Learning to form letters physically helped children to memorise letter shapes, which made writing automatic and much easier later on.
“We’d have happy children and children who felt good about themselves, children who were behaving well at school, children who were attending school every day.
“We’d have children by Year 3 or 4 who were genuinely able to engage in their own independent research projects.”
It is one possible solution to the challenges identified in the Herald’s Making the Grade, a series on the issues in our struggling school system.
Surveys carried out by literacy specialist Belinda Blick-Duggan found the handwriting component of teacher training has steadily decreased.
She found 66 per cent of those who trained before 2000 received instruction in handwriting compared to 29 per cent of those trained between 2000 and 2009, and just 12 per cent of those trained in 2010 or thereafter.
A 2009 Education Review Office report also found almost no teacher professional development is conducted in how to teach handwriting.
In line with those findings, a smaller survey of 200 high school students found about 90 per cent had never had any handwriting lessons in school, she said.
Walls said the decline of handwriting started in the 1980s when process writing was in its heyday and the focus was on the meaning of a child’s writing rather than the errors. More recently the problem had become a belief that children will learn to read and write just by immersion in language.
She said the understanding of its importance was growing again but new teachers were still telling her they were not hearing the words handwriting or spelling spoken in their training year.
“We’re seeing lots of children in Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 levels that have difficulty forming letters - they reverse letters or they have really illegible writing so there are big problems out there.
“If we had handwriting happening in every junior class, just for 10 minutes, I believe that would be the fastest way to turning around our crisis situation with low rates of achievement in literacy.”
Blick-Duggan, who provides professional development for teachers, said most primary school students were not even being taught how to form individual letters.
Two years ago she studied a Year 7 and 8 class writing out the alphabet and found every student had formation errors and most did not know how to hold a pencil correctly.
“This is what I see on a daily basis,” she said.
“It’s just a massive, massive problem.”
While many argued handwriting was no longer essential in a digital age, both Blick-Duggan and Walls argued handwriting was the strongest predictor of writing quality in Year 1, accounting for 60 per cent of the difference in the quality of students writing.
By about Year 5 spelling and handwriting combined still accounted for about 50 per cent of the difference in the quality of writing,” Walls said.
“If a child doesn’t master handwriting, their writing will never progress because it continues to be this massive sea anchor for them.
“The reason is that all of our learning happens in our working memory system which is highly limited in its capacity.
“If a child is worried about which way around the D goes it’s going to occupy all their working memory and is going to prevent them from thinking about other things and they may even forget what the word was they were going to write in the first place.”
“By just intervening in the handwriting aspect, you see better ideas, better sentence punctuation and better vocabulary because suddenly they have working memory space available to them to attend to those other features of the writing,” she said.
Walls said children needed to be able to write quickly and legibly with little thought about the formation of letters or spelling.
Blick-Duggan said it became a big problem in high school where students were still often required to hand-write their exams.
Many people didn’t realise how important handwriting was in learning to read as well.
“Children who learn by handwriting always outperform other groups who practise the same words using typing or tracing or working with letter tiles,” Walls said.
MRI scanning has shown that handwriting connects the brain’s motor cortex to its speech and language areas and activates the orthographic mapping pathways, she said.
“This is the pathway we are building when we are teaching children to read. It’s a pathway between the sound input area in the brain and the visual input area.”
The Teaching Council, which ensures initial teacher education programmes equip students to meet the standards for teaching and gain registration, said course content was up to the providers but needed to follow the NZ Curriculum.
“Providers are subject experts and curriculum researchers on best practice,” media advisor Leigh Bitossi said.
He said there was a strong focus on equipping beginning teachers with a broad range of skills – like the ability to adapt their practice to new knowledge or strategies.
The Herald approached Auckland University, the country’s biggest provider of teacher training, for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
