GoBigEd

Tuesday, April 12, 2005


DON’T LET SCHOOLS MISS THE BOAT ON PENMANSHIP

Excuse the pun, but in most schools today, penmanship is . . . sunk.

They just don’t teach it systematically any more, except maybe on a remedial basis. They teach computer keyboarding, instead. Penmanship is a key facet of good phonics-only reading instructional programs such as Spalding Phonics. But that’s rare.

Most Nebraska schools take a whole-language or “balanced literacy” approach to early reading. So the alphabet and pronunciation and spelling rules and the proper way to hold a pencil and position the paper on the desk kind of take a back seat to “groovy creativity.” So penmanship is pooh-pooh’ed.

That’s a shame. But when you try to explain to an educator that the multisensory experience of forming letters, words, sentences and paragraphs with paper and pencil is a key component of a good language education, and the best possible start for good writing skills on down the road, they look at you like you’re Amish and think it’s 1853.

Well, $%^& it, I’m NOT Amish. And this is NOT about convenience. It’s about brain formation. I’ve read a lot about it, and am a true believer in handwriting instruction. The decline in kids’ penmanship skills and enjoyment of writing worries me about as much as anything else that goes on in our schools today.

Everyone BUT educators seems to know how important proper handwriting is. It helps develop fine-motor skills and concentration. It builds self-esteem to be able to produce work that is neat and legible. It leads to the bedrock reading skill of automatic letter-recognition. That provides the threshold for automaticity and flow in writing, that can only come from lots of practice.

It makes sense: the more practice you have physically forming letters and words on paper, the easier it is for you to abstractly visualize them, and the faster you can accurately recognize them in text.

Similarly, if you have been taught to take care with HOW you form those letters and words, you learn that writing with precision and planning matters. Then even if you keyboard all your livelong days, you will still take care with forming those words, sentences, paragraphs and whole pieces of writing, because that’s how you started out in your crucial formative years. You just don’t get that same sense of writing craftsmanship if all you’ve ever done is bang away at a keyboard.

I’m not calling for people to have to handwrite everything throughout their lives; I’m just calling for giving them the best-possible start, which is clearly proper handwriting instruction.

Yet district curriculum chiefs and K-1 teachers don’t know these principles, because the teachers’ colleges don’t teach them, and there’s no money to be made in consulting on such a basic subject, so the inservices don’t teach them, either. It’s the same reason you don’t see a lot of TV ads for broccoli: everybody needs it, but it just isn’t . . . sexy.

So the educrats sneer at parents and taxpayers who urge them to go back to teaching proper handwriting in the early grades. It’s really pretty sad.

But here’s something happy: there’s a new study that shows that writing practice has a huge influence on alphabet letter recognition in preschool children, and it’s much better for kids than typing.

It’s in the journal Acta Psycologica, vol. 119, pp. 67-79 , 2005, by Marieke Longcamp, Marie-Thérèse Zerbato-Poudou and Jean-Luc Velay.

The abstract reads:

“A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we trained two groups of 38 children (aged 3–5 years) to copy letters of the alphabet either by hand or by typing them. After three weeks of learning, we ran two recognition tests, one week apart, to compare the letter recognition performances of the two groups. The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training”

So if somebody tries to tell YOU that handwriting is obsolete, whip out that study to . . . jam their keys . . . and let’s work together to get the penmanship to set sail once again, for the benefit of our kids.

Comments:
Think of school kids in the Far East when you think of penmanship. Asian kids must learn hundreds and then thousands of chinese characters in addition to their own native alphabetical systems (eg Korean Hangul and Japanese Kana.) They also must learn a meticulous system for writing out the characters step by step. NO DOUBT this contributes to their educational experience.
 
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