Second Language Perspectives on Reading in the Writing Classroom

Abstract

The ESL teaching profession is on the brink of an important new understanding of the connections between reading and writing. For many years reading and writing in ESL classrooms were taught separately and as technical skills. Reflecting audiolingual methodology, these two language acts were thought of as consisting of component language subskills that could be taught one by one until the student had mastered all the pieces and, consequently, reading and writing. In this formulation, reading was rightly understood as a process distinct from writing, but the distinction was too sharply drawn and failed to recognize that the two skills share similar cognitive processes of meaning construction. In the second language classroom composition classroom reading typically played no more than a secondary role, serving mainly as linguistic model for rhetorical patterns and as a content material for writing assignments.