It has longed been argued that writing is not merely a way for students to demonstrate what they know, but a primary mechanism in understanding and learning across disciplines. In particular, writing can causally contribute to reading development.
This post provides an overview of the key findings of Graham and Herbet’s (in Hardeman & Chandler, 2026) meta-analysis of the writing to read research with a particular focus on the extent writing improves the understanding of texts, whether teaching writing led to an improvement in reading and if writing more frequently led to improvements in reading.
The DBI is grounded in the Simple View of Writing model which consists of three essential components:
- Transcription: Handwriting, spelling (phonological, orthographic and morphological knowledge), typing and mechanics (punctuation). Effortful transcription impacts on higher-level composition.
- Text generation: Generating ideas, organisation (structure and coherence), vocabulary and word choice, syntax (sentence construction and complexity) and genre knowledge. Text generation requires the integrated application of multiple skills.
- Self-regulation: Planning, monitoring (tracking progress and identifying errors) and revising. Self-regulation often co-occurs with other difficulties, but may occur in isolation.
Curriculum measurement tasks
Each task is administered for 3 minutes and are designed to assess different levels of written language acquisition.
- Word Dictation
- Words Written – counts total words written.
- Words Spelled Correctly – counts words spelled correctly.
- Correct Letter Sequence – measures any two adjacent letters correct in spelling.
- Picture Word Prompts
- Words Written and Words Spelled Correctly – regardless of correct contextual use.
- Correct Word Sequence – counts any two adjacent words correct in spelling, grammar, capitalisation and punctuation
- Incorrect Word Sequence – counts any two adjacent words incorrect in spelling, grammar, capitalisation or punctuation.
- Story prompts
- Words Written, Words Spelled Correctly, Correct Word Sequence and Incorrect Word Sequence – can all be used in scoring.
Intervention based on identified need
Correct Letter Sequence and Correct Word Sequence demonstrate higher reliability and greater sensitivity to small increments of improvement compared with Total Words Written or Words Spelled Correctly in isolation.
- Transcription – focus is on symbol recognition and the explicit teaching of letter formation. Teach letters in groups with similar strokes (e.g., a, d, o). Spelling instruction should focus on high frequency words.
- Text generation – focus is on identifying sentence mechanisms (e.g., punctuation, subject, verb) beginning with simple sentences and progressing to more complex ones. Again, lessons should include explicit instruction with activities at three levels: Sentence framing (e.g.. provision of starters), sentence expanding and sentence combining.
- Self-regulation – focus is on both cognitive and behavioural deficits and including goal setting, self-monitoring and self-reinforcing. These skills can be taught at the transcription and text generation level. It involves six stages:
- Developing and activating background knowledge
- Discussing strategies and their benefits
- Modelling the strategies
- Memorising strategies using mnemonics
- Providing support via scaffolding and progress monitoring
- Fading support leading to independence
Reference
Duesenberg-Marshall, M., Lembke, E., McMaster, K., & Sussman-Dawson, K. (2026). Data-based individualization in early writing: Research based guidelines from assessment to intervention. The Reading League Journal. 7(2), 30-38.