How Reading and Writing Support Each Other Across a School Year in Primary School Children

There is general agreement of the broad notion that reading and writing skills complement one another. However, when it comes to the more detailed interplay between skills at the word, sentence and text levels within and across reading and writing domains, there is much less evidence. In a study of 1,160 6-9 year-old children in second and third grade in Denmark we measured at the beginning and end of a school year both reading and writing skills at the word level (decoding and spelling), sentence level (sentence reading and writing), and text level (text comprehension and narrative). Results show generally that over the course of one school year word-level skills in both reading and writing predict the development of higher-level skills in the opposite domain. The results hold important implications for the teaching of reading and writing in primary school.