The Contribution of Reading Abilities to the Writing Quality of Expository Text Structure in Hebrew Speaking Elementary School Children

Abstract

Three decades of inquiry have explored the nature of the relationship between writing and reading, yielding at least three theoretical models (interactive, socio-cognitive, and separate processing), numerous perspectives within each model, and a wide range of research methodologies to support or refute these theories. Texts in general and written texts in particular, must have content (i.e., the information depicted in the text) and structure (i.e., the way this information is organized), both constructs are interrelated and essential in the construction of a good expository text. For example, reading research has shown that awareness of text structure contributes to reading fluency, and assists the construction of a coherent mental representation of the text structure improving (Williams JP, Journal of Special Education 39:6–18, 2005) or hampering (Williams, Literacy in the curriculum: integrating text structure and content area instruction. In: McNamara DS (ed) Reading comprehension strategies theories, interventions, and technologies. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hoboken, pp 199–220, 2007) comprehension. Drawing on different aspects of each of these theories, this study explores the relations between reading and writing abilities in elementary school children, in middle class integrative schools in central Israel. Our assumption that a high-quality written text contains the various structural components in accordance with the genre requirements was corroborated. We conclude that the indicators that relate to text-structure-quality of different text genres is dynamic and its development is age-dependent.