English Certificate Preparation

You are going to read four short texts in which education experts give their views on teaching handwriting. For questions 1–4, choose from the experts A–D. The experts may be chosen more than once.

SHOULD WE STILL TEACH HANDWRITING? A — Dr Voss The evidence that writing by hand helps children absorb and retain what they learn is, to my mind, persuasive, and I would resist any attempt to remove it from the timetable. But my real enthusiasm is for something less often discussed: creativity. There is, I am convinced, a quality to the slow, continuous movement of a pen across paper that no keyboard can reproduce, and it is precisely this that helps ideas flow. We abandon it at our peril. The fuss over elegant, decorative handwriting, on the other hand, leaves me cold — as long as a child can be read, that is quite enough. B — Professor Adeyemi A good deal of the hand-wringing over handwriting is, frankly, sentiment masquerading as science. I am thinking in particular of the much-repeated claim that forming letters by hand strengthens the memory; when you examine the actual studies, they are nothing like as solid as their popularity would suggest. I am not arguing that we should stop teaching children to write — of course they should learn — only that we ought to be honest about how flimsy some of the evidence really is. The reverent talk of creativity flowing from the nib of a pen strikes me as equally unproven. C — Ms Calderon Like Dr Voss, I am in no doubt that committing words to paper by hand fixes them in the memory far more securely than typing ever could. Where my own emphasis lies, though, is on something more fundamental still. The act of forming letters by hand trains the fine motor control on which a whole range of later abilities depends, and to deprive young children of that practice would be a grave error. I lose no sleep, I confess, over the gradual disappearance of beautiful penmanship — that is no loss at all. D — Mr Tanaka We owe our pupils a degree of realism about the world that awaits them. They will be judged, almost without exception, on what they can type, and an education that ignores this plain fact does them a real disservice. I should stress that I do not dispute the memory benefits of writing by hand — the research there is sound enough — but those benefits must be weighed against the many hours such teaching consumes. And I remain wholly unconvinced by the notion that a pen confers some creative magic that a screen withholds.

Part 6 · Exercise 1 — Should we still teach handwriting?

Part 6 · Cross-text multiple matching