In the research area of writing development, an increasing number of researchers suggest that graphomotor skills could be much more important than they appear to be (Christensen, 2009). Few researchers have studied the link between handwriting and teaching practices, despite the fact that some studies indicate its importance (Graham, 2010). The general objective of this study is to explore the relationship between different handwriting styles and the development of writing skills among 715 children in Grade 2. Generally, our results show that the three handwriting styles (manuscript/cursive, manuscript, and cursive) have different effects on writing development (speed, quality, word production, and text production). Handwriting and Text ProductionBased on Hayes and Flower's model (1980), written production supposes three cognitive processes: planning (generating ideas and setting goals), translating (transcribing ideas into written text), and revising (rereading the text to improve clarity of idea expression). Further, Berninger and Swanson (1994) adapt this model to text production among younger writers. They describe two processes for translation: text generation, which occurs at different levels of language, and transcription, which includes handwriting (letter production) and spelling (word production).The emergence of cognitive psychology studies in the area of writing learning has brought to light the fact that the development of handwriting skills brings into play several related abilities and that handwriting skills take a long time to acquire (Alamargot & Fayol, 2009). Indeed, an increasing number of studies are shedding light on the relationships between handwriting, spelling, and text production. Given the fact that text production requires the coordination of a large number of cognitive and metacognitive abilities, it could be argued that the graphomotor skills mobilized by children during handwriting have relatively little importance in the writing process as a whole. However, several studies have provided good reason to believe that this low-level aspect could be much more important than it might appear; to generate creative and well-structured

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Résumé Cette étude s’inscrit dans le domaine de recherche qui s’intéresse au développement de la litéracie chez les jeunes enfants, en tentant de valider l’impact d’un programme d’orthographes approchées en maternelle sur le développement des habiletés litéraciques de 90 enfants à risque. Globalement, les résultats de notre étude indiquent que les élèves à risque ayant participé à ce programme témoignent de performances significativement plus élevées à une tâche d’écriture de mots en fin de maternelle et à la fin de la première année, en comparaison de celles obtenues par les sujets du groupe contrôle. Cette recherche vient ainsi soutenir l’importance de prévenir les difficultés d’apprentissage dès la maternelle en favorisant l’activité des jeunes scripteurs.

La gestion et l'appropriation du changement en éducation Volume 40, numéro 1, printemps 2012 URI : id.erudit.org/iderudit/1010146ar

Learning to spell is very difficult for dyslexic children, a phenomenon explained by a deficit in processing phonological information. However, to spell correctly in an alphabetic language such as French, phonological knowledge is not enough. Indeed, the French written system requires the speller to acquire visuo-orthographical and morphological knowledge as well. To date, the majority of studies aimed at describing dyslexic children's spelling abilities related to English and reading. The general goal of this study is to describe the spelling performance, from an explanatory perspective, of 26 French-Canadian dyslexic children, aged 9 to 12 years. The specific goals are to describe the spelling performances of these pupils in the context of free production and to compare them with the performances of 26 normally achieving children matched on age (CA) and with those of 29 younger normally achieving children matched on reading age (RA). To do so, errors were classified according to phonological, visuo-orthographical and morphological properties of French written words. The results indicate that the dyslexic group scored lower than the CA group but sometimes also lower than the RA group. The results are discussed according to the types of knowledge required to spell correctly in French.