on the web with students with an LD in reading. Much research has been focused on basic reading skills for this group of students, but few studies have examined their learning within electronic environments.