Statement of Problem
Connie, a pre-service teacher, is sitting with me in my office at the university. Normally, she is the picture of confidence. She has a great smile, using wit and humor to her advantage. Just a day ago, I asked Connie to meet with me in my office to discuss one of her assignments. The paper was handwritten with answers to questions covering a chapter. There were several spelling and grammatical errors. Connie’s confidence is fading, and now she is very flushed. She looks at me sadly. “I’m not good at grammar or spelling,” she whispers. Connie is not alone. She is just one of the many students that lacked the necessary writing skills with whom I held a conference during my first semester at the university. I wanted to learn why there were so many pre-service teachers without these skills and what we could do about it.
As a first-year assistant professor in the Department of Early, Elementary, and Special Education, I looked forward to teaching my first class in reading. As the semester proceeded, I became quite aware of the
students’ lack of skill with various writing conventions. I read their writings, which included lesson plans, reflections, end-of-chapter questions/answers, and essays. I found many of the students made the same errors such as spelling, subject-verb agreement, singular/plural possessives, and parallel sentence structure, just to mention a few. In this time of increased demands from standards and testing, what were once considered the best teaching practices in schools, such as specific grammar instruction, seemed to be brushed aside.
In my experience, it seems the emphasis in P-12 schooling has centered more on creative writing with less emphasis on the mechanics of writing. Some of my first thoughts regarding the lack of spelling skills were that the students did not take the time to use the computer's spell-check. That came to a sudden halt when students began telling me that they did not know the difference between some of the homophones. If it had been taught, they did not retain it. Other grossly-evident areas of concern were incorrect use of plurals, plural possessives, and singular possessives. Many times I either made the correction for the students or circled the word and wrote “incorrect use of possessive,” only to see it appear again and again.
I decided that just correcting the students’ papers was not the answer. “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life,” (Chinese proverb) was my guiding principle to help these students with something they should have mastered earlier than their junior year in college. I began by holding a conference with students who had exhibited the most difficulty. They immediately told me they were not taught grammar in high school. They said they took dual-credit and advanced placement (AP) courses. I am certain they did take those courses and probably did well. The concen-tration was not on mechanics; it was on content, literature, and creative writing because there are strong connections between the reading and writing processes and because researchers tell us instruction in one will enhance learning in the other (Smith, 1998; DiStefano & Killion, 1984); the challenge is to implement the reading-writing connection by integrating instruction.
Certainly the most common form of integrated instruction is an increase in student knowledge from reading. The newly learned information is then used when they write. Reading and writing are also connected when the writer responds to reading (Sarmecanic, 1996). Integrated reading-writing instruction
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