Evidence-Based Practices to Enliven Integrated Reading-to-Writing Instruction

Abstract

Despite strong support for integrating reading and writing instruction, writing practice is often crowded out of the schedule in elementary classrooms. To promote increased emphasis on writing, a working group of literacy researchers highlights three writing goals and six research-based reading-to-writing practices to enliven instruction with more integrated opportunities. The three featured goals are maximize reading–writing connections, increase student collaborative writing, and promote a classroom writing community. To achieve these goals, the authors highlight flexible, evidenced-based writing activities to encourage genre diversity, goal-setting, peer feedback, and cross-curricular reading tasks. The collection of recommended practices has the potential to engage students and improve both reading and writing achievement.