The Science of Reading in Action: Five Evidence-Based Fundamentals

3. Integrated Literacies

Skilled reading is just one piece of what it means to be literate today.

Integrated skill in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing positions students to meet challenging and changing societal and economic demands (Darling-Hammond, L., Schachner, A. & Edgerton, A.K., 2020).

All students need structured opportunities for expressive language use—writing and speaking—that is grounded in meaningful, authentic text every day. And because these literacies closely inform and influence one another, integration can be motivating and fun for students.

Classroom

Applications

Structure your classroom culture and environment so that students have multiple opportunities each day to talk and write with peers in collaboratively constructing meaning about texts.

In preparation for reading a complex text, use videos and images to build knowledge, student motivation, and vocabulary—students can be asked to discuss or write about what they have viewed (Sedita, 2023).

To be fully literate, or to communicate effectively and make sense of the world, individuals need to be skilled readers, writers, and communicators with adequate speaking, listening, and viewing skills.

—Common Core Standards, 2010; Graham, 2020;

Lankshear & Knobel, 2007

When students respond to text through writing, there are multiple benefits. They gain a deeper understanding of the text while also building content knowledge, critical thinking, and an integration of comprehension and writing skills.

Responding to text in writing has been shown to support comprehension, for both students in general and students who are weaker readers or writers in particular. This applies across expository and narrative texts as well as in content areas such as science and social studies (Graham & Hebert, 2011).

Oral language supports the development of all other literacy skills.

Oral language involves communicating, understanding words or concepts, obtaining new information, and expressing thoughts— skills that are prerequisite to successful reading comprehension, which in turn is essential to successful learning.

Classroom

Applications

Develop higher-order questions that encourage students to think deeply about what the text means rather than simply recalling details.

Foster discussion about complex ideas.

Teach students how to generate questions and answers during and after reading. Students can write their questions or ask other students to respond to their questions orally.

Give students opportunities to observe and practice discussion techniques, clearly outlining what is expected of them.

Active discussions empower language development while also promoting understanding of the text. Student-led discussions get students constructing their own meanings from readings, connecting stories to their personal experiences and prior knowledge, and clarifying their understanding of text events, characters, and vocabulary.

Common Misconceptions

While a popular instructional method, posing open-ended questions to the whole class and calling on individual students both omits many students from the exercise and tends to yield responses that are short and simplistic. The goal is to provide all students with multiple daily opportunities to collaboratively construct meaning from texts—participating in student-led discussions with a partner or in small groups (Peterson, D., Journal of Early Childhood Literacy).

Classroom

Applications

Facilitate writing to sources, enabling students to create text evidence–based answers.

Model for students how to effectively communicate (speaking and listening) when writing collaboratively.

Support students in creating multimodal content that incorporates audio, video, and graphics.

Discussions among students or between the students and the teacher [must] go beyond simply asking and answering surface-level questions to a more thoughtful exploration of the text. Through this type of exploration, students learn how to argue for or against points raised in the discussion, resolve ambiguities in the text, and draw conclusions or inferences about the text.

—Shanahan et al., 2010

Reading and Writing Reciprocity

Take advantage of the time-saving and comprehension-boosting benefits of connecting your reading and writing instruction. In their meta-analysis, Writing to Read, Steve Graham and Michael Herbert report that extended writing activities produced greater comprehension gains than simply reading the text, reading and rereading, or reading and discussing it.

Ways to bring reading and writing reciprocity into your instructional practices:

Have students respond to text evidence–based questions in writing.
Use core texts as source material for students’ own writing.
Analyze core texts with a “writer’s eye,” using them as mentor texts for writing instruction and students’ writing.