Handwriting vs. Typing: Which is More Effective When Learning New Language?

In this digital era, people tend to spend more time typing on a keyboard than handwriting with pen or pencil and paper. However, a new study found that the latter-mentioned still provides anything useful.

According to a ScienceAlert report, researchers tasked more than 40 adult volunteers with learning the Arabic alphabet from scratch.

Some of them did the learning task through writing on paper, while some through typing on a keyboard. There were also some who did the task by watching and responding to instructions from a video.

Respondents from the handwriting group not just learned the unfamiliar letter faster, but were better able to apply as well, their knowledge in other areas through the use of the letters to form words and recognize words that they had not encountered before, for instance.

Now, cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp from Johns Hopkins University said, the question for both parents and educators is, why should the kids spend any time "doing handwriting?"

Obviously, she explained, one is going to be a better hand-writer if he practices it. But the real question is, she added, "Are there other benefits to handwriting" that have something to do with reading, spelling, and understanding? The researchers discovered there are benefits, for sure.

Writing Vs. Typing

While handwriting, typing, and visual learning were effective at teaching the study participants to recognize Arabic letters, learners made a couple of mistakes after six exercise sessions, averagely, the writing group needed lesser sessions to obtain a good standard.

Then, the researchers tested the groups to find out how the learning could be generalized. In each follow-up test, through the use of skills the participants had not been trained on, the writing group was found to have performed the best, identifying letters, writing letters, and spelling and reading words.

The study, "The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning", published in Psychological Science, showed that the "benefits of teaching through handwriting go beyond better penmanship."

More so, there are advantages as well, in other areas of language learning. It appears as though the knowledge gets more firmly implanted through writing.

According to Robert Wiley, a cognitive scientist from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, the main lesson is that, even though the participants were all good at identifying letters, the writing training was the most effective at every other measure. He added these people needed less time to get there.

Vital Role of Pen and Paper

While having 42 people is not a huge sample size for research of this kind, a similar Tech and Science Post report said, the trends reported by this study specify that pen and paper still have an essential role to play in learning, even as digital formats have come to rule communications.

And even though adults were used in this specific experiment, the study authors said their findings need to have relevance to children, as well. Numerous previous studies have underscored too, the advantages of copying it as a support to learning.

Presently, students in schools are spending far less time than they used to on handwriting skills and practice for evident reasons, although according to what this research presented, it would have been wise to permanently put the pens and pencils away.

With writing, said Wiley, one is getting a stringer representation in his mind that lets him "scaffold toward these" other kinds of tasks that do not, in a way, involve handwriting.

Related information about the comparison between handwriting and typing is shown on WGN News's YouTube video below: