Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Do American children still learn handwriting in
school? In this age of the keyboard, some people
seem to think handwriting lessons are on the way
out. We asked a literacy professor at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Steve Graham says he has been hearing about the
death of handwriting for the past fifteen years. So
is it still being taught? He said: "If the results
of a survey we had published this year are accurate,
it is being taught by about ninety percent of
teachers in grades one to three."
Ninety percent of teachers also say they are
required to teach handwriting. But studies have yet
to answer the question of how well they are teaching
it.
Professor Graham says one study published this year
found that about three out of every four teachers
say they are not prepared to teach handwriting. He
said some teachers teach handwriting for ten or
fifteen minutes a day. Others teach it for sixty to
seventy minutes a day.
Many adults remember learning that way -- by copying
letters over and over again.
Today's thinking is that short periods of practice
are better. Many experts also think handwriting
should not be taught by itself. Instead, they say it
should be used as a way to get students to express
ideas. After all, that is why we write.
Professor Graham says handwriting involves two
skills. One is legibility, which means forming the
letters so they can be read. The other is fluency --
writing without having to think about it. The
professor says fluency continues to develop up until
high school. But not everyone masters these skills.
Teachers commonly report that about one-fourth of
their students have poor handwriting. Some people
might think handwriting is not important anymore
because of computers and voice recognition programs.
But Steve Graham at Vanderbilt says word processing
is rarely done in elementary school, especially in
the early years. American children traditionally
first learn to print, then to write in cursive,
which connects the letters. But guess what we
learned from a spokeswoman for the College Board,
which administers the SAT college admission test.
More than seventy-five percent of students choose to
print their essay on the test rather than write in
cursive.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
