Learning to write: The role of handwriting for Chinese spelling in kindergarten children.

Abstract

Given the orthographic complexities of Chinese characters, handwriting skills may play an important role in how children learn to write Chinese. The present study includes a comprehensive battery of handwriting measures in relation to Chinese spelling in young children. Measures of handwriting, including stroke order, visual-motor integration (Hebrew and Vietnamese copying) and handwriting fluency, along with other reading-related cognitive skills, were administered to 141 kindergartners in Hong Kong schools. We assessed the extent to which these handwriting measures are associated with spelling. A series of regression analyses revealed that the handwriting measures altogether significantly contributed to children's spelling performance, with age, nonverbal reasoning, and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled. Handwriting fluency and Vietnamese copying were unique correlates of spelling even after considering all well-established cognitive measures, including morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, and phonological awareness. The finding also highlights the importance of orthographic awareness: Both sensitivity to Chinese character structure and understanding of the function of semantic radicals are crucial to children's early spelling abilities. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe present study demonstrates that handwriting skills play an important role in children's spelling/ writing to dictation performance in Chinese, beyond the influence of traditional cognitive-linguistic skills. Handwriting skills are potentially crucial for children's later writing development. Therefore, particularly within the context of today's electronically dominated learning environment, this study suggests that handwriting activities should not be sacrificed as young children learn to write.

The Reciprocal Relationship Between Handwriting Fluency and Spelling Accuracy in Chinese: A Longitudinal Study

“…Supporting the hypothesis, the current study showed that handwriting fluency in fourth grade significantly predicted subsequent spelling accuracy in fifth grade, which is consistent with previous findings (McBride-Chang et al, 2011;Lam and McBride, 2018). This suggested that previous proficient handwriting fluency could improve later spelling accuracy for both Chinese and alphabetic characters, even after third grade.…”

“…This 2-year longitudinal study assessed the bidirectional relationship between handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy. These findings, extending the research of Lam and McBride (2018), confirmed a bidirectional predictive relationship between handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy in upper grade primary school students, even after considering well-established cognitive measures, including non-verbal intelligence, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming. However, inconsistent with previous research (Bosga-Stork et al, 2016), this study indicated that handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy in Chinese are still interdependent in the upper grades of primary school, and provided further clarification regarding the extent to which the two predict and facilitate each other.…”

“…The results showed that the correlation coefficient between handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy was between 0.37 and 0.58, and handwriting fluency explained 3% of the unique variance in spelling accuracy. Consistent with findings from McBride-Chang et al (2011), Lam and McBride (2018) surveyed 141 kindergartners in Hong Kong schools to explore the important role of handwriting skills in how children learn to spell Chinese words, and found that handwriting altogether significantly explained 10% of the variance in spelling accuracy, even after statistically controlling for the effects of age, non-verbal IQ, vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, and phonological awareness. Similar results were also seen in studies by Bosga-Stork et al (2016) and Afonso et al (2018), however, they further found that the effect only lasted until the third grade and disappeared in upper grades.…”

“…One possible reason is that Chinese is square script and morphosyllabic character, which has a writing system profoundly different from alphabetic language systems (Shu et al, 2003). With Chinese spelling, there are many radicals, and once children are aware of the purpose of morphemes and master these complex radicals precisely and skillfully, they can more accurately identify the orthography in their mental lexicons, therefore, more quickly selecting the correct words during dictation (Packard et al, 2006;Lam and McBride, 2018), even to the point of automatic processing, and their handwriting speed will increase correspondingly (Casalis et al, 2011). Children who develop sensitivity to radicals in the early stages may be more inclined to process radicals as a whole, which creates larger blocks with more information in their brains and reduces the cognitive load, even improves handwriting fluency later.…”

“…Moreover, spelling is a complex cognitive process that emphasizes accuracy. Spelling accuracy is a core indicator of children's spelling abilities, and dictation has been conventionally adopted to test spelling accuracy in alphabetic languages (Lam and McBride, 2018) and morphosyllabic languages (Li et al, 2017)]. In the process of dictation, when children hear a spoken word, they need to spell out this word, with the help of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and complex orthographic rules (Brown and Ellis, 1994).…”