Does Writing Improve Reading Skills

Parent Cafe
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<p>

[quote]

  1. having undergone education: educated people.
  2. characterized by or displaying qualities of culture and learning.
  3. based on some information or experience: an educated estimate of next year’s sales.
    <a href=“dictionary.com”>/quote</a></p>

<p>I mean, ultimately, educated means having an education. There’s no value implicit in that; you seem to be adding one from a slanted view of the word. The word “educated” doesn’t imply what kind, or what its source is; it’s basically the opposite of “uneducated” (sorry, tautology alert! :)). I think that’s a fairly mainstream understanding of the word, isn’t it?</p>

<p>( not meaning to be argumentative, I just don’t see the negative value implicit in the word, so I’m puzzled. But I’ll leave out the winky symbol, myself.)</p>

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<p>Wrestle with it a while. Or you can do like I’m going to and get out and enjoy the sunshine instead, provided you’re getting a slice of it there in NJ today, too. :)</p>

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<p>Nothing to wrestle, as far as I can see (perhaps that shows how unejumicated I am. Biked all morning. It’s gorgeous here.</p>

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<p>One type of writing that has been found to improve reading comprehension is “sentence combining” - exercises in sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. By doing these types of exercises, students practice pulling the meaning out of the sentences and developing better “syntax dexterity”. Typically sentence combining uses the works of sophisticated writers as models, which gives students exposure to complex sentence structures.</p>

<p>Research has supported the benefits of sentence combining, and intuitively it makes sense to me.</p>

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<p>^^^^It makes sense to me too, but I can’t imagine myself every doing it or asking students to do it. If I’m going to do things like that I might just as well do Calculus because it comes from THAT part of my brain, not my intuitive, language rich part. </p>

<p>Translation: Too lazy as a person and as a teacher.</p>

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<p>When I was in spanish 1 during 9th grade, we had to write two papers en espanol. nice, 4-5 page long papers. Most clases didn’t even have you writing 5 page papers in english yet alone in another language. To this day I still think that thinking through the process of how to conjugate my words in different tenses helped me not only learn spanish quicker but also with reading. Prior to that I’d read it and have to ‘translate’ the tenses in my head…but after writing them out time and time again I would read it and know instantly what it was. Obviously this is more elementary as it’s to do with learning a new language as opposed to your native tongue, but I do believe it helps your reading skills. To this day I still read ESPN.com in Spanish just to keep ‘sharp’ with it. :)</p>