Will individuals who read well also write well?

By Winnie Tam, Centre for University and School Partnership, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Kim and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis to explore the relationship between reading and writing skills, focusing on how this relationship varies by linguistic grain size (units or chunks of language), measurement of reading comprehension and written composition, and grade levels. The analysis included 395 studies with 646 unique samples, totaling 2,265 effect sizes, and found a strong average correlation of +0.72 between reading and writing.

Across different linguistic grain sizes, the results showed that word reading and spelling had the strongest relationship (r = +0.82), while reading comprehension and written composition exhibited  a moderate correlation (r = +0.44). Other moderate correlations included spelling and text reading fluency (r = +0.59), word reading and written composition (r = +0.42), and text reading fluency and written composition (r = +0.33).

Further investigation highlighted relationships between various reading comprehension tasks and different dimensions of written composition. Among the measures of reading comprehension, writing quality had stronger correlations with oral-retell (r = +0.55), open-ended questions (r = +0.49), and multiple choice (r=+0.48) compared to the cloze task (r = +0.37). Regarding dimensions of written composition, reading comprehension correlated more strongly with writing conventions (+0.55), writing quality (r = +0.46), and writing syntax (r = +0.41) than with writing productivity (r= +0.23).

Developmentally, the word reading and spelling relation was significantly stronger for primary grade students (r = +0.82) than for university students and adults (+0.69). However, the relationship between reading comprehension and various dimensions of written composition did not differ by grade levels.

The findings suggest that reading-writing relationships are not uniform and vary across different linguistic components and developmental stages. This meta-analysis provides a detailed and nuanced picture of these connections.