A Case Study of Two College Students’ Reading Strategies and Their Writing Styles

Zhanfang Li

doi:10.18533/journal.v5i7.972

Abstract

<p>The importance of integrating reading and writing has aroused many people’s interest, and how to bridge the gap between input (reading) and output (writing) is regarded as an urgent necessity. However, input does not equal to intake, and to achieve the stage of intake, the reader’s conscious attention to the input is necessary, which is commonly realized in the reading process, either by intensive reading (focus-on-form) or extensive reading (focus-on-meaning). Previous studies put more emphasis on extensive reading, while this study is based on the assumed different effects of reading strategies upon writing styles, that is, intensive reading may guarantee accurate writing and extensive reading may promote fluent writing. Therefore the relationship between two college students’ reading strategies and writing styles is the focus of this study. The research lasts for 16 months (August, 2014 - December, 2015), during which all their journal writing pieces, their term papers, together with their compositions in the final exams, are used as the written data, while materials concerned with their reading strategies are collected by a questionnaire, two interviews, as well as their written self-reflections. Results show that extensive reading with a subconscious focus-on-meaning tends to enhance the fluency of writing while intensive reading with a conscious focus-on-form is more likely to promote the writing accuracy. Findings suggest that production is based on intake, which is the result of either the subconscious or conscious attention to both the language meaning and language form. </p>

Highlights

The close relationship between reading and writing and the importance of combining readingLi, JAH (2016), Vol 05, No 07: 15-23 and writing has been emphasized and frequently discussed (Berninger, 2002; He, 2013; Zhang & Yang, 2010)
I can say that journal drives me to read”. Both Cathy and Sophia are regarded as good language learners, analyses of the data show that they possess different features in free writing, vocabulary learning, and time-specified writing, which correspond to their different reading styles
From what has been discussed, we can see that between reading and writing, language learners’ conscious or subconscious attention to both the form and meaning of the language guarantees the successful transition from input to intake

Summary

Introduction

The close relationship between reading and writing and the importance of combining readingLi, JAH (2016), Vol 05, No 07: 15-23 and writing has been emphasized and frequently discussed (Berninger, 2002; He, 2013; Zhang & Yang, 2010). Reading and writing are even regarded as equivalents in the sense that reading is "really writing" (actively creating meaning), and writing is "really reading" (passively finding what culture and history have inscribed in our heads), and weakness in reading often stems from neglect of writing (Elbow, 2004), and a large amount of reading can improve student writers’ fluency and accuracy in writing (Ji, 2009; Wang, 2015). The importance of the integration of reading and writing cannot be more revealed in its cultivation for critical thinking (Cavdar & Doe, 2012; Gao, 2013; Yang, 2010; Zhang, 2009a), for it is generally agreed that reading widely can improve the learners’ writing abilities, and in the process of writing, the logical thinking abilities will be enhanced. All the values and competencies of critical thinking are socially constructed and highly situated within different disciplines (Condon & Kelly-Riley, 2004), and meaning construction, the link between reading and writing, is the result of critical thinking (Gebhard et al, 2013)

Methods

Results

Conclusion