11/05/2024
Why Teach Handwriting in the Digital Age?
-It helps create the neural pathway for reading.
-Letter learning through typing and the "see and say" method do not lay the foundation for the reading network.
-The most effective handwriting instruction is self-directed, with a combination of writing from memory and direct copy.
-Writing a variation of letters is crucial (at least in the beginning, messy is okay!)
Often parents ask why their child should learn to write since handwriting has largely disappeared from our lives. Save signing our names and the occasional card or doctor's form, opportunities for writing anything by hand are few and far between. By the time students are in middle school, most assignments and assessments are typed. Well, it turns out there is a large body of evidence, actual brain science, which underscores the importance of handwriting, particularly for the development of reading. (Please see links below.)
Functional MRI (fMRI) has allowed researchers to identify which areas of the brain are activated when particular tasks are being performed. Through fMRI studies it has been established that in literate adults, the reading network and the handwriting network are almost identical, even when the letters are being written by memory. The areas of the brain that "light up" when reading include: the left fusiform gyrus in the ventral temporal lobe, the left superior temporal gyrus/inferior parietal lobule, and the inferior frontal gyrus. Perceiving individual letters and writing letters by hand involves these regions and the left middle frontal gyrus and left dorsal precentral gyrus. The researchers looked at pre-literate children to see which came first, the reading network or the writing network. It turns out that handwriting instruction helps create the reading network. The researchers found that learning written symbols (letters) are best learned through writing them by hand rather than learning them visually, auditorily or with typing. The theory is that the combination of the sensory and motor networks is crucial. A study looking at preliterate children at age four showed that printing letters by hand creates the perceptual-motor brain network that underlies letter identification and word reading. Significantly, it also demonstrated the specific kind of manual production important for creating these brain networks. The child's brains before the printing training responded the same way to simple shapes such as triangles and squares as it did to letters: there was no letter-specific activation of the brain. The "see and say" method and the printing method (without saying them) were used to teach the letters and the children's brains were compared. Only the printing training activated areas of the brain used for visualizing letters that later are used for letter recognition.
Another study compared letter learning methods: seeing and saying, printing, typing on a keyboard, and tracing with four and five-years-olds. Only after printing training did the letter recognition/reading network "light up". Visual regions that are active during letter perception become functionally connected to motor regions only as a result of handwriting experience. Further studies demonstrated why neither tracing a letter nor typing recruits the letter perception or reading network. It is known that we learn better if we see many, variable examples, than if we see a single example. That is how we learn to deepen our understanding of a category (such as the category "dog"). So, the child directed experimentation with various forms of a particular letter may be very important for letter learning! An over reliance on tracing for letter learning may not reap the same rewards as self-generated (messy) handwriting as the child is learning letters! Allowing the learner to create and experience variation in their learning improves their understanding of letter categorization. Another study looked at six-year-olds learning to read cursive (a new script). Only after cursive handwriting instruction was the reading network recruited. Watching another person write the letters did not recruit the reading network. Research has also shown that effective letter instruction for first graders combined numbered arrows to show stroke order, closing eyes to visualize the letter and then writing the letter from memory. This not only improved writing, but word reading!
A recommended sequence of learning is manuscript in the first two grades, cursive in grades three and four and touch typing (using both hands with eyes up) in middle school. Writers benefit from being able to use multiple modes of writings.
https://earbmc.sitehost.iu.edu/pubs/James_aps_2017.pdf
https://ldaustralia.org/publications/bulletin-volume-51-no-1-autumn-2019/
