Integrating Narrative Reading Comprehension and Writing Instruction for All Learners.

A study examined the effects of an integrated reading/writing curriculum on the narrative writing of students in general education eighth-grade classrooms. Subjects, 93 students (including 10 with learning disabilities) from middle to upper-middle socioeconomic backgrounds at a suburban middle school in western Oregon, were administered narrative writing probes pre- and post-intervention to assess students' ability to plan, organize, and write stories for topic prompts. Students were enrolled in four sections taught by two teachers; students from one teacher's classes served as the experimental group and the other teacher's classes participated in the control condition. Instructional materials included 10 short stories. The integrated reading and writing curriculum was designed in three interdependent phases: learning narrative text structure; learning a writing process; and learning to generate stories. Students in the control condition received instruction and practice on narrative text comprehension. Results indicated that students in the experimental group significantly outperformed students in the control group--their stories contained more fully developed ideas, content, settings, characters, and attempts to solve the central problem than students in the control classrooms. Results also indicated that all students in the integrated condition benefitted from the curriculum, although students continued to have difficulty generating well-developed stories. Findings suggest the potential value of investing in curriculum development that equips learners with transferrable and maintainable knowledge. (Two tables of data are included; 22 references are attached.) (RS)