Examining the contribution of handwriting and spelling to written expression in kindergarten children

Abstract

In this study, we examined the development of beginning writing skills in kindergarten children and the contribution of spelling and handwriting to these writing skills after accounting for early language, literacy, cognitive skills, and student characteristics. Two hundred and forty two children were given a battery of cognitive, oral language, reading, and writing measures. They exhibited a range of competency in spelling, handwriting, written expression, and in their ability to express ideas. Handwriting and spelling made statistically significant contributions to written expression, demonstrating the importance of these lower-order transcription skills to higher order text-generation skills from a very early age. The contributions of oral language and reading skills were not significant. Implications of these findings for writing development and instruction are addressed.

The ontogeny of visual–motor memory and its importance in handwriting and reading: a developing construct

“…Empirical evidence already suggests that in pre-school children nascent handwriting ability is associated with concurrent levels of emergent literacy skill [33,34], indexed by letter identification and word decoding abilities. Meanwhile, within schools there is evidence of a link between the automaticity of children's handwriting (between 7 and 11 years old) and the quality of composition within written work [35,36].…”

Cross-lag analysis of longitudinal associations between primary school students’ writing and reading skills

“…According to Flower and Hayes (1981) text writing requires the concurrent execution of transcription, spelling and handwriting, and text-generation skills, as well as narrative competence (Puranik & Alotaiba, 2012). The association between spelling and narrative competence in written production is still controversial, as much of the research has produced contradictory findings.…”

Assessing children's writing products: the role of curriculum based measures

“…Various approaches to evaluation of written composition have been used by researchers and teachers, including holistic scoring, analytic scoring, quantitative scoring, and curriculum based measurement measures (Abbott & Berninger, 1993;Lee, Gentile, & Kantor, 2010;McMaster & Espin, 2007;Puranik & AlOtaiba, 2012;Scott & Windsor, 2000;Wagner et al, 2011). These various evaluation approaches differ in purposes and in the underlying assumptions about the dimensionality of written composition.…”