Teaching reading comprehension
Helps in teaching writing & study skills

If you want literate students, you must teach:

• Reading comprehension,

• Nonfiction writing, and

• Study skills.

Moreover, you must teach those skills regularly throughout the school year.

The more you integrate these three areas into your total curriculum, the easier teaching becomes: each lesson on one skill reinforces teaching on the other two.

The three competencies should be:

• Integrated,

• Made to reinforce each other,

• Employed to achieve all your curricular objectives.

The material below outlines how to achieve that triple-treat.

Authenticity matters

Don't restrict your reading instruction to imaginative literature. Teaching reading comprehension is most effective when you teach reading strategies from authentic, nonfiction texts. Expository prose is required reading and required writing for everyone.

You'll find good, short expository essays suitable for middle and high school students on grammar, etymology, punctuation, and usage. In fact, you'll find more on those subjects than on literary topics.

That abundance will help you in teaching reading comprehension, writing skills, and all other facets of your English language arts curriculum.

Writing skills develop reading skills

Until students become competent writers, reading good writing does little to develop their writing ability. However, instruction in writing improves reading, especially if students' reading and writing is in the same genre.

Struggling readers are helped by instruction in thesis + support writing regularly found in persuasive essays. The thesis + support pattern is the basis for most expository writing ordinary people encounter, including student texts.

Knowing the thesis + support teaches students:

• Where to look for a thesis statement in another author's writing.

• How to recognize a thesis statement.

• Where to look for topic sentences of body paragraphs.

• The relationship between a thesis statement and a topic sentence.

• Where to look for transitional expressions that indicate the relationship between ideas.

In effect, when you teach the essay structure as the basis for writing, you are teaching reading comprehension while you teach writing.

Don't just take my word for it

In 2010, (two years after I first published this web page) the Carnegie Corporation of New York released a report showing that writing improves reading.

Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading was written by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert of Vanderbilt University. The 74-page report is available free in PDF format from all4ed.org.