Handwriting and Education

Sun Oct 19 15:35:56 UTC 2003

It depends on the context -- the school's philosophy, the age of the child,
and/or whether the child has been categorized as a SPED student.

1.  If a school's philosphoy emphasizes printing/cursive instruction in
addition to computer instruction, then instruction may/will take place
depending on how strongly the classroom teacher follows the curricular and/or
is held accountable for following the curricula.  Other schools may not place
a great emphasis on cursive.  It depends a lot on the state/local testing
goals as well.

2.  A small child's hand may not span a computer keyboard until he or she
reaches the upper elemntary school grades (and even then, smaller children may
have trouble spanning the keys.)  On the other hand, there are keyboards that
are larger and have larger keys available (and more expensive to purchase) for
schools to purchase.

3.  Very often, children who have been categorized as SPED students may have a
larger keyboard written into their Individualized Educational Plan (IEP)if the
parents, SPED instructor, classroom teacher, and guidance counselor agree.
The IEP needs to be updated each year.

Anne

Quoting Francis M Hult <fmhult at dolphin.upenn.edu>:

> I wonder if the treatment of handwriting in schools (particularly
> elementary schools) is impacted by the cyber age.  I often hear people
> speak about computer literacy.  With so much being done by typing these
> days, I wonder if emphasis on handwriting is changing.  I had the worst
> time with cursive writing--do they still come down on kids for that?
>
> CL's question also made me think of an anecdote:
>
> When I taught in New York City I had a student who was
> terrified to write.  We were working on short stories in class and while
> all the other students had composed a page or more he had not even
> written a full sentence.  I was worried about him.  Later I learned that
> his father, who was an immigrant from China, would chastise (sometimes
> physically with a ruler on the hand) the boy at home when his writing was
> not perfect.  The father explained his thoughts by saying that writing
> must never be sloppy--it requires discipline.  He was taught this way by
> his father (when learning Chinese characters) and so would he teach his
> son.  This had an effect on the kid in that he was so concerned with accuracy
>
> in writing letters that written fluency was tough for him.  An interesting
> outcome of the convergent-divergent scrips continuum in the continua of
> biliteracy--ideologies about writing can run deep and have a lasting
> impact on biliterate development.  This is definitely the kind of thing
> we should consider as educational linguists when trying to bridge home
> and school language use and culturally situated literacy practices.
>
> Francis
>
>
> >
> > C L F L M wrote:
> >
> > > Dear Prof Hornberger
> > >
> > > Hope you are well. I've recently come across two closely relevant
> > > articles on handwriting in education today.
> > >
> > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3103421.stm
> > > http://www.detnews.com/2003/schools/0310/15/a01-298601.htm
> > >
> > > While calligraphy (nowadays) might not seem to be quite directly
> > > related to language education, handwriting, which perhaps used to be
> > > part of literacy, now appears to be somewhat/somehow marginalized.
> > > Would you think this might deserve educational linguists' attention?
> > > Thank you.
> > >
> > > Best wishes
> > >
> > > C.L.
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > Do you Yahoo!?
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> > >
> <http://shopping.yahoo.com/?__yltc=s%3A150000443%2Cd%3A22708228%2Cslk%3Atext%
2Csec%3Amail>
>
> > > - with improved product search
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> >
> > --------------050001080304050203080900
> > Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> >
> > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
> > <html>
> > <head>
> >   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
> >   <title></title>
> > </head>
> > <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
> > <br>
> > <br>
> > C L F L M wrote:<br>
> > <blockquote type="cite"
> >  cite="mid20031016151723.91615.qmail at web40708.mail.yahoo.com">
> >   <div>Dear Prof Hornberger</div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div>Hope you are well. I've recently come across two closely
> > relevant articles on handwriting in education today. </div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div><a
>
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3103421.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1
/hi/education/3103421.stm</a></div>
> >   <div><a
> >
> href="http://www.detnews.com/2003/schools/0310/15/a01-
298601.htm">http://www.detnews.com/2003/schools/0310/15/a01-
298601.htm</a></div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div>While calligraphy (nowadays) might not seem to be quite
> directly
> > related to language education, handwriting, which perhaps used to be
> > part of literacy, now appears to be somewhat/somehow marginalized.
> > Would you think this might deserve educational linguists' attention?
> > Thank you.</div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div>Best wishes</div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div>C.L.</div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <div> </div>
> >   <hr size="1">Do you Yahoo!?<br>
> >   <a
> >
> href="http://shopping.yahoo.com/?__yltc=s%3A150000443%2Cd%3A22708228%2Cslk%
3Atext%2Csec%3Amail">The
> > New Yahoo! Shopping</a> - with improved product search
> > </blockquote>
> > </body>
> > </html>
> >
> > --------------050001080304050203080900--
> >
>

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