How does Handwriting Help Children Learn about Letters?

The following extract is taken from PETAA Book The Alphabetic Principle and Beyond...Surveying the Landscape, edited by Robyn Cox, Susan Feez and Lorraine Beveridge, published in 2019. This piece is from a chapter contributed by Noella M. Mackenzie.

The need for explicit handwriting instruction in schools was highlighted in 2017 by the former chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), Stephen Schwartz:

Handwriting has been weighed in the balance and found necessary. To handwrite a letter, a child must form a mental image of the letter's shape. The child then uses this image to guide a pen or pencil...With practice, the specific movements needed to draw each letter create a unique 'motor memory' that not only facilitates writing but also helps children recognise letters when learning to read. (Schwartz, 2017)

This concept is supported by examples of extensive recent research from a range of disciplines, including:

  • occupational therapy (McMaster & Roberts, 2016)
  • neuroscience (James & Englehart, 2012; Marquardt, Diaz Meyer, Schneider & Hilgemann, 2016)
  • pediatrics and child health (Isaacs, 2013)
  • developmental medicine and child neurology (Feder & Majnemer, 2007)
  • human movement (Alamargot & Morin, 2015)
  • psychology (Labat, Vallet, Magnan & Ecalle, 2015; Santangelo & Graham, 2016)
  • early childhood literacy (Dinehart, 2014)
  • learning difficulties (Limpo, Alves & Connelly, 2017)
  • social and behavioural sciences (Alonso, 2015)
  • education (Malpique, Pono-Pasternak & Valcan, 2017; Medwell & Wray, 2014).

When someone writes a letter of the alphabet by hand, they must focus on the detail of that particular letter: its size, shape, position, direction, detail etc. The motor actions performed to produce letter shapes by hand promote letter knowledge, spelling, and reading acquisition (Labat et al., 2015). It is the 'meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, [which] establishes sensory-motor memory traces' (Kiefer et al., 2015, p.136) and facilitates written language acquisition.

Instruction in correct letter formation is necessary for children to learn how to analyse each letter in terms of the specific features that make up that letter. They need to learn 'how to attach lines, circles, dots and tails in just the right place and just the right ways', a process that 'requires abstract processing and places a high demand on memory' (Lyons, 2003, p.97). Letter reversals, for example, are common for early writers and are sometimes seen as evidence of a reading problem when in fact the child has simply not yet developed the necessary print knowledge to deal with the abstract processing required by letters like 'b' and 'd'. Likewise, the ability to recognise differences in height and position is necessary to discriminate between 'h', 'n' and 'r', with some children writing each of these letters in almost the same way so they are not distinguishable.

Teachers are advised to teach easily confusable letters like 'b' and 'd' separately, ensuring that one is well-known before the second is introduced (for example, see Carnine, Silbert, Kame'enui & Tarver, 2004).