How spelling and handwriting abilities contribute to the quality of written texts in adolescents
Chiara Straccamore, Elisabetta Morelli, Cesare Cornoldi
It has been suggested that, although apparently independent, the three aspects of writing (handwriting, spelling and written production) are interrelated; in particular, a young child who does not write fluently and spell correctly produces a lower quality text. This aspect, however, had not been systematically investigated in adolescence, until now. The study, examining the data collected for the standardisation of the MT Avanzate-3 Battery of 3,122 students attending the first two years of Upper Secondary School, addresses the issue of the relationship between the different components of the writing process. Through correlation and regression analysis, we found that spelling variables contribute significantly — although not widely — to the quality of written production and we found a correlation between the quality of the text and the quality of handwriting in text production, whereas the contribution of handwriting speed is minimal. Lastly, this paper proposes a new «Lexical Spelling Correctness» index, obtained by subtracting the number of mistakes made in the dictation of non-words to the errors in the dictation of words. The index is correlated with the quality of text production.
Keywords
Handwriting, spelling, written expression, adolescents.