As literacy levels among children decline nationally and globally, strategies are needed to turn this around. It is said that we learn ‘to do by doing’. So, if children are to improve their writing they need to write. However, in my experience many students are afraid to write because they fear they may not be able to write to a standard required. This fear of failure feeds anxiety and cripples motivation. One key way this anxiety can be reduced is through ensuring that children are reading.
Reading before writing
To improve a child’s writing, parents and educators need to ensure that young people are reading. Reading is an essential key required to improve the child’s writing. This might seem odd. However, once the benefits of reading are fully understood, the huge effect on writing can be appreciated.
Benefits of reading
There are numerous purported and reported benefits of reading. Some of these benefits include boosting thinking, assisting to build emotional resilience, providing situational awareness, improving speaking and articulation, improving both intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, boosting creativity and critical thinking, boosting a child’s academic autonomy, and boosting writing confidence (including vocabulary, grammar, understanding of syntax rules). There is also a link between writing in exams and the reading students do prior to the exam. The studies suggest how well students perform in exams can be correlated with their time spent reading.
Reading to boost thinking
Thinking involves a range of cognitive functions and processes. Reading as a process acts as a cognitive stimulus and strengthens thinking. In a study undertaken at Emory University, the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of students both before and after reading was found by researchers to increase connections within the brain. The scans revealed heightened neural activity for days afterwards. Separate researchers state that reading can boost memory and aid in the capacity for analysis. Regular reading can also improve the capacity to focus and concentrate without restlessness. This will deepen a child’s understanding.
Reading to build emotional resilience
Reading can help students find connections with characters they would not otherwise meet and with whom they can form a connection unavailable in the world. Some children may find ‘friends’ in the characters they read about. These connections can be a source of strength. A child can have a secret conversational ally from the characters they read about in books.
Emotional growth
Through reading, a child can learn the ‘language of emotion’. It can assist them to identify and name feelings. This is extremely important when children may have been taught to disassociate or compartmentalise. Reading about the feelings experienced by characters in books can be enlightening as children can realise, they are not alone. They can feel normalised, included, have deepened self-understanding, and also learn the basis on which to manage themselves. In these ways, reading can provide students with role models of emotional regulation.
Reading to develop situational awareness
Reading improves overall understanding of situations and characters. Situational understanding means an awareness of the factors affecting a situation and the context when making decisions within that situation. When events occur in stories, they occur in a context. The responses to different situations and scenarios faced by the characters in stories, help us to understand or comprehend whether their responses are appropriate, proportional, justified, likely and helpful. Exposure to situations a child reads about places them in a context where they mentally manage to find a response. This type of imagined scenario can help to develop insight into what can be done in the real world when faced with challenges.
Reading improves speaking and articulation
There is a strong relationship between reading and speaking skills. According to Norbaevna and Yuldashevna, there is no doubt that people who develop large reading vocabularies tend to develop large speaking vocabularies. How a child articulates as a result of their vocabulary will directly impact their writing.
Reading benefits both intrapersonal and interpersonal skills
A study by Bunce and Stansfield, confirmed that reading fictional stories is associated with the development of empathy in children. This link implies there is a nexus between the empathy felt for fictional characters and the ability to empathise with real people. This means that a child’s emotional understanding will be amplified, with implications on both understanding themselves and understanding others.
Reading provides a basis on which to be creative and solve complex problems
According to a study by Maghsoud and Nourdad, there is a relationship between reading comprehension ability and creative problem solving as measured on tests of creativity. This relationship is important as creativity can be the basis of solving complex problems.
Reading and the process of reading can boost a child’s academic autonomy
Reading is largely an individual activity. If children read independently, they tend to generate autonomy over time. This has a further academic benefit as it can mean a child will start to direct for themselves what they read, becoming independent researchers.
The benefits of reading are clear, however the effect on writing is crucial. According to Attyat, reading helps learners develop their writing experience by inspiring them, expanding their vocabulary, and improving their grammatical structure.
If we want children to become very good writers, the first step is to encourage and inspire them as readers. With the national decline in literacy and global interest in boosting learning, a focus on reading is essential. From a confident base as competent readers, we can encourage and support children to become capable, purposeful, and competent writers.
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