Writing One's Way into Reading

Despite research and theory to the contrary, approaches to the teaching of reading continue to reflect a transmission model of reading, focused on the retrieval of information from a text. This model prevents students from experiencing reading as an active, exploratory process, one that involves the making of meaning. It thus denies them their transactions with a text and the realization that reading involves such transactions. In order to give students experiences with reading that demonstrate the ways in which readers engage, contribute to, and make connections with texts, writing needs to be fully integrated with reading. Writing, because of its heuristic, generative, and recursive nature, allows students to write their way into reading and to discover that reading shares much in common with writing, that reading, too, is an act of composing. It has become commonplace to characterize the act of writing as a meaning making, purposeful, evolving, recursive, dialogic, tentative, fluid, exploratory process. Recent research and theory in reading have shown us that these terms can be applied as well to the act of reading, for like writing, reading is characterized by active engagement through which meaning is created. But although there have been ongoing attempts to incorporate the implications of writing research and theory into the classroom, the teaching of reading seems to be less responsive to what we know about the process of reading, perhaps because it is difficult to reconcile the kinds of outward performance and demonstrations required by schooling with the internal experience of reading.