Abstract

YAUSAZ, Fabián. Handwriting fluency and writing composition skills: Exploratory study with argentine children of third grade. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2012, vol.29, n.2, pp.271-286. ISSN 1668-7027.

The present study analyzes the handwriting fluency in a group of children who finished third grade of elementary education in Argentina. This work aims, on the one hand, to compare fluency level of these children, with a sample taken from other reference study; and on the other hand, to explore the relationship between handwriting fluency and measures of quality of writing composition. Consistently with the literature that characterized the function of working memory (WM) during writing (Berninger & Swamson, 1996; Kellogg, 1996; McCutchen, 1996, 2000) the present work considers that the lack of proficiency in handwriting severely limits composition processes. In fact, if the writer has to focus his orher attention during composing to mechanical demands, such as think in the particular form of the letter, he or she may forget ideas or plans already held in WM (Graham & Weintraub, 1996). Children of third grade were chosen because literature in this field indicates that pupils of this level should reach a basic degree of mastery in handwriting processes. Also because the national language curriculum at the primary-school level in Argentina, in contrast with the policies adopted in most educational systems in the world, has relegated the development of transcription processes (handwriting, spelling, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge) to a tangential or non-existent position. One hundred and twenty two children of different SES were assessed. All of them were selected from a total of six schools in the cities of Corrientes and Resistencia in Argentina. Children were evaluated through two tests: a copying text and story writing. The first one estimated hand-writing speed (with letters per minute measure), whilst the second one assessed different characteristics of text quality (length, word-segmentation errors and orthographic mistakes). The comparison of speed of copy against a sample of United States (Graham, Weintraub & Berninger, 1998) showed that the average results obtained by children of this study, reach similar level of fluency of the participants of that reference sample. In the same vein than specialized literature, it was found that girls copied faster than boys (Berninger & Fuller, 1992). In addition, differences associated with the school of attendance were found. This result was interpreted as a remark of the importance that instructional factor has in the development of handwriting fluency. An analysis of correlation showed that it could not be detected any associations between speed of copy and length of the story composed. This was a surprising result since it was supposed that differences of fluency among schools would be associated with differences of text length. It was documented that differences in handwriting fluency predict the amount and quality of children writing (Jones & Christensen, 1990). The non-significant correlation was related to the low quality of most of the texts written by children. Bourdin and Fayol (2002) specified that when the task of writing is too easy, it is difficult to detect the influence of transcription on composition processes. Finally, significant associations were detected between fluency and problems of word representation (spelling and word segmentation) in the texts composed. These results showed that the lack of fluency in the access to the orthographic representations of words is related to both tasks of writing above mentioned. When this kind of representation is not easily available, the writer uses anti-economic strategies of word writing, like phonological analysis. It was observed that these processes reduced the speed of handwriting in the copy task and caused orthographic mistakes in the story writing. An extra evidence of this situation was observed during the copy test. In this task, children who copied particularly slow, whispered a phonological analysis in most of the words that they were copying. Although several researches that examined the performance of children with writing difficulties, reported lack of writing continuity during the copy, there were not found references in that studies to this process of phonological analysis. Pedagogical implications of these findings were also considered through the present study.

Keywords : Handwriting fluency; Writing composition; Children of third grade; Orthographic word representation; Working memory.

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