Cursive or printing - what shall it be?

This following blurb is from Colleen's assignment

......Addy presents the use of cursive style of writing as being an important aspect of development of speed and fluency. This viewpoint is represented by the New Zealand Department of Education (1985) supplement on teaching handwriting in which they state that the use of ligatures to join letters will increase the speed of writing but that a full cursive style was not necessary to do so. Ziviani and Watson-Will also concluded that cursive writing produced faster output in students (Summers & Cattaro, 2003) In contrast, various authors have disputed this as fact. Graham, Weintraub and Berninger (1998) found that a mixed style of cursive and manuscript was found to be the fastest (Summers & Cattaro, 2003) In their own study of university students, Summers and Cattaro found that no difference was found between writing style and amount of output in an exam situation and supported findings of Graham et al that a mixed style proved to be the fastest.

In my own practice with older students I have suggested learning cursive, mostly I have used Handwriting without Tears (Olsen) programe. My reasoning behind this being that often the children coming to see me have been battling with poor handwriting and inefficient method of writing for years. A new way of writing offers an opportunity to start learning new habits (I especially like HWT for this as the letter style starts from the bottom, and therefore is quite different from how we form printing). However, they will be slower to start off with as they are learning a new habit, and it will take more effort. I do not imagine the students ending up with a handwriting that looks like HWT - however I aim for them to blend towards developing there own mixed style. Therefore I often trade out some of the letters to match more closely to the NZ system , the letters s and f being two examples.

I also feel that cursive writing encourages chunking segments of letters together and as mentioned in a earlier post this can help with increasing speed, and awareness of segments within words.

Rita