Is reading important to improving writing?
Many people have stressed the importance of writing practice. A teacher may give students a lot of writnig homework in the hope of improving student’s writing skills quickly. Of course, it is natural for students to do a lot of writing in a writing class. My question: Can students improve writing without doing enough reading?
Based on my own experiences as a novice and expert learner, as well as my reading of educational research, I am convinced the processes of acquiring literacy skills are closely related. The answer to your question is no. Students need to do a lot of reading to become better writers. By experiencing good writing in multiple forms, students construct both the schema as well as skills to become better writers themselves. Modeling is vital. The good news is that when students become more motivated to write, as many do when they are able to write for an authentic audience via a blog, they end up spending much more “time on task” in both reading and writing. When students are spending more time reading and writing, my sense is that they can’t help but develop better skills in both areas.
Comment by Wesley Fryer — October 9, 2006 @ 11:24
hello
my name is Abeer. I’m from Sultanate of Oman in Arabian Gulf. I think that reading is very important to improving our writing skills. Without reading, we cannot write and even speak well. So, I think reading is playing an important role in learning any language.
Comment by Abeer — November 1, 2006 @ 16:10
I absolutly agree that reading and writing are very connected to each other. If you cannot read, how you can write? On the contrary, if you cannot write, how you can read. Of course you can master the foreign language without special writing and reading skills, but you will know the language only in speaking part and if you will speak only with people, you will get and give all kinds of information through the conversation, maybe TV, even using the radio. And how about other very impotant kinds of information:documents, records, all kind of bills, newspapers, magazins, books. Without good reading and writing skills you cannot receive 90% of the information in modern world. You cannot communicate with other people with the help of, for example, the Internet. You cannot use any libraries, you cannot prepeare any special documents, you cannot impove your education, all doors of all colleges and universities will be closed to you.Therefore , my conclusion: if you want to be successful, you must have good writing and reading skills. Good Luck.
Comment by MikhailG — November 8, 2006 @ 12:17
How do You do! My name is carm from Philippines. For Me writing and reading are the same important. But how we can improve this at the same time if we don’t help ourselves.? I would like to say thanks to all the members of ESL writing because they giving a chance to all the people want to share their knowlege for writing.
Comment by Asianacarm — March 29, 2007 @ 13:34
Reading is very important to people all over the world because it can improve your knowledge and know to communicate with other foriegner. On the other hand, some documents need to spend long time to read it if you want to correlty about it.
Comment by Sam bonel — May 8, 2007 @ 04:32
I believe that reading and writing are linked together and can’t be separated. If we need to develop any of them, we have to develop the other. Reading can help me in improving my speaking skills more e.g in presentations, meetings, negotiations and conferences. While writing can help me in communicating through the internet or between my colleagues at work e.g in documents and letters.
From my experience as an English student, I could say that on reading one can acquire new vocabulary and structure that could not help him in writing only but even in grammar. That’s why practicing reading ,in my point of view, could create a difference for english learners around the world whatever their level or their mother language is.
Comment by Talaat Abd Al zaher Eid — May 25, 2007 @ 08:46
Listening,Rrading and Writing are the three sides which form the languge triangle. so every side is linked to the other one. In my openion ,more reading inrich us by new vocabulary,grammers,sentences and so on. To improve your skills in writing you should be good at reading, because it is like any system equation ,reading as an input and writing is the output.
Reading is not ony for english books but it is imoprtant to read magazines,news papers,stories and so on.
Finally i would like to say that we can make reading not only as asource of improving our ability of writing but also as ahabiit.
Comment by nasser kamel mohammed ali — June 1, 2007 @ 11:22
I used to give lmy Thai EFl students lots of writing assignments without providing them enough reading sources and the result was a disaster. People cant write well enough without ample reading because they haven’t surveyed what the others have siad about that topic. An individual cant generate complex intuition by themselves without interacting with the others. Just like a child can’t learn a human language if he/she has no aural/verbal input from the other human.
Comment by tessie — June 20, 2007 @ 19:20
I used to give lmy Thai EFl students lots of writing assignments without providing them enough reading sources and the result was a disaster. People cant write well enough without ample reading because they haven’t surveyed what the others have said about that topic. An individual cant generate complex intuition by themselves without interacting with the others. Just like a child can’t learn a human language if he/she has no aural/verbal input from the other human.
Comment by tessie — June 20, 2007 @ 19:20
Reading is significant if one has to improve one’s command over the language. It helps in building a strong vocabulary. I have seen that people who read a lot, can speak with ease. Writing is altogether a different skill set. While writing we have to formal in our communication. Writing is far tough than reading, because one has to master the rules of grammar.
Comment by Yamini — April 10, 2008 @ 07:37