When it comes to literacy education and cross-domain learning, it’s critical to understand the relationship between reading and writing. In this episode, Susan talks to Steve Graham all about writing—and how it can be used to strengthen literacy. Graham served as chair of the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides on elementary and secondary writing, and is the current Regents and Warner Professor at Arizona State University. Together, he and Susan discuss ways to support student writing, hindrances to writing development, the importance of teaching handwriting skills, and why writing is essential to any literacy program.
Show Notes:
Quotes:
“Our development as writers might be something that you can think of as open-ended…it can expand ever outward.” —Steve Graham
“Handwriting gets better, spelling gets better…students become better at constructing sentences in their writing. They tend to generate more content, and the quality of their writing may improve as well.” —Steve Graham
“Any kid who has trouble with handwriting [or] spelling usually dislikes writing much more than their peers that do not have those difficulties, and they typically don't produce as much. And what they produce usually is just not as coherent or well connected.” —Steve Graham
“What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write. And at least through grades one to six, when students write, the quality of their writing gets better and their reading comprehension gets better.” —Steve Graham
“Kids need to write, they need to write for a variety of purposes. And they also need to write for real reasons, for real audiences.” —Steve Graham
“We want to create a community in which kids can thrive as writers and take risks.” —Steve Graham
“We want to make sure that we're using reading and writing for the functional purposes of learning, because they make a huge difference. They're really the basic building blocks around which we acquire and understand information.” —Steve Graham
When it comes to literacy education and cross-domain learning, it’s critical to understand the relationship between reading and writing. In this episode, Susan talks to Steve Graham all about writing—and how it can be used to strengthen literacy. Graham served as chair of the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides on elementary and secondary writing, and is the current Regents and Warner Professor at Arizona State University. Together, he and Susan discuss ways to support student writing, hindrances to writing development, the importance of teaching handwriting skills, and why writing is essential to any literacy program.
Show Notes:
Quotes:
“Our development as writers might be something that you can think of as open-ended…it can expand ever outward.” —Steve Graham
“Handwriting gets better, spelling gets better…students become better at constructing sentences in their writing. They tend to generate more content, and the quality of their writing may improve as well.” —Steve Graham
“Any kid who has trouble with handwriting [or] spelling usually dislikes writing much more than their peers that do not have those difficulties, and they typically don't produce as much. And what they produce usually is just not as coherent or well connected.” —Steve Graham
“What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write. And at least through grades one to six, when students write, the quality of their writing gets better and their reading comprehension gets better.” —Steve Graham
“Kids need to write, they need to write for a variety of purposes. And they also need to write for real reasons, for real audiences.” —Steve Graham
“We want to create a community in which kids can thrive as writers and take risks.” —Steve Graham
“We want to make sure that we're using reading and writing for the functional purposes of learning, because they make a huge difference. They're really the basic building blocks around which we acquire and understand information.” —Steve Graham
What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write.
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert. Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Where the Science of Reading lives. We're continuing to tackle the hard stuff, taking on some of the topics that listeners have asked most about. And now it's time for a big one. The role of writing and literacy development. And to dive into this topic, we decided to call in the expert on writing, Dr. Steve Graham from Arizona State University. Among many important roles and accomplishments in his four decades studying writing, Graham served as the chair of the What Works clearinghouse Practice Guides on elementary and secondary writing. And in this conversation, Graham unpacks the research on writing and also shares strategies for classroom teachers to use writing most effectively. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Steve Graham. Well, Dr. Steve Graham, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.
Dr. Steve Graham:Thank you so much for inviting me.
Susan Lambert:We are really excited to talk to you because you've been doing a lot of work in the world of writing for a long time . But before we jump into that, I would love if you could share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and maybe how you became interested in literacy and specifically in writing.
Dr. Steve Graham:Well, once upon a time, a long time ago, I was a special education teacher in a relatively small town on the Georgia-Florida line. And most of the kids that I worked with did not read well. And , I went back to doctoral school. I went to doctoral school at University of Kansas with the idea that I would learn more about how to teach reading, which I did. I took a lot of courses on that. And this is kind of a failure story leading to success, but with my dissertation, I had federal funding from a grant to do a miscue analysis study with kids with learning disabilities, or had been identified as having a learning disability, kids who were reading at the same level, and kids who were the same age, reading at a higher level, but did not have reading difficulties. And my minor person on my dissertation said to me at the end, and, you know, this could have been a devastating kind of comment, but she privately said to me, you could have done better. And I thought about it, because that's not really what you w ant t o hear after you passed y our dissertation. And I thought about it and I thought, you know, there were 80 other studies that did miscue analysis, maybe not quite like we had done this, but it didn't ... you know, it's like a brick i n t he wall, so to speak. It didn't make a real strong contribution to what we knew about reading. And I thought, you know, it's not really reading I'm interested in. It was w riting. And the reason for that was, I did not consider myself a good writer, so that's not necessarily the best way to enter an area. And as a doctoral student, all of a sudden I was having to do all this writing. At the same time. I was reading interviews from the Paris Reviews with authors such as Steinbeck , Hemmingway, etc. And at that time, the Paris Reviews were focusing in on process -- what people did when they wrote. And I found it fascinating. I've always loved writers; I've always loved reading. And I realized that's really what I wanted to know more about. And at that point, all of my kind of interests were with kids with special needs. And there was virtually no one doing this with these kids in terms of thinking about writing. So I also saw a very open path in front of me, you know, in terms of what I might do and what I might accomplish. Since then, my interests have ranged more broadly in terms of, you know, all kids. And also the connections between reading and writing and the connections between writing and learning. But it was that kind of, not a failure, but you know, this comment about you could do better, that really set me off on this path to what I've been doing for the last 40, 45 years.
Susan Lambert:Mm . That's amazing. Well, what a great way to turn that comment around into doing something that's interesting and actually, like, has led to interesting things that's happened in the field. So, good for you for taking it in a positive way. <laugh>. So you've been researching writing development for, what'd you say, 40 years?
Dr. Steve Graham:About 40 years. A little bit more.
Susan Lambert:Wow. What have you learned about writing development over these years doing this research?
Dr. Steve Graham:Well, one of the things I've learned about writing and it's development, or its operation, if you'd like, maybe starting there, is that it's a really complex skill when you think about what we as adults do as writers. There's a lot that we bring to the task. It's our knowledge of the topic that we're writing about, we have various processes that we put in play, our knowledge of language also helps us in terms of crafting what we're gonna say. In addition though, we have to manage all of these processes, whether we're talking about planning, goal setting, organizing, drafting, revising, editing , writing sentences, transcribing words onto page in terms of correct spelling, grammar, etc. You know, we have to manage those processes and have those occur at the right time and in an order that makes sense, while also managing our, sometimes our emotions about writing. You know, some of us come at this, we really like it, some of us don't like it so much. And so there's a lot going on here, and it can be a very complex and complicated task. One scholar, in terms of looking at college writing, once compared it to the middle equivalent of digging ditches. And their research suggested that writing required the same effort and cognitive resources that, you know, good really strong writing, they're acquired of a master chess player. So it's a very complex and difficult task. On the other side of the coin is that when you're six years old, it's not that complicated. Kids are probably brighter than we give them credit for sometimes. You know, they haven't mastered all of these things that they need to master and automatize things like handwriting and spelling or made facile their sentence production in terms of written language or, you know, they don't tend to think in advance about what they're gonna write and continue that process and keep their mind open to, you know, monitoring and evaluating what they're doing. They simplify the task, you know, if they have a topic like, you gotta write about Bessie the cow, you know , they think, well, cows live in a field and that might be their first sentence, and that serves as a stimulus for the next one, which serves as a stimulus for the next one. So what kids do, and we adults do this, I'll give an example of it as well, is they convert this to a task that doesn't require a lot of orchestration, self-regulation. They simplify it, so it's something they can actually do. And that strategy doesn't go away if you're writing a note to your significant other that you're gone out to pick up groceries and are gonna be back in 45 minutes. It's not the next great novel. It's just dumping, you know, it's like the Balkind mindUP, whatever's in your head that you need to say you put on paper. And so that starts with young kids. And as they grow as writers , the things that they can do expands outwards, and this gets more complicated and more complex over time. And of course, we ask kids to write about more complex things over time. And as they move into their writing outside of school, it also becomes more complex. So, you know, they get better at doing this. So that's one of the things that I think is very important. It's a very complicated task, but initially it's a very simple task for young kids. In terms of thinking about this.
Susan Lambert:Hmm , that's an interesting comment because I know there's been a lot of conversations lately about literacy development, what it means to be a proficient reader and writer. And I've heard over and over again that writing is the most complex task we actually ask our students to engage in. Would you agree with that comment?
Dr. Steve Graham:I would agree with that, and I'll give kind of an analogy here. You know, by the time you leave school, most of us are very, if you think about, you know, a novice reader, a competent reader, and an expert reader, most of us are clearly competent readers. You know, sometime in middle school to high school, what it means to be an expert reader depends upon your domain. You know, like if you're reading physics texts, then you know, some people are probably a bit better at understanding what's there and what's not. But that depends a lot on your knowledge about the topic area and your ability to read that material critically. But it doesn't seem to me like the distinction between becoming competent and expert is quite as large as it is in writing. You know, most of us would consider like a novelist to be an expert writer. You know, Tony Morrison, in my view, is an expert writer. Now, if you took a look at me, you wouldn't say that I'm Tony Morrison. Okay? God help me if I had to write a novel or poetry. But I am quite good at writing research articles and generally pretty good at writing articles for teachers that explain or share information for that research. And the point that I'm trying to make here is that our development as writers might be something that you can think of as open-ended so that we become better over time at what we do. And I think this is true for professionals as well. Those people are experts because they create new writing problems for themselves to solve. But it can expand ever outward. Like I could write poetry, right? Maybe I'll never become a published poet, but I can get better at that if I choose to do that. So there's a lot of different genres that we can expand into, and there's a lot of room to improve. So I see this as a lifelong development. Now, I don't wanna take away from reading and say that it's not a lifelong development, but I don't think, you know, when you stack the two next to each other in terms of potential for growth over time. I think writing has this great potential to kind of expand outward in terms of what we can do, the skills and processes and knowledge that we have at our disposal and the various types of writing. So I think this makes it a much more complicated task.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. As you're talking, I'm reflecting myself as my own self as a writer. So I go through these stages similarly, like, oh, I can sit down and you know, engage in this writing task, and today it feels pretty easy. Yesterday, well , it was really complicated, and I sat for two hours and wrote one sentence, and oh my goodness, where is that coming from? So when we sort of think about all of that for our students, and I think also one more comment is that's what makes it hard to teach. I think. You know, I also reflect back in my years, mostly in third grade, trying to get kids to learn how to write. And I don't think I ever provided them any instruction. I think I gave them writing activities, but I don't think I ever provided them any kind of writing instruction. So I'm just gonna put that out there . So there's that. But as you're thinking about this, what are some of the things that actually serve them as a catalyst for this writing?
Dr. Steve Graham:So, I tend to think of this in terms of four catalyst. I would love to say that the theoretical underpinnings for this are mine, but they're mostly from a friend of mine named Patricia Alexander, who is in the human development department at University of Maryland, where I work for 23 years. Her basic theory or idea that as you move from being a novice to being incompetent to being an expert, there's three catalysts that drive this. And so obviously if I've got four, I've added one. And one of those is that your knowledge base initially, whatever it is that you're , you know, domain you're working in is not very deep and fragmented, you know, so let's say that you're a five-year-old kid and you're interested in dinosaurs. So initially, as your interest starts there, you don't really know a lot and it's kind of fragmented. But over time you learn a lot more, it becomes more connected, it becomes more rich, and it becomes connected to other knowledge as well. So that's one of the things that, you know, knowledge seems to be a very important driver of this. And there's all kinds of knowledge in writing. There's knowledge of language, there's knowledge of content, there's knowledge of the specialized tools or skills that we have to bring to the writing task. There's also knowledge of the communities within which we write. Like, you know, I'm sure many of us adults that are a little bit older, like myself, have typed in something in full caps when responding to somebody younger at some point, and they write back and say, you know, this doesn't happen much anymore, but I remember the first time I did it. Why are you shouting at me?
Susan Lambert:Yeah. <Laughter>.
Dr. Steve Graham:I didn't know the rules of the community. And so that's part of what you have to learn. So knowledge is one important aspect of this. Motivation is another. You know, I kind of mentioned interest in the first part and that, you know, we initially might start out with kind of a general interest in this, but as we become more competent in it than our interests and our efficacy and the value that we see in whether it's writing or reading or some other domain grows to the point that if you're an expert, it pretty much drives your life. So it's, it's really a defining factor for you. And then the third thing is strategic prowess. So, when I was talking earlier about how young children approach the process of writing, they kind of have a general approach for doing this. They might use something like brainstorming and prompted to do it, which is kind of a general, very simple strategy. But as time goes on, they learn strategies for helping them generate and organize ideas for different genres. Maybe using the basic building blocks, like knowing, I have to have a premise. If I'm gonna argue a certain point, I need to give reasons for it. I need to give evidence. And so that's both knowledge. But if we use that knowledge to help us generate ideas and organize them, then it becomes strategic. And as you become an expert, well then, you know, you approach task in a much more strategic way. You know, figuring out your own angles on how you're going to address, say a particular issue that you're dealing with in a in a novel, if you're a novelist. In addition, I would add to this knowledge, motivation, and strategic prowess, another element. And that is one that interferes with those three. And that involves foundational skills. So until you master things like handwriting and spelling and become fluent with sentence construction, you never become automatic. And we don't want people to become automatic with sentence construction because that's a thinking activity. Then those things can interfere with other writing processes. And so, you know, we sometimes see little kids who are six or seven years of age and they write 10 letters or 11 letters a minute. So if you want to get a sense of what this means, write with your non-dominant hand. If you're right-handed, write with your left hand, every fifth word, spell it backwards. See how long you last, and see how fun this is. And what you'll notice is even though you've mastered a whole lot of other things, it makes writing much more difficult. And so in terms of thinking about development as writers, we need to be able to put those aside in the case of handwriting, spelling, or typing by mastering them so they become virtually automatic. And with something like sentence construction, we develop some fluency and facility with those skills as well. And so for me, when we look at the evidence as it stacks up, the evidence is consistent with that. Although motivation's a little wonky in terms of this, it doesn't always work out the way that we would think it does. Sometimes we don't get the associations between different motivational ways of viewing motivation and writing outcomes. And it's really hard to move the needle forward on motivation in many instances for writing. Kids come to school liking to write, but there's a tendency for that to dissipate for many of them as they remain in school.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. It's the, the fear of the blank page. I mean, there is something to that too, where you get a blank page in front of you and you're like, oh my gosh, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this thing. So, yeah. So I wanna dig in a little bit to this mastering of the handwriting and the spelling aspect of that and getting fluent in being able to do that. That sounds a little bit like reading, getting fluent in recognizing the words and being able to sound the words out. So that reading, writing connection . Maybe we'll get to that a little bit later, but you've done a lot of work in research around these transcription skills, this handwriting and the spelling. Is that, is that right?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. And the impetus for this, in part, was that many of the kids that I worked with when I was a special education teacher found handwriting and spelling to be extremely difficult, especially spelling. And then my daughter had considerable challenges with handwriting and spelling. She was in a Quaker school in Washington, D. C ., in kindergarten and first grade. And it was a great school in a lot of ways, but one of the things the teacher did was, you could take as long as you wanted to pick a topic to write about. The school was very close to the university, so my wife and I, who's also a professor in education, would come often and observe. And Leah would just kind of wander around. Mm . You know, choosing her topic . She'd take three or four days and I'd ask her what she was doing and she said, she basically would say, not in these same words, I'm avoiding the writing task, because I really find handwriting and spelling challenging. And so we've , over the years, have taken a look at what happens when you teach either one of these skills, handwriting or spelling, particularly with kids who have challenges with those skills or the two together. And, you know, basically what we find is that well, handwriting gets better, spelling gets better, but more importantly--now that's important because if it's hard to read, people form negative judgements about the content. There's no question about that. But it's also important because there's an effect on the writer when you don't master these skills. So what we see is that with sentence construction skills, students become better at constructing sentences in their writing, they tend to generate more content, and the quality of their writing may improve as well. This is particularly with kids in kindergarten through third grade. So, you know, just like in reading where decoding, if you don't master it, can interfere with comprehension and fluency, it's a similar kind of thing with writing in terms of handwriting and spelling.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . That's interesting. Now, I remember when I was a teacher, we won't say how many years ago that was, that was a long time ago. But when I was in the classroom, there was a question of, eh ... do we really need to teach handwriting? This seems like something that's not that important. You know, they're gonna get it, they're gonna figure it out. And so I wonder how you would talk about handwriting being maybe overlooked or being devalued in terms of instructional time. Instructional time is super important, right? Like we only have so much. What would you say to teachers about that ?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah, I'd actually expand that a little bit and I put spelling in that same category. So I'm gonna start with spelling because this is the one that, you know, English spelling is really tough. It's very, very difficult. Many of us who are adults don't, and this includes myself, I don't consider myself a good speller. I'm an okay speller. But , thank God I have a wife who spells really well, because I don't like looking in the dictionary or looking it up, and she usually knows it right away. So one of the things that I observed during the 1980s when, you know, kind of naturalistic approaches to learning to write and read were in the in vogue. Which, you know, basically is whole language, is that one of the things I think was the death of whole language was this issue around spelling. Because the idea was, all you really needed to do was immerse kids in an environment where they read and they wrote a lot for social and real purposes. And what would happen is that they would develop the skills that they needed. So to connect this back to my daughter's school, that's exactly what my daughter's school did. And her fifth grade teacher was a great teacher, and realized 80%, 90% of her kids in her class really had great difficulties with spelling. And so all of a sudden in fifth grade, she's taking this up as a crusade to teach spelling you, which you know, better late than never, but probably too late to have the effects that you would most like. And so there has been this kind of disregard for both handwriting and spelling. And the issue with handwriting is also a bit complicated, but in a different way. So, you know, I've seen kids form the letter " u" as an example, by starting at the bottom of the line, going up to the right, all the way back down to the bottom, up to the left in terms of curving up and then all the way back down that " u" part, and then they're lying down. It's like drawing a letter And so, you know, if you leave kids to develop their own approach for doing each letter, you shouldn't assume that they're gonna do it in an efficient manner. And once a motor pattern gets established, or ways of holding a pencil, for example, it is really difficult to change it . I had a young man in my class, fourth or fifth grade, who would hold his pencil like a bannet in terms of squeezing around it with his whole fist. And just down near the bottom of it. And so, we got one of these kind of mechanical tools that kind of forced his hand into holding it in a certain way. And whenever he saw me, he would put it in that way. But if I wasn't around or I took a look, you know, to see what he was doing, he immediately reverted back. It was a yearlong battle that I lost. And I realized that I wasn't gonna win that battle. He had to want to change this for that to work, because it's very difficult. You know, I hate to say this, as a human species, if we have something that works, it takes little effort and it works a good bit of the time, he could write out what he wanted. He didn't like it, but he could write it out. It's really hard to change a behavior if you're not dedicated or motivated to doing that. And in this case, I lost the battle and, and probably should've realized I was gonna lose it a lot earlier in the game.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . So, I guess then you're advocating for, for handwriting instruction in the early grades and spelling instruction in the early grades, <laugh>.
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. And you know, the data that we have is that if you teach handwriting, typing, and spelling, those skills get better and students become better writers as a result. So, you know, the evidence that we have is consistent with this idea. It's not, you know, a philosophical view. It's really, these are important skills that interfere with other aspects of writing. Any kid who has trouble with handwriting and spelling usually dislikes writing much more than their peers that do not have those difficulties. And they typically don't produce as much. And what they produce usually is just not as, as coherent or well-connected.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . What about the differences between print and cursive for students?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah, so I take this a little bit with a grain of salt. When Common Core State Standards came out, they emphasized handwriting in kindergarten and first grade. Now, traditionally in the U. S., we typically taught manuscript in kindergarten and first grade. A long, long time ago. We taught manuscript in second grade, but most programs started having a transition in second grade to cursive. So if you read the Common Core State Standards literally, and you think that they're the Bible, so to speak, then you only teach handwriting in kindergarten and first grade. And because of our tradition, that's manuscript. But you look at other countries, you know , there are other countries that start right away with cursive. They don't do manuscript. I think the real issue here is, is that you want to have at least one style of producing texts in a transcription way that is both easy to read or reasonably easy to read and fluent. I don't think it matters if it is cursive or manuscript. And so, you know, if you ask the man on the street, which is more legible, they're gonna tell you manuscript's more legible than cursive. That's kind of a common viewpoint that we have. You ask, which is more fluent to produce, and you know, it's connected letters. So obviously it's cursive. We did a study with a hundred kids at each grade, 50 girls, 50 boys. And we looked at this and we didn't really find these differences that exist between them. And when you look back at the literature that kind of this common belief was based on, it was based on studies with adults. And so if you teach manuscript in kindergarten to second grade, and then they use cursive all the way from third grade to adulthood, which do you think you're gonna be faster at? It's the one that you keep doing over and over and over again. And so once you control for those issues, then these differences are pretty minimal. What's really important is--whether it's italics, whether it's cursive, whether it's manuscript, whether it's kind of this move to slanted manuscript--it can be done quickly, and it can be done where it's reasonably easy to read. I don't care if you teach two different forms , that's really a matter of time if you have to do it. But when you get legislators like in Arizona where I live, you know, involved in making decisions at this level for educators, that's a problem in my opinion. They need to keep their nose out of the business of education when it's down at the point of how you teach and the educational practices you do . They don't know more than we do. I'll, say that, and I'm sure there are people who will disagree with it, but I'm tired of listening to legislators telling professionals how they should teach when they've never been in a classroom themselves.
Susan Lambert:So going back to this, you know, differences in handwriting, when I look at my own handwriting, it's a combination of both manuscript and cursive. And so maybe I've picked up whatever's the fastest thing to your point, huh? <Laugh>
Dr. Steve Graham:I didn't say this in terms of that study we looked at, we didn't find differences between manuscript and cursive, but we did find that if you mix script, and a lot of kids did that you actually wrote a bit faster than you did in manuscript and cursive. And so while this was more of a correlational study, and you'd have to be a little cautious with this, it would suggest that teaching both might be advantageous over teaching just one or the two, because what kids do is they pick the letter forms they can create most easily in each of the different forms of scripts. And it was about 60% of kids, by the way, that actually make scripts.
Susan Lambert:Hmm . Interesting.
Dr. Steve Graham:And some of them were more manuscript and less cursive, and some were more cursive and less manuscript.
Susan Lambert:Interesting. So we've talked a little bit about the reading and writing connection. And so, I know in other episodes of this podcast, we've talked a lot about the importance of kids actually associating the sounds of the language with the letters that are in print and also the letters they form. Right? So in instruction, it seems to me that an efficiency as well--we're teaching the code, we're also helping kids learn how to write that code--but there, there must be other things you can talk about since you're the expert about this reading and writing connection.
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. But I would like to say something about this connection at, you know, the sound symbol, symbol sound. A basic principle in psychology is, recognition proceeds recall. So reading is recognition. Recall, in a sense is writing. And so you can see a word and you're more likely to recognize it correctly than you are to spell it correctly. That doesn't happen in every word. It's a general tendency. So, while I would agree that you wanna connect whatever consistencies in English orthography that you're teaching through decoding , you wanna reemphasize those in spelling. But there is a little bit of a disconnect there that you have to think about because you could end up using words under decoding, and that may be particularly difficult to spell on the encoding. And so just, you know, something to keep in mind.
Susan Lambert:Right. Yep. It's a good point.
Dr. Steve Graham:But when we think about reading and writing connections, I think there's three ways of thinking about this, and one of those ways is thinking about it in terms of shared knowledge. And so , Tim Shanahan has presented a nice way of kind of visualizing this. If you think about having a well of knowledge and you think of having a bucket that's reading and a bucket that's writing, it's this common pool of knowledge that would include these symbol sound , sound symbol relationships, but would include a lot of other things too. You know, like the knowledge of whatever you're reading, you're writing about, so when you dip that writing bucket down there, it's pulling out of that pool of knowledge, say about outer space. And when you're reading about outer space, it's also pulling out that same knowledge. There's also knowledge about the purposes of different kinds of texts that we read. If you recognize you're reading a persuasive text, then those basic building elements of persuasive text you are likely to use as a framework for helping you remember and understand information. You recognize a counter reason or a counter explanation that might be put forward. And those same things can be used in terms of purposes and text structure in terms of helping you write texts. So there's a lot of different kinds of knowledge, both the strategies that we use, this knowledge about genre, knowledge about content, you know, knowledge about how words and vocabulary, etc., linked together that we can draw upon for each of these. Now here's the good news about that. When you teach these various things, you teach decoding, kids become better spellers. You teach spelling, kids become better decoders. You teach kids strategies for writing, planning, revising, etc., that tends to have a positive effect on their reading. We teach strategies that we often use in terms of like, visualization or critical reading, etc., that helps you become a better writer. So the evidence suggests that if you have kids do these things, you teach these things in each of these areas, it has a positive carryover affect from reading to writing, or vice versa. There's another way of thinking about these connections as well. And that is what's called a rhetorical relations perspective. It's a simple idea with a long title, right? It's basically that reading and writing serves social purposes, so they have this kind of common purpose in mind. So when we read, we're making connections with an author. When we write, hopefully we're making connections with an audience. Now, sometimes that audience is ourselves, like when we write a diary that we may come back and read or think about. So the, the reader, even though you don't have a second reader here, the reader becomes ourselves. And so the idea here is that as you read, you can learn something that may help you in your writing. And as you write, because of the internal conversations you might be having about your audience, that may help you think about the writer who you're reading at the time. And so I wanna be real clear about this. When I read texts, like I read every night, and right now I'm in my mystery phase, I don't read to really find out what the author's doing. I kind of read, I'm on a motorbike and I'm riding down the road and I don't care how the engine works. But, you know, if I'm reading something in my domain, in terms of science and literacy, then I'm pretty analytic in terms of what I'm reading. I'm questioning why the author said this, I'm questioning why ... And that provides me with kind of a process and approach and sometimes tools for when I write my own stuff in the same area. It doesn't mean it happens automatically, but it can happen and can have a positive flow back. Now there's a third approach and it's called a functional approach, and that's basically the idea that reading and writing can be used together in functional ways. And so think about learning, we do this constantly, we read something, we write about it, and that facilitates our learning of that material. Or we're getting ready to write and we do some reading to gather information. And that not only increases our understanding of the material , but it helps us in terms of what we're gonna write, because we have more to say about the topic and we're more informed about it. So there're multiple ways in which reading and writing work together, and we haven't taken advantage of those like we should. And I'm gonna call out the Science of Reading on this as well .
Susan Lambert:Okay. Do it <laugh>,
Dr. Steve Graham:You know, because for the most part, this has been ignored. These kind of positive relationships that exist back and forth. I think some of the advocates for the Science of Reading have been so focused in on the big five that they haven't looked beyond that in some instances to say, what else can we bring into this mix that's going to be important for moving students reading forward, but also to move their learning forward. And I would say their writing forward as well.
Susan Lambert:Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, when I was a brand new teacher, I don't know where I learned this term, but we were exploring this term of writing to learn that really using, and maybe you've said this already, and I'm just saying in another way, but actually the writing process, and I'm not talking necessarily about the five paragraph essay, right? But actually putting pencil to paper to try to unpack an idea or summarize an idea, really does help us facilitate that learning process. And writing can be a powerful tool for that. Am I way off base here?
Dr. Steve Graham:No. You're not . And so I'm gonna approach this in two ways. The first is kind of an empirical way. We had a meta-analysis taking a look at the effects of writing to learn with school aged kids. I think it was published in 2020, somewhere in there. And basically what we found is there was about a third of a standard deviation jump in terms of content learning. We didn't look at reading, we looked at what was being presented in class. But that's a pretty good effect. And, you know, it did not differ across math, science, or social studies. So it was a consistent effect across different areas and different kinds of writing didn't differ that much either. So if you wrote a summary or you wrote a persuasive piece about this, you took notes. It wasn't all that different. All of those things, and many more had a positive effect on learning. And guess what? When you write about what you read, it also has a positive effect. And that's all the way from generating and answering your own questions in writing to note-taking, to summarizing, to doing things like, writing something about how you can read this information or writing a story about it or writing something persuasively. So there's clearly an impact on learning both when you write about what you read and what you write about what you're learning in class. Now, why is that? A couple of people propose that one reason this happens is that you do some learning at the point that you take an idea and you put it in your own words. You have to think about that idea and structure into your writing. Now that doesn't mean it happens all the time, but if it's a particularly complex idea that you're struggling with to get onto paper, I can tell you it certainly worked for me because it's sharpened my thinking about that idea to be able to make it clear to others. So, you know, at the point of utterance, sometimes it can make a difference. But then, you know, also think about this. When you're writing about something you're reading, one of the things that you're doing is rehearsing it, right? Because you're having to look back at it after you've read it and make decisions about what are the most important ideas, how you're gonna organize this. And not only are you doing those two things, which are cognitive strategies, you're rehearsing the information again, you're seeing it again. So one of the things that's a really powerful learning tool is rehearsal, but obviously making decisions about what's important and how to organize it are important as well. And then you elaborate on what's in that material with what you already know. And I think we could keep going on this, but you see rehearsal and cognitive strategies coming into play to get you to think more about what you're reading and more about what you're learning in class. And all of those things are strong learning tools and writing, basically a way of thinking about it, is thinking. And so it makes you think about this material you're reading and the material you're learning.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Oh my goodness. No wonder writing is so hard. I got tired just hearing you talk about all that work that it takes. <laugh>. Shout out to all the teachers that are using writing strategies to help their kids learn more. It's hard. I wanna dive into a little bit of vocabulary. So we've talked about how this really helps with knowledge development, but you know, I'm gonna misquote this, I probably will, but I think it was Mark Twain that said something about picking the right word or gosh, I wish I had that at my fingertips.
Dr. Steve Graham:If you catch an adjective kill it.
Susan Lambert:Oh, well ... <Laugh> .
Dr. Steve Graham:That may have been the quote.
Susan Lambert:It wasn't, but that's a good one.
Dr. Steve Graham:There's another quote from him about using the right word is kind of like , I'm gonna mess this up, lightning to a firefly. That that's the difference. I suspect I have that wrong, and somebody listening to this thing saying that idiot can't quite get it right.
Susan Lambert:<Laugh> We'll see if we can find it, because I think I was on the right track as you. But using vocabulary a nd writing is tough. I mean, that's where shades of meaning come in. That's where synonyms come in. So can you talk a little bit about that vocabulary a nd writing?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. And I would put this in a little bit broader array and that is sentence construction. You know, a way of thinking about this is that you generate an idea or a visual in your head that you wanna write down. So what you have to do is you have to put this into an acceptable sentence that conveys your intended meaning. Okay? So that means it can't be messed up grammatically, but it also has to have the right words, to convey your meaning. And how well it works depends upon the sentence that you use and the words that you use to get your intended meaning on text. I know that sounds backwards and all the way around the block, etc., but these work together, they don't necessarily work in isolation. Now, this is also a way of thinking about vocabulary. It's a language skill that you bring to the task. And obviously the greater your proficiency in language, you have more that you can bring to the task of writing in terms of vocabulary. So it's important. What we don't have enough evidence on, and this is unfortunate, is what happens when you teach vocabulary. Does it make you a better writer? There're surprisingly few studies looking at this, whereas in reading there're quite a few, right?
Susan Lambert:Yeah. That's interesting.
Dr. Steve Graham:So, you know, some ways that this has been approached in writing , this was a study one of my students did, I really particularly liked. They taught students about vocabulary and either story writing or mystery writing that would be important things, you know, kind of elements of characteristics. So like in a mystery, what's a red herring? And so, you had all these kind of vocabularies that revolved around basic elements in mysteries. And the same thing with stories. Now this was done with fifth and sixth grade kids who were not really very strong writers. And what we found was that it didn't make much difference to do that with story writing , but it made a big difference to do it with mystery writing. And my guess is, that what happened here is that with story writing , kids really already know a lot about stories and what's used. But mystery writing was much newer to them. Another way that this has been approached is, let's say you're doing something on outer space, is that you might have 10, 12 words that have central elements about outer space that might be important to know, and second, that might be useful in your writing. And so you've had people who have taught words like that and then take a look at what happens when you ask to write about something on the moon or some other aspect of outer space and that's had a positive effect. And we've also had studies, one or two where, Tier 2 words were taught and that's had a positive effect. But you're kind of in a quandary because you're lucky if you can find four or five experiments or quasi-experiments where the effects on writing have been looked at. So theoretically you can make a strong case for this. But in terms of what happens when you teach this, I would say we want to teach and we wanna be cognizant of this, but if you said to me, is this an evidence-based practice at this point, probably not. We need more evidence. That doesn't mean we shouldn't teach it though.
Susan Lambert:That's right. But this is also a call to up-and-coming researchers: get into a doctoral program so that you can now do some research to add to the evidence-base around writing. <laugh>.
Dr. Steve Graham:Right. This is really wide open and you know, it's too bad that reading researchers in the past haven't also included measures of writing. They're reasonably good at including measures of spelling, but not too good beyond that. And you can have changes in spelling as a result of vocabulary instruction, but it'd be nice to see if there are other changes in terms of what students write more generally.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. How about for our listeners who, a large portion of our listeners are actually teachers in the classroom doing the hard work, what key takeaways do you have for them when they're trying to put all this together and think about, what can I do in the classroom to do a good job of teaching writing?
Dr. Steve Graham:I have five words that I rely on . One is write , the second is support, a third is teach, a fourth is connect, and a fifth is create. So by themselves that probably doesn't mean a whole lot, but if we're gonna have a, what I would consider a strong writing program--and this is based on the empirical evidence that we have, both from experimental studies and quasi-experimental studies, and also studying exceptional literacy teachers to see what they do. It's trying to bring all that information and some other information together. What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write. And at least through grades one to six, when students write, the quality of their writing gets better and their reading comprehension gets better. If you already have a writing program in place, just increasing that by 45 minutes a week to an hour can make a huge difference in terms of the effects of writing. The effects at the secondary level, not so much by increasing writing. We just finished a large meta-analysis with around 400 comparisons and we did not find an effect for increasing writing. However, about 75% of the studies had writing as an integral part of what they did. And so I'm not saying kids shouldn't write, but it was embedded with other things like teaching strategies for planning, revising, etc. But I think kids need to write, they need to write for a variety of purposes, and they also need to write for real reasons , for real audiences. Most kids think of writing as writing for their teacher. And that's okay sometimes, but we need to write for ourselves, we need to write for others, and kids are really good at telling when something's not for real. I think the worst example I've ever seen of this was a curriculum that will go unnamed here that had kids write a letter that never went anywhere.
Susan Lambert:Oh man.
Dr. Steve Graham:So <laugh>, kids need to write. A second thing is while they write, we can help them a lot if we support them. And so there are multiple ways of supporting them. So one is through pre-writing activities where they read to gather information or we give them a little bit of instruction that helps them use graphic organizers to generate ideas and to organize them. Using digital tools that have supports in them, that give them feedback or help them with planning in some way or have spell checkers. That supports kids as they write. Giving them feedback as long as we don't go crazy. Sometimes we give too much and we give both positive and constructive feedback, that can make a difference as well. Being really clear about the goals that we're asking kids to achieve. If they know what we're looking for, they're more likely to give us that. So being very clear upfront, for the amount of time it takes is one of the most important things that you can do. A third thing is we need to teach and you know, there's a lot we could teach. We need to be smart about what that is. So we know that with younger kids, we need to teach transcription skills, handwriting, spelling, and typing. And for some kids that may have to go on for a little bit longer, there is evidence that even into middle school, teaching kids who find spelling challenging can be useful. I'm not sure that teaching handwriting throughout middle school and high school is all that useful. You start looking for ways of circumventing those problems like speech-to-text synthesis, etc. We need to be sure that we teach kids how to construct more sentences, more vastly. And sentence combining is probably the best way of doing that that we have currently. And with, sentence combining, we take smaller sentences, we model how to combine those into more complex sentences. Students practice doing that together and then they write stuff where they use those types of sentences that they're learning or they go to their text and revise. We need to teach kids what are the basic purposes and building elements of different genres. And we need to teach kids strategies for planning, drafting, revising, and editing. And that tends to work best if it's genre-specific as kids move through the grades.
Susan Lambert:Can I stop you there because you said something about the sentence level writing and sentence combining and the importance of teaching writing sentences. I feel like that's really overlooked.
Dr. Steve Graham:It is . So if you look at common core, you don't see it anywhere. And here's a way of thinking about that sentence level stuff. If you watch a writer, a more mature writer, write, I would say 80 to 90% of their cognitive effort is at the sentence level. When I write, my time is more spent at the sentence level than anywhere else. I have a general idea of what I'm gonna do, and what I'm gonna say when I approach a paragraph. Where I'm really spending my time and resource efforts is putting that into the vessels in words that I think will convey my intended meaning well to the audience. When you ask about transcription skills as being something that we haven't done a good job of emphasizing, I would say sentence instruction has also been de-emphasized. I'm gonna share a little something with you, even though it's an aside. We published a report with Carnegie called Writing Next , which was a meta-analysis with kids in grades four to 12. And we found a negative effect for grammar instruction. What that meant was that teaching grammar didn't actually make writers poor writers, it just meant whatever else was being done worked better. And, you know, we presented it, but we didn't have it out there in the front because we were afraid that's all that the press would see. So what all did the press see? That's what they saw. It didn't matter that it was kind of tucked away somewhere else. Now I'll also say on that, in our new meta-analysis with secondary students, we changed it around a little bit. So we didn't treat control conditions that had grammar instruction that was often very poorly done as a treatment condition, and we found that grammar instruction actually had a positive effect, in terms of both grammar and the quality of students' writing. But I think one reason teachers really like that is they don't feel comfortable with grammar themselves. And if somebody says, it doesn't make an effect, that means, hey, maybe I don't need to teach this. But the evidence now shows that if you have grammar miscues in your writing, it's gonna influence how people see your writing and the quality of it. And I think the newer evidence suggests that you can make a difference for students in their writing if you help them become better at sentence construction, grammar, vocabulary, etc.
Susan Lambert:Is it true then that grammar instruction should be in the ... so when you teach how to write a sentence or you focus instruction at the sentence level, you can embed that grammar instruction within that focus at the sentence level?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. And so that's been part of the problem with grammar instruction in the past is that, we define something for kids, an adjective is blank, blank, blank. And then we might show them an example of that, and then we have them fill in blanks with sentences where they pick between the right adjective or add one, and then they never do it in their writing, you know? So they often don't realize that this is something for writing. A better approach would be, having them help you define what that definition is for an adjective. And you could do that quite easily by saying, you know, can anybody think of words that are describing words for a place, for a person, for a thing. And then that gives you the thing to collectively, with your kids, define what it is. And then, take a kernel sentence that doesn't have adjectives in it and model how you could put it in there , but also talk about too many adjectives, like Wayne said. You wanna kill some of them if there's too many of them . And then have them write stuff with another kid and then share and talk about how they've used the adjectives, and then do it in their own writing as well . And go back and revise. That way you ensure generalization and it's done by showing and practice, the kind of explicit instructional things that we know that work quite well.
Susan Lambert:Yeah . Yeah . Okay. Sorry. Thanks for taking that little turn.
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah, no, no, no. It's a good aside on this. So, you know, in addition to writing, supporting, and teaching, I would also say, I'm gonna change the order a little bit. We want to create a community in which kids can thrive as writers and take risk. And this is really from watching really exceptional teachers teach. Their kids write a lot , their writing is displayed in various ways. If they're young kids all across the classroom, they might, have older kids be displayed in anthologies, etc. But, you know, writing in these classrooms are valued. Kids are encouraged to take risk . These things don't always turn out quite right, but we expect students to be able to achieve and we challenge them to do so within their capabilities, which is not an easy thing to do. We're positive about what each other does, etc. So we want to create a community in which kids can thrive and grow as writers. Now that's not based on these kind of experimental and quasi-experimental studies, but boy it's clearly what we see exceptional teachers do. And then finally, we want to connect reading, writing, and learning. So reading and writing need to be much better connected for the reasons we said earlier than they currently are, both in the classroom and curriculum materials that are available to teachers. And we want to make sure that we're using reading and writing for the functional purposes of learning because they make a huge difference. They're really the basic building blocks around which we acquire and understand information.
Susan Lambert:Mm-hmm . That's great. Oh , there's a lot there. <laugh>. Is there anything that has been left unsaid that you'd like to share with our listeners when we're thinking about writing?
Dr. Steve Graham:Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that is a challenge for teachers is that for those who have come through schools of education , we do national surveys with teachers in first grade to 12th grade. We've done 'em in the U.S. , China, Norway, and Chile. And we get kind of the same results. Teachers do not feel that the academy, colleges of education have done a good job of preparing them to teach writing. And usually when we ask more pointed questions, what we find is that the majority of the teachers had one night or two nights where writing was emphasized in a literacy course. So, you know, they don't always feel comfortable in their own skins as writers, and they haven't learned much through the academy in terms of how to teach this. And so I think this is a place, being a member of the academy, where we failed teachers, we have not done an adequate job on this. So that places a lot of responsibilities on three collaborators with teachers, although we don't always think of them as collaborators. One is teachers themselves, you know ? I mean, obviously one way that you can learn more about something is making this a goal for you and engaging in it and learning more, s eeing other teachers teach, be critical of what they do in your own head < laugh>,, but see what you can draw from them. Yeah. Look at the literature that's written for teachers around evidence-based practices to draw methods from there and try things out and be critical o f whether they're working for your kids or not, and how you might have to modify t hem. A second thing is, I think because so many teachers, 50% come outside of schools of education, so let's say schools of education, w e're doing a great job. You still have 50% of teachers that are coming from somewhere else. This puts a great responsibility on schools to help their teachers move forward as good literacy teachers and strong writing teachers. And so I think that should be right on the top, you know, if I was an administrator, that would be right at the top of my thinking, given that writing can improve reading and learning and writing is important in its own right. A third kind of thing here is that companies that develop materials for teachers, Basal readers as an example of this, you know, for a lot of teachers in this country , literacy instruction is driven by Basal materials. And so I think these companies have done a good job of saying, okay, we need to concentrate on evidence-based practice. But often what I see is that these evidence-based practices are watered down , when you see them. So in something like writing, where we know that if you teach students strategies for how to plan a persuasive text, in our own work with self-regulated strategy development, we have kids write multiple texts over time, applying the strategy, perfecting their use of it. And what we see in commercial materials is that, you know, you get it one week, you try it out once, you'll see a little bit of modeling, and the assumption is, is that kids have internalized it and mastered it. And so it takes a different way of thinking about this for some of these complex skills like in reading comprehension and writing strategies, we need to extend out the amount of practice and modeling that goes on. And I haven't seen that in many commercial materials. So I think commercial material developers can also do a better job of this as well, because in many ways they're probably the most prominent collaborators of teachers in the classroom.
Susan Lambert:Yeah , that makes sense. Wow . Well that's really great advice. There is so much wisdom in this episode as we knew there would, be as you are one of the prominent researchers here in the world of writing. But we have one final question that's really important before I let you go. So you said that you're in a mystery phase right now in terms of your reading. Is there any recommendations you wanna leave us with?
Dr. Steve Graham:The Gamache series that's set in Canada.
Susan Lambert:Okay.
Dr. Steve Graham:In Montreal, particularly French Montreal, and mostly occurs in a small town called Three Pines. I'm not gonna remember the name of the author for some reason. Tony Hillerman, set in the Southwest, mostly on the Navajo or the Hopi reservation. And the main characters are indigenous police officers. Those would be two that I truly love.
Susan Lambert:Well, thank you so much for that. That was an out-of-the blue question. I know. So that wasn't fair, <laugh> .
Dr. Steve Graham:Okay . Well, thank you for asking me to do this today.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time , and thank you for the work that you're doing to help our teachers understand what's important about writing.
Speaker 3:Much appreciated.
Susan Lambert:Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Steve Graham, a Regents and the Warner Professor in the division of Leadership and Innovation at Teachers College at Arizona State University. We'll have links in the show notes to a number of useful resources from Graham , including a practice guide from the What Works Clearinghouse. Please subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We'd also be grateful if you rated us and left us a review. You can find information on all of Amplify is podcasts at amplify.com/hub. Science of Reading. The podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. Next time on the show, we're hearing from another luminary in the field of literacy research. Dr. Sally Shaywitz.
Dr. Sally Shaywitz:When you have something, but it doesn't have a name, it leads to anxiety. And so when you know that you have something and it has a name and many people have it who are intelligent, that makes such a difference.
Susan Lambert:That's next time on Science of Reading the podcast. Thanks so much for listening.