The CATESOL Journal

Drawing on studies in first and second language composition, an argument can be made for integrating writing, reading, and critical thinking skills to promote writing competence and better ensure academic literacy for first-year multilingual student writers. This essay first presents the rationale for incorporating literature into an integrated process approach. Such an approach emphasizes the reader’s response to a text combined with critical-thinking strategies and meaningful prompts for composition. Next, examples of reading and writing exercises are presented to demonstrate a possible integration of skills. Sample exercises illustrate the progression from initial exploration, through informal writing tasks, to guidelines for structured formal assignments. Encouraging students to do frequent daily writing for a variety of purposes while gaining facility with strategies for writing from texts in ways that are both personally meaningful and academically significant are important goals to help students make gains in their overall critical literacy