ABSTRACT
A. S. Byatt, quoted in Barrs and Cork, asserts her belief that good reading makes possible good writing. James Britton suggested that it would seem a perverse regime that attempted to separate the teaching of speaking and of listening, yet people continue to make that precise division between reading and writing. Margaret Meek suggests that those whose reading appears in their writing of continuous text have discovered a different kind of consciousness. Carol Fox's study of the oral storytelling of preschool children unfolds the complexities of their spoken narratives. Teachers need to know about the texts that children bring with them to school and to see how children draw on them to fuel their narrative explorations (Dyson 1997). The value of reading like a writer was explored in the Teaching Reading and Writing Links (TRAWL) project (Corden 2001). Children developed meta-cognitive awareness through close readings of texts and the encouragement to talk about the choices they were making as writers.
