Formation of writing skills

1.3 The evolution of writing skills in younger students in the learning process.
In the development of writing skills in students , some changes occur daily as the exercise progresses. It cannot be said that the initial period ends when the students write the last letter y in the copybooks: with the end of the letter period, neither fluency nor confidence in writing is yet acquired.
In the process of learning, children get acquainted with both spelling techniques and graphic writing skills.
So, for a student from the very beginning, the basis is a graphic task - to write one line at an even distance from the others, write the letter a or y, and the like. But the distribution of attention is always required - to write features evenly, without bending lines, with the same slope, at an equal distance, as shown. At the same time, the transition to writing letters, syllables and sentences each time presents an increasing number of graphic requirements: some of them are old, poorly mastered, others are new, which still need to be mastered.³
With the advent of the requirements of spelling literate writing - writing from dictation, writing off the board - control over the graphic side of the letter is weakened. If children already know how to read, then they easily carry out sound-letter analysis of words, and the spelling of the words given to them does not cause difficulties; their attention, without being distracted, focuses on graphic tasks, and they quickly and easily master the correct writing techniques. On the contrary, a student who experiences difficulty in the sound-letter analysis of a word during dictation is in a hurry and performs the task from the very beginning, inevitably, somehow. He does not have time to improve the graphic image.
At the first stage of mastering a skill, a very large expenditure of energy is characteristic, inadequate to the expenditure of forces, uneconomical involvement in the performance of unnecessary muscle movements. The child squeezes the pen very tightly in his hand, presses hard on it when writing with his index finger. The muscles of the face and the whole body are tense.
The movement of the hand in the process of writing is at first very slow, although the speed of writing in primary school age is much greater than in preschool age. So, according to T.S. Komarova (when shading with a pencil) and E.N. Sokolova (when writing elements of letters and individual letters with a ballpoint pen), in preschool children from 4 to 6 years old, there is no increase in the speed of movements even with exercises for several months. At a later age, writing exercises have a great influence on increasing the speed of writing, but its increase is more significant in children of 7-8 years old than in children of 6-7 years old. This must be taken into account when teaching children to write from the age of 6.
At the beginning of the letter, the movements of children are very fractional, one effort is calculated for a small segment of the letter. Stopping the movement is possible in any part of the letter, since there is still no rhythm in movement. But already in the first year of study, with a gradual increase in the portion of continuous writing to 2-3 letters, most students can easily fulfill this requirement. The fragmentation is associated with the great effort that the student makes while writing with the difficulty of performing movements, with the lack of coordination of all the necessary links of the hand while writing along the line, with the lack of anticipation of the subsequent movement.
In the first period of the skill, both visual and motor control over movements are very imperfect. In this case, visual control is the leading one. The child constantly monitors how he leads his hand when writing, how he sets letters apart from each other, whether he writes them on a line; however, the shape of the letters is far from the model, the letters are unevenly spaced from each other, and the slope is broken.
The difficulty of comparing the sample with his performance is explained by a number of reasons: a) when the student follows the movement of the teacher's hand, he perceives this movement as insufficiently differentiated, as a very complex image, he does not immediately perceive all the features of the hand movement when writing; b) when a student sees a discrepancy between the sample and the results of his performance, he cannot always, having written again, correct his mistake, perform better, since he does not have visual-motor experience. Usually this experience is achieved with the direct assistance of the teacher. The teacher takes the student's hand in his and gives his hand the right direction, at the same time explaining how to write. This is how the relationship between visual pattern and movement is achieved.
The initial period is also characterized by the fragility of the emerging techniques. This affects the complexity of tasks. Thus, the transition to a new task, for example , to the continuous writing of a syllable, causes a violation of the writing of the shape of a letter (which was written more or less correctly in isolation), a violation of the inclination of the elements, which was not observed in the isolated writing of a letter, and more. When moving to writing words, sentences, graphic errors again appear in the children's writing, which seemed to have been eliminated in previous lessons.
The task of writing letters and connecting them is solved anew each time and somewhat differently than the previous time. This is noticeable when looking at the result of the students' writing: there are fluctuations in the slope, different widths of letters, uneven spacing of letters from each other, inconsistencies in proportions, and so on. One and the same letter in the same word, sentence turns out to be executed in different ways.
Thus, when studying in the first grade, children still do not acquire either fluency or confidence in writing. In the future, qualitative changes occur in writing: the image of a letter, letter combinations is reproduced more and more accurately, due to the fact that connections are established between visual and muscular control of movement.
The nature of hand movements changes in the process of writing in the following direction: a) the hand gets used to making movements that are most convenient and economical: down, towards oneself - the main movement when writing and connecting with a large slope - when writing up, before the next main element begins to write; b) movements are enlarged - with one impulse, an unseparated letter of several letters is performed (usually 3-4); c) in connection with these features of the movements, writing becomes more rhythmic and smooth. In general, the process of consolidation of movements, their rhythmization occurs very slowly, over many years.
Gradually, the same type of movements are consolidated when writing the same letters, which is reflected in the stereotype of the same letters when writing - handwriting begins to develop. However, stereotyping of movements is dynamic. By the end of the first year of study, one and the same student should note that a certain letter, when repeated in the text, is similar to the same letter previously written (the same rounding, shape of rotation, slope of the element, and so on). But in the second grade, when greater freedom and confidence in movement is acquired and the shape of the letters is improved, they will become somewhat different. Even more similarity will be between the same letters in the letter of the same student. Every year the movements become more and more fixed, stereotyped. Therefore, changing, correcting the handwriting of a student in grades III-IV is an extremely difficult task (T.N. Borkova , N.T. Orlova), although the students’ handwriting has not yet developed and will continue to change. This is apparently due to the fixation of the same type of movements when writing letters at a given writing speed and the fixation of other writing techniques.
A gradual increase in the speed of writing, the acquisition of a rhythm of movements in the process of writing, the desire of the hand to make the most economical movements lead to more coherent writing, in which the shape of the letters changes and its stereotype. The search for an individual style of writing also affects the change in the shape of letters in the process of fluent writing. Such a desire, often imitation of the handwriting of adults, is already observed among students in grades V-VI, when the process of writing, if not yet fully automated, is nonetheless accomplished without difficulty.
D.N. Bogoyavlensky rightly raises the question of the mechanism of automation (in particular, automation of the spelling skill): “...firstly, a gradual decrease in the role of awareness of one's actions; secondly, the curtailment of mental operations due to substantiating, and then operational judgments; thirdly, the unification and generalization of particular actions into larger-scale actions and, in connection with this, the expansion of the boundaries of transfer; fourthly, the improvement of methods for performing actions, the selection of the most rational ways of solving spelling problems and, in the end, automated actions ...”. Apparently, there is much in common in the automation of other skills, and in particular the skill of writing, only these steps need to be transferred to the area of the motor sphere.
The desire to make the most convenient, economical movement when writing quickly leads to a deformation of the shape of the letter and to the likening of one letter to another as a result of the fact that different letters are written by students with the same movement .. The deformation of letters begins at the time when writing becomes fast. Therefore, in the primary grades, the teacher should work more on fixing the correct forms of letters.
With the combination of movements into larger ones, with the weakening of visual control over movements due to the fact that the movements are carried out easily and the spelling of the word becomes more and more familiar, the speed of writing increases. Numerous studies of writing speed note a rapid increase in speed in the first years of training and a slower one thereafter. The formation of handwriting continues even after the calligraphy training ends (after grade 4). At this time, the formation of handwriting depends on the requirements for the speed and quality of writing, which are set for students by different teachers, and on the students' own desire to write better. The dependence of the quality of handwriting on the speed of writing is known, although this dependence is relative. Not all quality deteriorates with increasing speed.
By grades 8-10, the writing speed of students approaches the writing speed of adults (up to 100 letters per minute). However, in adults, very fast writing reaches a higher speed than in schoolchildren of grades 8-10, but usually a large deformation of the shape of the letters also differs. With age, it is possible to improve the quality of handwriting, turning it into a calligraphic letter, which is associated with the special abilities of students.
Thus, we have given some idea of the psychophysical features of the development of calligraphic writing skills, which will help the teacher to understand how the skill is formed, what requirements can be placed on students when teaching writing at a particular age.