Dyslexia and handwriting
The guest writer of this feature article is Dr Noel K.H. Chia, a board-certified educational therapist with the Association of Educational Therapists and a registered professional counsellor with the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors.
In 2008, the British Dyslexia Association (BDA) has recommended that children with dyslexia who manifest handwriting problems should be taught to write in continuous cursive style rather than learning to write in “print” before moving on to “joined up” handwriting at a later stage. According to the BDA, this is because for these children, learning two styles of handwriting - print and joined-up - can add an extra layer of difficulty and cause confusion. As a result, “the most widely recommended handwriting style is called continuous cursive. Its most significant feature is that each letter is formed without taking the pencil off the paper - and consequently, each word is formed in one, flowing movement” (BDA, 2008, p.1).
Dyslexia is considered one of the many literacy disorders (Manzo & Manzo, 1993), which also include dysgraphia, dysnomia, hyperlexia and alexia, its underlying problem concerns phonological processing deficiency which affects reading and spelling processes - both are specific literacy skills. Reading is a cognitive process involving decoding of words for word recognition (silent reading) and word expression (oral reading) so that meaning can be established and comprehension is achieved. On the other hand, spelling is part of transcription which in turn is a part of the writing process, which involves composition, transcription and handwriting (Chia, 1999).
Chia (1999) has argued that transcription and handwriting are two different forms of motor skills where the former is psychomotor and the latter, graphomotor. The term psychomotor means “of or related to movement or muscular activity associated with mental processes, especially affects” (see www.dictionary.com) while graphomotor means “of movements used in writing” (see www.dictionary.com). Later, Chia (2005) added imagination into the writing process without which “composition cannot occur, and without composition, transcription canot take place” (Chia, 2005, p.1).
“Transcription is a psychomotor skill involving spelling, legibility, punctuation, capitalization,and indenting (or paragraphing)” (Chia, 1999,p.5). It overlaps with handwriting which is “a graphomotor skill … involving memory of letter formations, spelling, grammar, context and more” (Barchowsky, 2008, p.1). Hence, spelling appears in both transcription and handwriting.
The term penmanship concerns an instructional program that formally introduces motor control and motor learning skills which are essential for the development of good handwriting in order for proper transcription to take place (see Willingham, 1998). In short, penmanship is handwriting instruction.
Good penmanship can help a child with dyslexia to develop good visuospatial-motor coordination so that along the way as the child develops good handwriting habits, he/she is also picking up the salient features of letters, and in doing so, helps to reduce letter reversals (e.g., “b” and “d”, “p” and “q”), inversion of letters (e.g., “m” and “w”, “n” and “u”), omissions of letters (e.g., “s” is missing from the word shot and becomes hot), substitutions of letters (e.g., the “o” in son is replaced with “u” to become sun), insertion of letters (e.g., “r” is inserted into ham to become harm), etc.
It is important at this point to be aware that a child with handwriting problems does not mean he/she has dyslexia (or dysgraphia or even dyspraxia). Poor teaching/learning of letter formation that results in untidy handwriting, sometimes known as cacographia, is not a disorder of handwriting. A real disorder of handwriting can be a result of graphomotor skill deficiency and proper assessment is needed to diagnose the issue so that appropriate intervention is implemented to rectify the problem.
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