CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Handwriting in Schools

NARRATOR: Walk into almost any Canadian classroom today, and you will still find a child laboriously shaping the letter g. Whether you should expect to find her there in ten years is becoming a genuinely contentious question. As tablets and keyboards take over more of the school day, a growing number of educators wonder why scarce instructional minutes are still devoted to a skill most adults use only for grocery lists. Others reply that something valuable, if difficult to measure, would disappear with the pencil.

NARRATOR: Education consultant Trevor Lang is firmly among the former. Forty minutes a week of penmanship, he calculates, amounts to several full school days every year, time he would gladly hand over to keyboarding and reading. Employers, he observes, stopped asking to see anyone's penmanship decades ago. More persuasively, perhaps, Lang points to children whose hands tire quickly or whose letters stubbornly refuse to line up. Give that child a keyboard, he argues, and teachers finally discover how much she actually understands. Six-year-olds would still learn to print their alphabets under his plan; it's the drills that drag on into later grades that he would abolish. Keeping them, he suspects, owes more to parental nostalgia than to any demonstrated benefit.

NARRATOR: Occupational therapist Marianne Cole hears this reasoning with mounting unease. Forming a letter by hand, she contends, teaches the brain to recognize it, and the struggling readers in her clinic are frequently those who were rushed past that stage. She is equally protective of the older student's notebook. A laptop invites pupils to record a lecture almost verbatim, whereas a pen, being slow, forces them to decide what deserves writing down. Cole sheds no tears for elaborate loops and flourishes; cursive could vanish tomorrow, provided that children leave elementary school able to print clearly and comfortably. A child dependent on a keyboard, she adds, is stranded the moment a battery dies.

NARRATOR: The research, it should be said, is less conclusive than either camp suggests, since many of the studies involve small groups of very young children and say little about a fourteen-year-old. Still, one wonders whether a practice refined over centuries ought to be discarded largely because the timetable is crowded. Lang may well be right about the struggling writer, yet a keyboard for those who need one hardly requires taking the pen from everyone else. Before school boards rewrite their curricula, they might reasonably ask for better evidence than a calculation of minutes.