Handwriting trumps visual learning for teaching English to children

A new study published in Acta Psychologica has found that handwriting provides significant advantages over visual learning when it comes to helping elementary school students acquire new English words, particularly their shapes, sounds, and meanings.

Scientists have long argued that handwriting engages the brain differently than typing or visual learning alone, due to how handwriting combines multiple senses. Writing requires the individual to see the letters, guide their hand movements, and feel the pen or pencil, making the learning process deeply engaging. By contrast, reading words on a screen or page relies solely on visual input, which might not create as strong a memory.

The team behind the study wanted to see if handwriting had distinct advantages in learning the three critical aspects of English words: their form (how they look), sound, and meaning.

To test this, Yang Ying and colleagues from Shenyang Normal University in China recruited 40 sixth-graders (20 males, 20 females, average age of 11 years). The students were split into two groups – one learning English words through handwriting and the other learning English words through visual reading.

Over three days, the children performed tasks that tested their ability to recognize word forms, match sounds, and identify meanings.

By the end of the experiment, the handwriting group outshone the visual learners in almost every category, and the researchers discovered that students who wrote out words achieved better accuracy and faster response times in the tasks compared to those who simply read them on a screen.

Interestingly, Ying and colleagues noted that the impact of handwriting did not happen all at once. The children demonstrated improvements in recognizing word sounds on the very first day, followed by word meanings on the second day, and lastly word forms on the third day. Furthermore, word form tasks showed fastest improvement in reaction times.

The authors explained that writing words by hand forces children to slow down and pay close attention to the shapes and details of letters: “the reasons for these advantages may be related to factors such as attentional focus, multisensory processing, and detailed visual processing.”

However, the study isn’t without its limitations. All the participants were sixth-grade students, so it is unclear whether handwriting offers similar benefits to younger children or older students. The researchers also didn’t include typing in their comparison, leaving open the question of how handwriting stacks up against today’s most common method of text input.

Despite these gaps, the findings have practical implications. In an era when screens dominate classrooms, educators might want to revisit the value of traditional pen-and-paper exercises. Handwriting, according to the study, doesn’t just teach kids how to form letters – it strengthens their understanding of the entire word.

The study, “The Role of Handwriting in English Word Acquisition Among Elementary Students,” was authored by Yang Ying, Zhang Huixin, Wu Yunxia, and Li Wenhui.