Developmental Relations Between Reading and Writing at the Word, Sentence and Text Levels

Purpose– The relations between reading and writing have been studied extensively but the exact nature of their interrelation is not known. This study applied new advances in change score modeling to investigate longitudinal developmental relations between reading and writing skills at the word, sentence and text levels. Dynamic models were used to compare unidirectional pathways (reading-to-writing and writing-to-reading) and bidirectional pathways in a test of nested models.Method– Participants included 316 boys and girls who were assessed annually in grades 1 through 3. Measures of reading included pseudo word decoding, sentence reading efficiency measures and passage comprehension. Measures of writing included spelling, a sentence combining task and computational indices of linguistic features of a writing prompt.Results– The changes in reading and writing were characterized by improvements between years. The reading-to-writing model fit the data well, where changes in reading and writing were a function of a) status, b) growth or c) both in reading or writing. At the word level, high status in grade 1 decoding predicted an improvement on spelling between grades 2-3, and the improvement in decoding between grades 1-2 predicted an improvement in spelling between grades 2-3. At the sentence level, high status in reading predicted an improvement in writing across the years. At the text level, high status in grade 2 reading predicted an improvement in writing between grades 2-3.Discussion– findings suggest that a reading-to-writing model better describes the data than does a bidirectional model, and this relation holds across levels of language. Secondly, changes in writing are predicted by high achievement status in reading at all levels of language, and this effect was significant at both stages of development at the word and sentence levels, and at the later stage of development at the text level (between grades 2 and 3). Thirdly, change in spelling was predicted by change decoding between grades 1 -2. Thus, our results show that Mathew effects are characteristic of reading-writing development in that acquisition of writing skills is facilitated for good readers.