"Work Processing: Its Impact on Children's Writing" by Lynne Outhred
Outhred looks at how using word processor to write stories impacts the creative writing of children with learning disabilities. Outhred observes that "early writing is more closely linked to early spelling than to early reading" and explains that children learning to spell employ a phonetic approach where early readers rely more on visual word recognition, later learning to alternate between these strategies. Outhred cites Barron (1985) to suggest that "good readers are characterized by their ability to use visual and phonological information in both reading and spelling, while poor readers are characterized by heavy reliance on visual information in reading and phonological information in spelling" (Barron 374 cited in Outhred 262). Children with learning disabilities are often reluctant writers, and frequent criticism for illegibility or misspelling leads them to play it safe by using only familiar words, avoiding complex ideas, and keeping their written work short (262). Word processors are thought to be especially helpful to children with learning disabilities because they result in a neat finished product, because children are less likely to reverse letters, because the format reiforces the standard left to right and top to bottom sequence, becasue poor spacial or coordination skills do not interfere with letter formation, and because it makes revision easier (262). The study compared weekly handwritten and word processed stories by the same students over a period of between 12-20 weeks, and analyzed each for fluency (total number of words) and misspellings (262-3). Fluency was chosen because of its close correlation to the quality of children's written work, and misspellings because of a theory that children would spell better on a word processor because the words on the screen look more like those the child sees in books (263). For students whose handwritten stories were 60 words or more, using the word processor decreased the length of their stories, while for children whose handwritten stories were 50 words or less, using the word processor increased the length of their stories. Similarly, those children with less severe spelling problems in their handwritten work did not improve significantly while those with the most errors in their handwritten work spelled better using the word processor (263). The children who improved the most were those who used visual rather than phonetic clues to remember how to spell a word (263). The results were found to be encouraging, particularly because of an increase in confidence in the students whose writing was weakest.
Bibliography
Outhred, Lynne. "Word Processing: Its Impact on Children's Writing." Journal of Learning Disabilities 1989; 22: 262-264)