Good and Poor Elementary Readers’ Use of Cohesion in Writing

Good and Poor Elementary Readers’ Use of Cohesion in Writing

Timothy Shanahan, Beverly Cox and Elizabeth Sulzby

Reading ability and writting ability are closely related. A number of studies have shown that childern's writing can accurately reveal information about their reading knowledge and processes (see reviews by Shanahan, 1988; Stotsky, 1982, 1983). For both reading and writing, one must have knowledge both of the subject matter (prior knowledge or "world knowledge") and linguistic structure and conventions (linguistic knowledge). The linguistic knowledge shared between reading and writing occurs at all lecels, including phonemic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic, and discourse structure knowledge (Shanahan, 1984).