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Putting writing before reading
is an effective approach to teaching and learning.
The expression "writing and reading"
violates the habitual rhythm of our tongues. We usually say
"reading and writing," so it sounds as though I'm putting the
cart before the horse. But I call writing the horse. Nothing can
be read unless it was first written.
Consider this scene. First graders in
their classroom are writing stories--or rather drawing pictures
and writing pieces of their stories underneath each picture.
Here's part of one story:
A picture with two human figures.
Text: "Me and Mommy went to Star Market."
An obscure picture of two shapes
intersecting. Text: "I opened the car door and it bumped the car
next to us."
A picture of two human figures with
lots of bubbles coming out of one of their faces. Text: "The man
shouted at Mommy."
I standardized the text of this story.
What the student actually wrote for the first picture was this:
"me an mommmy wn to staa maaktt." Besides the spelling problems,
the letters vary wildly in size and wander around the picture;
there are often no spaces between words (see Calkins, 1983).
Nevertheless, every word is there, and the child can read it
back to you word for word (as long as you don't wait too long to
ask). A teacher or parent who gets to know that child's tricks
of spelling can pretty reliably read the writing.
Teachers or parent helpers often
compile these pictures and type the text in standard "grown-up"
spelling, then bind the pages together with a hard cover to make
a book. Students "write" multiple books during the year, which
the teacher displays in a prominent spot in the classroom
library. Students learn to read by reading their own and their
classmates' books. This scene is happening in many kindergarten,
1st grade, and 2nd grade classrooms. I'd call it the most
far-reaching change in education--in our very conception of
literacy--that has happened in centuries.
First graders are not well positioned
for reading: They can read only the words they have learned to
read or sound out--a fairly small lexicon. But they are
beautifully positioned for writing: They can write all the words
they can say. Even younger children who don't know the alphabet
can write if they have seen other people write: They just
scribble, scribble, scribble--but with meaning, and they can
"read" their writing back to you. All that's needed is to invite
them to use invented spelling or kid spelling, whatever letters
come easily.
Once this door is opened, teachers
find that it helps teach reading. The process of writing helps
children comprehend written language and control letters and
texts, an understanding that they need for reading. Children no
longer think of books as something impersonal--like arithmetic
workbooks--written by a corporate, faceless "they." They realize
that books are the products of people like themselves trying to
communicate with other people like themselves.
Donald Graves and several others
deserve enormous credit for this discovery: Very young children
can write before they can read, can write more than they can
read, and can write more easily than they can read--because they
can write anything they can say (Calkins, 1983; Graves, 1983;
Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Sowers, 1982). Why did it take
us so long to discover this root, brute fact? Plenty of children
through the ages must have scribbled meaningful writing before
they could read or spell. Plenty of grown-ups must have noticed.
But somehow no one really noticed; or else they noticed and
called it aberrant or wrong.
We could blame our blindness on the
phrase "reading and writing," but that phrase--and the sequence
it implies--merely encapsulates a deep cultural construction
embedded in everyday language. The word literacy literally means
power over letters--that is, over both writing and reading. But
used casually (and in government policy and legislation),
literacy tends to mean reading, not writing. The words academic,
professor, and even teacher tend to connote a reader and critic
more than a writer, so deeply has the dominance of reading
infected our ways of thinking.
The word learning also tends to
connote reading and input--not writing and output. Our very
conception of learning favors reading over writing because the
concepts of learning and reading draw on the same root metaphor.
Learning is input: taking things in, putting things inside us.
People think of listening and reading--not talking and
writing--as the core activities in school. (An old tradition has
not fully disappeared: Talking is the crime and writing the
punishment.) If we stop to think about it, we will realize that
students learn from output--talking and writing. But we don't
naturally think of learning as talking and writing. Notice, for
example, how many teachers consider assessment or testing as
measuring input rather than output. Tests tend to ask, in
effect, "How well have you learned others' ideas?"
When I ask about a more
writing-friendly model of assessment, educators suggest
questions like this: "How well can students build new thoughts
out of what they have studied?" That's a good model--yet notice
how it's still a covert test of input. We need to stretch our
cultural habits to realize that we could also have tests that
ask, "What new ideas can the student come up with?" Such a model
may seem to be an inadequate test of learning, yet it would in
fact measure learning and reflect skills that students need for
school, work, and life.
In most school and college courses,
reading is more central than writing. There is usually only one
writing course: some kind of "freshman writing workshop." A
sprinkling of creative writing or other advanced writing courses
is available to comparatively few students. Departments other
than English and journalism typically have no writing courses at
all.
Of course, writing is assigned in many
courses across many disciplines, although some students in large
universities manage to avoid writing for their entire college
career. But when writing is assigned, it traditionally serves
reading: The student summarizes, interprets, explains,
integrates, or makes comparisons among readings.
Our sense of reading as the horse and
of writing as the cart derives from a metaphor of learning that
students are vessels to Fill with knowledge. But if we put the
real horse forward and emphasize writing, we make use of a
better metaphor: Learning is the making of meaning. This helps
explain much that is otherwise paradoxical. For example, the
more we write and talk, the more we have to write and say. The
greater the number of words that come out of us, the greater the
number of words we find left inside. And when students feel
empty--"I have nothing to say, nothing on my mind"--the cause is
not insufficient input but insufficient output. Talking and
writing put words and thoughts into students' heads. These facts
are not contradictory when we understand that learning consists
of making new connections, and thus new meanings.
When we stop privileging reading over
writing and put the real horse--writing--in front, we stop
privileging passivity over activity. I grant the usefulness of
the currently fashionable formulations: that reading is "really
writing" (actively creating meaning), and writing is "really
reading" (passively finding what culture and history have
inscribed in our heads). These formulations carry genuine and
useful truth, but in the end, writing promotes more
psychological and physical engagement than reading.
For example, reading tends to imply,
"Sit still and pay attention," whereas writing tends to imply,
"Get in there and do something." Reading means that the teacher
and the author chose the words; writing means that the student
chose the words. Reading asks, "What did they have to say?",
whereas writing asks, "What do you have to say?" Reading is
consumption; writing is production. Putting reading first
encourages passivity by locating agency and authority away from
the student, keeping it in the teacher or the institution. It
locks schools into sending students a pervasive message: Don't
speak until spoken to, and don't write your own ideas until you
prove you can correctly reproduce the ideas of others. When we
make writing as important as reading, however, we help students
break out of their characteristically passive stance in school
and learning.
We also shouldn't overlook the
importance of the physical dimension. Students are more awake
and involved after they write than after they read. The next
time a class discussion turns listless, stop and have everyone
read a helpful piece of text. But notice how much more energized
students become if--in the same situation--you ask them to write
for a few minutes. The physical dimension can even enliven
reading. Reading out loud--especially if the student uses
gestures--has a positive influence on cognition.
Reading's dominance is linked to a
cultural fear: "We must put reading before writing--input before
output--or else we'll invite romantic solipsism and rampant
individualism. Students will disappear into cocoons of
isolation." This fear rests on a model of individual development
that most readers of this journal will recognize as misguided--a
kind of parody of Freud and Piaget: "Children start out as
egocentric little monads dominated by the desire to stay
separate and egocentric. They cannot become 'decentered' or
social without a terrible struggle." It's as though we fear that
our students are each in their own little bathrooms, and we must
beat on the door and say, "What are you doing in there? Why have
you been in there so long with the door locked? Come out and
have some wholesome fun with us!"
A different model of development that
derives from thinkers like George Herbert Meade, Mikhail
Bakhtin, and Lev Vygotsky now seems more acceptable: Our
children start out social and intertwined. Their little selves
are not hermetically sealed atoms; instead, they are deeply
enmeshed in the important figures in their lives. We don't have
to struggle to make children connect with others--they already
are naturally connected. We don't have to bang on the bathroom
door to make them listen to, collaborate with, and feel part of
the people and cultural forces around them. They may not want to
listen to us, but that doesn't make them private and
solipsistic. (It's usually the more private and solipsistic kids
who listen best to us teachers.)
Separateness and autonomy are not
qualities that children start out with but rather qualities they
gradually achieve--a process marked by struggle and setbacks
throughout adolescence and young adulthood. It can be a slow and
difficult process for individuals to achieve that sense of self
that enables them to think and act in ways that their community
may disapprove of. Writing, in this instance, is a particularly
powerful tool for helping adolescents listen, reflect, converse
with themselves, and tackle both cultural messages and peer
pressures.
Students invariably read better if
they write first--if they start by writing their own thoughts
about a topic that the class will tackle in a text. Even if the
topic is scientific, factual, or technical, and students know
little or nothing about it, I tell them, "Write your hunches
about this topic--even your fantasies. What do you wish were
true?"
For example, before having students
read an essay about dropping out of school, I might ask them to
freewrite about whether they think the number of dropouts has
gone up or down in recent decades--and speculate about the
causes of dropping out. Before reading an analysis of
environmental degradation and a proposal on how to deal with it,
students might speculate about the causes and suggest solutions
of their own. Before conducting an experiment that involves
rolling balls of different weights down inclined planes,
students might speculate about the results. Starting with
writing rather than reading highlights how learning and thinking
work best: as a process of hypothesis making and hypothesis
adjustment in which the mind is active rather than passive.
After writing their hunches, students
are more attentive to what the author wrote--sometimes out of
mere curiosity to see how well their ideas match the material.
This kind of writing also makes students braver about
questioning an alleged authority. For example, when students are
asked to read an interpretation of something they find
far-fetched--such as a strongly Marxist or psychoanalytic "take"
or some "overintellectual" explanation--they often just tune out
and say to themselves, "This is nuts!" If they write first and
try to work out a hypothesis of their own, they may in fact be
more resistant to the text, but they will at least be engaged in
the problem--which just doesn't happen when they say, "This is
nuts!" Now they have an intellectual relationship to the ideas
in the text.
The previous examples focused on
content. A comparable approach can help students better
understand the forms that writing takes. If we are studying
imaginative writing (fiction, poetry, or literary nonfiction), I
have students try out the forms that I want them to understand.
They might tell the story as a flashback, or tell it through the
eyes of an unreliable narrator, or use a certain stanza.
Students find this writing less intimidating if they do it as a
low-stakes, playful exercise before reading the "great work of
art." As they get braver, they can write at greater length after
discussing the published piece.
Before we read pieces of analytic or
academic writing, I ask students to experiment with various
forms: a frankly partisan argument in which they reveal
themselves openly; an argument that strives to be dispassionate
in which they try to keep themselves out; an analysis that tries
to clarify and understand a complexity rather than make an
argument. As we self-consciously try out these forms--sometimes
as playful exercises, sometimes as serious revised
essays--students learn to read more intelligently.
We saw how writing helps 1st graders
learn the difficult process of reading. Writing can help
students at the college level as well, by providing them with a
metacognitive understanding of the nature of the reading
process. Most students have been taught by writing teachers to
draft, get feedback, and revise (even if many of them skip this
sequence when they can). Most students can see how writing is a
process of slowly constructed meaning, often socially negotiated
through feedback. They have learned that clarity is not what we
start with but what we work toward. Fewer students are prey to
the once-common myth that good writers sit down and immediately
produce excellent writing out of some magical genius place in
their heads.
But reading is much quicker and more
hidden than writing. Students are therefore more prey to the
myth that reading is a process in which experts look at texts
and immediately see perfectly formed meanings hidden
there--meanings that ordinary folk can't see. Students have a
harder time understanding that reading is just like writing: a
process of cognitive (and social) construction in which everyone
builds up meanings from cues in the text, using as building
blocks the word meanings already inside readers' heads. Just as
in writing, clarity is not what we start with in reading but
what we work toward.
We can use writing to help students
comprehend this concept. When they understand it, they read
better. What helps clarify the process is capturing elusive
"rough drafts of reading"--what I call "movies of the reader's
mind." I present a text in fragments. After each fragment, I
have students quickly write down everything that's going on in
their minds: their reactions, their interpretations. For
example, after being given the title and the first several
sentences of a text, a student might write, "It seems to be
about X. Some kind of analysis or story or argument. I have a
hunch that I'm going to like this piece." After reading the next
couple of paragraphs, the student might write, "Oh, now I see
it's doing something different from what I thought. It's making
me think of X and Y, and it's reminding me of Z
from my past experience [my past reading]." I try for three to
five interruptions of this kind, regardless of the length of the
piece. I also have students record changes in their reactions
and interpretations after they read the piece a second time. The
reflective writing after the first fragment might take only two
minutes--but the writings get longer with subsequent fragments.
This process flushes out the misreadings and wrong takes that
are inevitable even with expert readers. It often helps for the
teacher to be the guinea pig for the class and record movies of
his or her mind with a text encountered for the first time (see
Curtis, 2001).
I'm not arguing that reading is less
important than writing. Nor am I saying, "Let's put writing
first because students already read well." Many students are
remarkably bad at reading. But weakness in reading often stems
from neglect of writing. Students will put more care and
attention into reading when they have had more of a chance to
write what's on their minds and when they have been given more
opportunities to assume the role of writer. This is not an
either/or argument, and the writing/reading connection is not a
zero-sum game.
PHOTO (COLOR)
??? Calkins, L. M.
(1983). Lessons from a child on the teaching and learning of
writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
??? Curtis, M.
(2001). The original text-wrestling book. Dubuque, IA:
Kendall/Hunt.
??? Graves, D.
(1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
??? Harste, J.,
Woodward, V., & Burke, C. (1984). Language stories and learning
lessons. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
??? Sowers, S.
(1982). Reflect, expand, select: Three responses in the writing
conference. In T. Newkirk & N. Atwell (Eds.), Understanding
writing: Ways of observing, learning, and teaching. Chelmsford,
MA: Northeast Regional Exchange.
~~~~~~~~
By Peter
Elbow
Peter
Elbow is Emeritus Professor of English at the
University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the
author of Writing Without Teachers (Oxford University Press,
1973), Embracing Contraries (Oxford University Press, 1986),
Writing with Power (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Everyone
Can Write (Oxford University Press, 2000). He is coauthor with
Patricia Belanoff of the textbook Being a Writer (McGraw-Hill,
2003). |
