Re the research on cursive vs. printing: There's a New York Times article from 2014 (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=) that says there's evidence that cursive and printing may activate two separate brain networks, suggesting that teaching both may activate more cognitive resources.
The article also says that Dr. Virginia Berninger has suggested "that cursive writing may train self-control ability in a way that other modes of writing do not, and some researchers argue that it may even be a path to treating dyslexia." The author cites a 2012 review (https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/35808) suggesting that cursive instruction may be particularly helpful for people with dysgraphia.
I wonder if you came across any of that research and/or whether you feel it's convincing?
These are great questions! Many thanks -- you raise some important points regarding both dyslexia and the brain scan studies in the NYT article. We’ll talk about each one in turn:
1. Re. the value of cursive writing for individuals with dyslexia:
Nidhi and I smiled when we read your comment! When we were preparing this piece, Nidhi felt we should include a paragraph about dyslexia and I ended up cutting it out! There does some to be a growing consensus that cursive writing is helpful for individuals with dyslexia. Our problem was that we couldn't find much in the way of evidence. We did find this article:
There simply wasn't as much hard evidence as we expected. We figure we're likely missing one or more key studies. Since we couldn’t find compelling evidence that cursive was beneficial for dyslexic individuals, or not beneficial, we simply left the topic out of the article. Some of our readers may know of such studies – if so, please share them with us!
2. Re. the brain scan studies described in the NYT article:
Thank you for sharing the NYT article. Brain scan studies, like the ones described in the article, are intriguing. Some of them (like the James article) offer a neurological explanation for the discovery that handwriting is superior to keyboarding in terms of facilitating early reading – a fact that we already know from earlier research (Cunningham & Stanovich; Longcamp et al).
In general, Nidhi and I try to exercise caution when considering the implications of brain scan studies. It’s tricky to infer specific cognitive functions from measures of brain activation. A single region of the brain can easily be activated by different cognitive processes. Moreover, different regions of the brain may be activated in different people. Given this uncertainty, we need to be careful about how we interpret this kind of research.
In a few cases we’ve seen situations where people have drawn unwarranted conclusions from brain scan studies. For example, in 2020, Psychology Today published an article entitled, “Why cursive handwriting is good for your brain: Writing by hand helps the brain learn and remember better an EEG study finds.”
Initially, we were excited to find this article. However, after reading the cited EEG study, we felt that Psychology Today’s headline overstated the findings. The EEG study did not measure learning, or remembering. Nor did it compare cursive writing to printing. All it showed was that different parts of the brain light up when students write, type or draw. Everything after that was speculation.
Brain science seems to be limited in terms of what we can learn from it. Maps of neural activity only tell us so much. Suppose, for example, that a brain scan reveals that slightly different regions of the brain are activated when students engage in cursive handwriting versus printing. What should we do with that information? Does it have any pedagogical implications? There’s no easy way to know. Ultimately, to determine whether cursive writing is superior to manuscript writing in some fashion, we need to see hard evidence from a conventional cognitive / behavioural study. That's the kind of research we examined when preparing this article. Brain scan studies, alone, do not provide sufficient evidence, in our opinion.
As an ESL teacher at the secondary level, I often wonder if the benefits of handwriting that we see in primary students could be extended to begjnner-level high school newcomer students, who are also acquiring vocabulary and learning spelling strategies, etc. Any thoughts?
Thank you for engaging with the article Marjorie and thank you for your excellent question. Since you shared your comment/question, Jim and I have had long discussions about it and we both searched to see if there might be a study done on this topic. We haven't been successful in finding anything (yet). It is possible that a study like that doesn't exist but we both think it would be such a useful investigation. Having said that, I can share my personal experiences of learning German as an adult. Handwriting was such an integral part of my learning. It helped me with sounds, spellings, syntax and so much more. We wrote sentences, we wrote passages and we definitely wrote words to memorize vocabulary. So I'd assume in such a situation, handwriting as a tool will provide benefits to high-school level ESL learners. I also assume the amount of experienced benefits might range for folks depending on their first language. For example, those who already know Roman script versus others who read and write a very different script say Devnagari (e.g. Hindi) or Arabic scripts. We are continuing to explore this theme to see if we can find something more evidence-informed. Will share more for sure if we do.
As Nidhi mentioned earlier, there wasn’t a lot of research literature, that we could find, on the use of handwriting as a teaching strategy for secondary-level ESL students. We were surprised. It seems like a huge gap in the literature!
In your question, you asked about the research that showed how handwriting helped primary students develop letter recognition, letter-sound correspondence and more accuracy in spelling. You asked whether these findings might also be applicable to secondary ESL students.
It seems likely, to me at least, that handwriting activities might be beneficial for any ESL students who, much like grade one students, are still largely unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. Students who have Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi etc. as a first language need some place to start when learning to read English text for the first time. In this case, handwriting activities should help accelerate letter-recognition and letter-sound decoding.
On the other hand, it's not immediately clear whether handwriting is more valuable than typing (keyboarding) in the case of ESL students who are already familiar with the Latin alphabet. For these individuals, the research on primary students is less applicable.
For me, this raises a more basic question: Given an activity in which students are asked to write something, do students learn more if they write longhand or if they type on a computer? Fortunately, there is a good deal of research on this subject in the note-taking literature. We found a good number of studies that try to determine whether handwriting or keyboarding leads to superior recall and understanding. We checked out a bunch of studies, which we've listed below. Unfortunately, there were conflicting findings. Some studies found that the writing medium made no difference. Other studies suggested that handwriting was superior to keyboarding.
I suspect one of the reasons for the conflicting findings is that the medium of writing is not the thing that promotes retention. Rather the important thing is what people are thinking about while writing. For example, if a student listens to a lecture and types the speaker’s words verbatim into a computer, they’re not doing much mental processing. On the other hand, if a student listens to a lecture and tries to summarize what the speaker is saying, they’ll likely retain more. Mental effort seems to be key.
Another relevant issue is that computers often have a lot of distracting apps built into them. This can get in the way of learning. On the other hand, computers vastly ease the process of editing and revision, which can be useful for larger writing assignments.
I hope some of this literature is helpful. I’m sorry we can’t point you to ESL-specific studies! Here are the articles that compare hand-writing to keyboarding, if you’re interested:
• Is handwriting better than typing for note taking? Surprisingly, it's not!
As a former ESL student (years ago), a TESOL certificate holder, and an IELTS instructor, I can testify the benefits of handwriting in vocabulary enhancement and spelling improvement. According to what I have seen in the classroom, it works for all ages, including older adults.
Aug 22, 2023·edited Aug 22, 2023Liked by Nidhi Sachdeva
My past experience conforms with all the findings in this article, and I particularly agree with "insist upon accurate and fair depictions of the research literature."
I have found three more reasons to learning handwriting:
1. In case typing is not an option (i.e. in emergency situations or when electronic devices are malfunctioning), handwriting can be a crucial way to communicate with others.
2. When sending a personalized postcards, handwriting can express one's feelings more vividly.
3. Modern typing software often include auto-corrections, which can hinder spelling accuracy for both native speakers and ESL students.
It is a great skill to possess, and we need the right reasons to do so.
Totally agree, thanks for sharing these Linyi. Great reasons!!! The case in favour of handwriting is a strong one but there isn't much available to show that cursive might have superior benefits to printing. Any kind of handwriting is great - I often write hybrid because I never officially learned cursive. My kids can write both (in fact, the picture in the blog shows my daughter's hand and her cursive skills). Once again, thank you for engaging with the article.
Thank you for pointing this out, Nidhi! Your daughter's cursive writing skill is very good! I haven't officially learned cursive handwriting either (in both languages I use). Compared to printing, the only advantage I can think of is speed. Again, in emergency situations, this can be helpful.
Speed does come to mind but available studies didn't find any significant speed related changes between cursive and printing. It's so tricky, isn't it? Hence the question about cursive really intrigued us.
Perhaps but the studies we looked at showed very little or non-existent differences. Interestingly enough faster writers employed hybrid handwriting (mix of printing anf cursive) - covered in the article too. If you come across a study that demonstrates a more significant difference in support of cursive, please so share :)
Thank you for pointing this out, Nidhi! I did some searching, and found an 2013 article with the same conclusion: writing styles does not affect speed for the same student.
It is really challenging to wrap this idea around my mind, probably because I learned different styles of Chinese calligraphy. Instead of using a pen or pencil, I was using a calligraphy brush. In this area, cursive style is significantly faster than print style. However, calligraphy is more like painting instead of writing, and the focus is on art creation instead of speed and accuracy. So, it may not be that relevant anyway.
Thanks Anne! I love the paper. Thanks for sharing it. I found it interesting that the "drawing" and "handwriting" patterns were somewhat similar. Both of them seem to activate areas of the brain that are relevant to motor actions (which makes sense) and attentive information processing. The article also suggests, indirectly, that handwriting seems to facilitate the encoding of new information. It would be interesting to run a comparison of brain activity between printing and cursive. Is there something distinctive about brain activity during cursive writing, as opposed to printing, and if so, what is it? Or are the brain activity patterns roughly the same whenever people try to represent objects or concepts in words?
Re the research on cursive vs. printing: There's a New York Times article from 2014 (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=) that says there's evidence that cursive and printing may activate two separate brain networks, suggesting that teaching both may activate more cognitive resources.
The article also says that Dr. Virginia Berninger has suggested "that cursive writing may train self-control ability in a way that other modes of writing do not, and some researchers argue that it may even be a path to treating dyslexia." The author cites a 2012 review (https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/35808) suggesting that cursive instruction may be particularly helpful for people with dysgraphia.
I wonder if you came across any of that research and/or whether you feel it's convincing?
Hi Natalie,
These are great questions! Many thanks -- you raise some important points regarding both dyslexia and the brain scan studies in the NYT article. We’ll talk about each one in turn:
1. Re. the value of cursive writing for individuals with dyslexia:
Nidhi and I smiled when we read your comment! When we were preparing this piece, Nidhi felt we should include a paragraph about dyslexia and I ended up cutting it out! There does some to be a growing consensus that cursive writing is helpful for individuals with dyslexia. Our problem was that we couldn't find much in the way of evidence. We did find this article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219419892845
However, we also found studies where it didn’t seem to make a big difference:
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=b968021d30df79c2892dd69711249de65320214f#page=66
There simply wasn't as much hard evidence as we expected. We figure we're likely missing one or more key studies. Since we couldn’t find compelling evidence that cursive was beneficial for dyslexic individuals, or not beneficial, we simply left the topic out of the article. Some of our readers may know of such studies – if so, please share them with us!
2. Re. the brain scan studies described in the NYT article:
Thank you for sharing the NYT article. Brain scan studies, like the ones described in the article, are intriguing. Some of them (like the James article) offer a neurological explanation for the discovery that handwriting is superior to keyboarding in terms of facilitating early reading – a fact that we already know from earlier research (Cunningham & Stanovich; Longcamp et al).
In general, Nidhi and I try to exercise caution when considering the implications of brain scan studies. It’s tricky to infer specific cognitive functions from measures of brain activation. A single region of the brain can easily be activated by different cognitive processes. Moreover, different regions of the brain may be activated in different people. Given this uncertainty, we need to be careful about how we interpret this kind of research.
In a few cases we’ve seen situations where people have drawn unwarranted conclusions from brain scan studies. For example, in 2020, Psychology Today published an article entitled, “Why cursive handwriting is good for your brain: Writing by hand helps the brain learn and remember better an EEG study finds.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/why-cursive-handwriting-is-good-your-brain
Initially, we were excited to find this article. However, after reading the cited EEG study, we felt that Psychology Today’s headline overstated the findings. The EEG study did not measure learning, or remembering. Nor did it compare cursive writing to printing. All it showed was that different parts of the brain light up when students write, type or draw. Everything after that was speculation.
Brain science seems to be limited in terms of what we can learn from it. Maps of neural activity only tell us so much. Suppose, for example, that a brain scan reveals that slightly different regions of the brain are activated when students engage in cursive handwriting versus printing. What should we do with that information? Does it have any pedagogical implications? There’s no easy way to know. Ultimately, to determine whether cursive writing is superior to manuscript writing in some fashion, we need to see hard evidence from a conventional cognitive / behavioural study. That's the kind of research we examined when preparing this article. Brain scan studies, alone, do not provide sufficient evidence, in our opinion.
Thanks so much for the very thorough response! Much appreciated.
THANK YOU for this!!
As an ESL teacher at the secondary level, I often wonder if the benefits of handwriting that we see in primary students could be extended to begjnner-level high school newcomer students, who are also acquiring vocabulary and learning spelling strategies, etc. Any thoughts?
Thank you for engaging with the article Marjorie and thank you for your excellent question. Since you shared your comment/question, Jim and I have had long discussions about it and we both searched to see if there might be a study done on this topic. We haven't been successful in finding anything (yet). It is possible that a study like that doesn't exist but we both think it would be such a useful investigation. Having said that, I can share my personal experiences of learning German as an adult. Handwriting was such an integral part of my learning. It helped me with sounds, spellings, syntax and so much more. We wrote sentences, we wrote passages and we definitely wrote words to memorize vocabulary. So I'd assume in such a situation, handwriting as a tool will provide benefits to high-school level ESL learners. I also assume the amount of experienced benefits might range for folks depending on their first language. For example, those who already know Roman script versus others who read and write a very different script say Devnagari (e.g. Hindi) or Arabic scripts. We are continuing to explore this theme to see if we can find something more evidence-informed. Will share more for sure if we do.
Great question Marj! Thank you for asking!
As Nidhi mentioned earlier, there wasn’t a lot of research literature, that we could find, on the use of handwriting as a teaching strategy for secondary-level ESL students. We were surprised. It seems like a huge gap in the literature!
In your question, you asked about the research that showed how handwriting helped primary students develop letter recognition, letter-sound correspondence and more accuracy in spelling. You asked whether these findings might also be applicable to secondary ESL students.
It seems likely, to me at least, that handwriting activities might be beneficial for any ESL students who, much like grade one students, are still largely unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. Students who have Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi etc. as a first language need some place to start when learning to read English text for the first time. In this case, handwriting activities should help accelerate letter-recognition and letter-sound decoding.
On the other hand, it's not immediately clear whether handwriting is more valuable than typing (keyboarding) in the case of ESL students who are already familiar with the Latin alphabet. For these individuals, the research on primary students is less applicable.
For me, this raises a more basic question: Given an activity in which students are asked to write something, do students learn more if they write longhand or if they type on a computer? Fortunately, there is a good deal of research on this subject in the note-taking literature. We found a good number of studies that try to determine whether handwriting or keyboarding leads to superior recall and understanding. We checked out a bunch of studies, which we've listed below. Unfortunately, there were conflicting findings. Some studies found that the writing medium made no difference. Other studies suggested that handwriting was superior to keyboarding.
I suspect one of the reasons for the conflicting findings is that the medium of writing is not the thing that promotes retention. Rather the important thing is what people are thinking about while writing. For example, if a student listens to a lecture and types the speaker’s words verbatim into a computer, they’re not doing much mental processing. On the other hand, if a student listens to a lecture and tries to summarize what the speaker is saying, they’ll likely retain more. Mental effort seems to be key.
Another relevant issue is that computers often have a lot of distracting apps built into them. This can get in the way of learning. On the other hand, computers vastly ease the process of editing and revision, which can be useful for larger writing assignments.
I hope some of this literature is helpful. I’m sorry we can’t point you to ESL-specific studies! Here are the articles that compare hand-writing to keyboarding, if you’re interested:
• Is handwriting better than typing for note taking? Surprisingly, it's not!
https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2022/01/is-handwriting-better-than-typing-for.html
• Note-taking: A research roundup
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/
• Which modality results in superior recall for students: Handwriting, typing, or drawing?
https://jowr.org/index.php/jowr/article/view/963
• The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614524581
• How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X21000849
• The effect of notetaking method on academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X21000849
• The Value of Handwritten Notes: A Failure to Find State-Dependent Effects When Using a Laptop to Take Notes and Complete a Quiz
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0098628320979895
Hi Marjorie,
As a former ESL student (years ago), a TESOL certificate holder, and an IELTS instructor, I can testify the benefits of handwriting in vocabulary enhancement and spelling improvement. According to what I have seen in the classroom, it works for all ages, including older adults.
My past experience conforms with all the findings in this article, and I particularly agree with "insist upon accurate and fair depictions of the research literature."
I have found three more reasons to learning handwriting:
1. In case typing is not an option (i.e. in emergency situations or when electronic devices are malfunctioning), handwriting can be a crucial way to communicate with others.
2. When sending a personalized postcards, handwriting can express one's feelings more vividly.
3. Modern typing software often include auto-corrections, which can hinder spelling accuracy for both native speakers and ESL students.
It is a great skill to possess, and we need the right reasons to do so.
Totally agree, thanks for sharing these Linyi. Great reasons!!! The case in favour of handwriting is a strong one but there isn't much available to show that cursive might have superior benefits to printing. Any kind of handwriting is great - I often write hybrid because I never officially learned cursive. My kids can write both (in fact, the picture in the blog shows my daughter's hand and her cursive skills). Once again, thank you for engaging with the article.
Thank you for pointing this out, Nidhi! Your daughter's cursive writing skill is very good! I haven't officially learned cursive handwriting either (in both languages I use). Compared to printing, the only advantage I can think of is speed. Again, in emergency situations, this can be helpful.
Speed does come to mind but available studies didn't find any significant speed related changes between cursive and printing. It's so tricky, isn't it? Hence the question about cursive really intrigued us.
It is interesting indeed! I thought cursive is faster than printing...
Perhaps but the studies we looked at showed very little or non-existent differences. Interestingly enough faster writers employed hybrid handwriting (mix of printing anf cursive) - covered in the article too. If you come across a study that demonstrates a more significant difference in support of cursive, please so share :)
Thank you for pointing this out, Nidhi! I did some searching, and found an 2013 article with the same conclusion: writing styles does not affect speed for the same student.
It is really challenging to wrap this idea around my mind, probably because I learned different styles of Chinese calligraphy. Instead of using a pen or pencil, I was using a calligraphy brush. In this area, cursive style is significantly faster than print style. However, calligraphy is more like painting instead of writing, and the focus is on art creation instead of speed and accuracy. So, it may not be that relevant anyway.
I'm going to take a wild guess that no one in California consulted with either of you...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/
This article supports benefits to learning cursive when compared with printing and typing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/
This article supports increased brain activity observed during cursive writing production.
Thanks Anne! I love the paper. Thanks for sharing it. I found it interesting that the "drawing" and "handwriting" patterns were somewhat similar. Both of them seem to activate areas of the brain that are relevant to motor actions (which makes sense) and attentive information processing. The article also suggests, indirectly, that handwriting seems to facilitate the encoding of new information. It would be interesting to run a comparison of brain activity between printing and cursive. Is there something distinctive about brain activity during cursive writing, as opposed to printing, and if so, what is it? Or are the brain activity patterns roughly the same whenever people try to represent objects or concepts in words?
A sample size like that doesn't support much of anything.