Literacy in primary school: does handwriting matter?

One of the first societies to develop the practice we would now recognise as handwriting were the ancient Romans. Around 400 AD, the first hints of uppercase and lowercase cursive began to emerge as people communicated with one another via written script.

By 700 AD, handwriting had boomed in popularity and was an essential part of how people lived - at least, those who could read. In this century, an English monk created standardised rules for handwriting including lowercase letters, gaps between words and punctuation - this was designed to make writing easy to write and easy to read, and these grammar techniques are just as important over 1,400 years later.

As time went on, handwriting only grew in popularity. At the time, handwriting was the only way to spread information from one place to another. Technology we now take for granted was not available - if you wanted a copy of a book, it would have to be handwritten for you. For this reason, books were incredibly rare - at least until Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s.

Throughout the centuries, different styles of handwriting began to emerge, displaying differences in gender, social class and education. First, the typewriter and the printing press took away the practice of hand written books. After that, the invention of the mobile phone reduced the need for handwritten letters - and that’s not to mention email!

In today’s world of social media, text messaging and keyboards, is there any need for students to learn handwriting?

When was the last time you picked up a pen and wrote something by hand? If you’re a teacher reading this, it might well have been yesterday, but the average adult in the UK has not written on a sheet of paper in the last two months.

The truth is, there’s no longer much need for adults in the UK to write with a pen or pencil on a sheet of paper. Even the traditional shopping list is available as an app on a smartphone. Communicating with others is largely done by phone, email or instant messaging. Taking notes in a classroom can be done with a tablet or a laptop. In fact, some classrooms, in harnessing the benefits of implementing educational technology, have moved away from writing on paper altogether, choosing to host homework and essays on an online platform.

Being able to write by hand is no longer one of the skills necessary to succeed in the modern world - in fact, many working adults acknowledge that their handwriting has become significantly worse over the years.

There is an argument to be made that schooling should prepare learners for the world beyond the school gates, and, at this moment in time, the world that awaits them is not a world filled with handwriting. Sensing this, some schools have transitioned away from teaching handwriting, choosing instead to focus on touch typing - now a more relevant skill for the working world. However, there is still a large school of thought that believes the move away from handwriting is a great loss for learners’ development.

Research by Johns Hopkins University has proved explicitly what many teachers consider to be true - when we take notes by hand, we retain more information and we learn faster. This was found to be especially true when learning languages - in the case of this experiment, Arabic - as well as literacy skills. The researchers assert that these results would be felt most explicitly in primary-age students learning the alphabet and understanding the link between letters and sound.

Wiley and Rapp (2021) found that writing by hand “provides a perceptual-motor experience” - when we write by hand, we automatically dual code the new information we are learning, and dual-coding helps learners retain new information more effectively (Pavio, 1972).

From this experiment, Rapp asserts that handwriting is more than just a skill to be learned for the sake of learning it - it has benefits in reading, writing, spelling and comprehension, benefits that were found not to be present when writing on a keyboard or typewriter.

As well as this, many of the assessments primary learners complete call for work to be submitted by hand. This includes their SATs papers. This means that even when handwriting is not explicitly being judged for a certain assessment, such as in a Maths or Science paper, learners’ attainment is impacted by how well they can commit their understanding to the page by hand.

Unless a learner is exempt from handwriting due to a special educational need, handwriting is still a necessary skill for high attainment in SATs and formative assessments - for as long as handwriting is a crucial element of SATs, primary schools should explicitly teach handwriting to learners in order to prepare them for their SATs.

Even if there are proven benefits to handwriting, are there any additional benefits for learning cursive? Cursive handwriting has been part of the UK National Curriculum for generations, but how many times do you see cursive writing used by adults in day-to-day life? Kate Gladstone writes in her article, ‘Handwriting Matters; Cursive Doesn’t’, “Adults are increasingly abandoning cursive.” So why do we still require our students to learn it?

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that the benefits of writing by hand, the dual-coding mentioned above, increase even further when the writing is cursive. Not only do learners combine the new knowledge they’re encountering with the skill of hand notation, but they also gain hand-eye coordination and motor skill improvement. The combination of neat hand movements, new information and transferring knowledge onto paper makes learning more efficient.

As well as this, cursive has a long history in the English language, as well as others. If your learners are to learn and communicate like experts in a particular field, such as in History, they should have an understanding of how to read historical texts - understanding cursive unlocks a learner’s ability to read older texts, encouraging their independence and allowing them to connect with previous generations. They may even have grandparents who still use the cursive style of writing - even if cursive is no longer used in day to day life, retaining learners’ understanding of cursive encourages communication across time.

The study by Johns Hopkins University found that learners’ reading comprehension increases faster when hand writing notes rather than typing them.

Despite the fact that much of our daily communication is facilitated by technology, such as emails and text messages, the ability to write a letter is a fantastic skill to have in your back pocket. The act of handwriting a letter or essay response encourages learners to construct their sentences efficiently, as it takes more effort to write by hand than it does to press keys, reducing waffle.

More information is retained when learners write notes by hand. This is due to the dual-coding of their “perceptual-motor experience”.

Most modern word processors have spell-check technology. Some are even more sophisticated, with software such as Grammarly interpreting sentences and correcting their grammar. Even aspects of writing such as passivity, sentence length and tone of voice are things which can be corrected on a computer through software. The best way to ensure your learners have internalised these skills is to have them write by hand.

Writing by hand takes significantly longer than writing with a keyboard, so learners are likely to be more economical when getting their point across. This reduces the likelihood that they will go off on a tangent, encouraging them to construct effective written responses.

Not only does handwriting promote comprehension and literacy improvement, but it also has benefits in fine motor skills. This is beneficial not just for writing but also for art. When learners have the freedom to write on paper, they internalise that a blank canvas can be filled by their hand, encouraging their creativity. Sure, this might lead to a bit of doodling, but a healthy amount that doesn’t disrupt their learning is beneficial for their creativity.

However, despite the proven benefits of handwriting versus writing on a keyboard, that isn’t to say that every single learner will experience the same benefits. In fact, for some learners, being forced to write by hand rather than on a computer might be detrimental to their progress. Introducing technology like computers and keyboards to the classroom can be an important part of how classrooms, both primary and secondary, support learners with special educational needs.

Many dyslexic learners may struggle to read and write without the help of assistive technology, such as a computer. Some might find themselves skipping words as they write, repeating words, or not being able to read their work back. Not only can this be incredibly frustrating for them, but you, as their teacher, can’t be sure of what they do and don’t understand, as their writing is not an accurate representation of their knowledge.

In situations like these, the benefits of writing on a computer vastly outweigh the negatives.

There are some disabilities which prevent learners from writing by hand altogether. Whether this is just writing for long periods of time or being physically unable to write at all, computers, keyboards and other technologies open doors for these learners.

However, though writing on a computer is necessary for these learners, you may have to be more creative in how you assess their ability to construct sentences, spell words correctly and use the right grammar - some word processors have the option to remove spellcheck.

Harness both the benefits of handwriting and the benefits of educational technology by incorporating handwriting practice into your Bedrock work. In each vocabulary lesson that learners complete on Bedrock, they encounter a handful of new, ambitious words. In addition to the contextualising word activities learners complete, why not use their new words as a handwriting challenge?

1. Challenge learners to use their new vocabulary in a sentence, written by hand.
2. Ask learners to spell their new vocabulary without looking - if they get it wrong, have them use the look-cover-write-look technique.
3. If you want to encourage creativity, ask learners to make an acrostic poem out of one of their new Tier 2 words.
4. To incorporate that all-important grammar knowledge, ask learners to go back to the sentences they wrote earlier and change the tense/sentence structure/object of the sentence.

There’s not much that can be done to prevent cursive handwriting from slipping through the cracks as the world becomes more and more digital. Even adults who learned cursive handwriting as children are relying on it less and less in daily life.

However, even if handwriting becomes less useful in adulthood, it is proven to be useful for children - education does play a role in preparing learners for the expectations of the adult world, but it also equips learners with the basic skills they need to develop further beyond the school gates, and the skills gained through handwriting benefit learners for life.