What about tracing and other multi-sensory teaching approaches?

As always, I come away from a Shanahan post thinking more about what I think I know about reading. :) After reading this review, I have 3 quick thoughts...
1). As a Wilson trained teacher (similar to OG), I also use multi-sensory methods and have often wondered about the theory behind the practice. I agree - "attention" is a key variable in this discussion.
2). Relatedly, I would also say multi-sensory techniques like air-tracing "might" reinforce neural processing because many kids (but not all!) find them fun. Let's not forget that motivation is also an important variable in learning to read (and one many educators forget about as the Science of Reading becomes the new phrase du jour). Duke and Cartwright's emphasis on self-regulation (Active View of Reading, 2021) is a valuable extension to Scarborough's Rope.
3). Finally, Thank You, Mr. Falker is a great book, but it does reinforce "beliefs" that merit further investigation. :)

Unfortunately I cannot reference this, but my understanding of the MOTOR part of multisensory input is actually SPEECH itself. By looking in a mirror when articulating a sound and being aware of what your articulators are DOING, the motor system is activating the phonological system. Any ideas on this?

I’m a parent of a child with auditory processing disorder. Learning to read in a classroom has a lot of obstacles if you’re auditory processing operates differently. With that in mind, I do think seeing, hearing, feeling the movement of letter formations can help a lot of kids who have a variety of sensory and processing differences grab on to what’s being taught. On the surface it may seem like attention issues, but underneath that it could be processing variation from person to person. It may be easy to assume that multi sensory approaches are for kids with diagnosed disabilities… but that stuff is on a continuum. We’re all neurodiverse. We all have variation. Kids with disabilities have just crossed the line that was drawn in the sand… but there’s another kid who’s just on the other side of that line. And many others who have not been tested. Multi sensory is following a universal design model.

Tracing vs mapping should be considered. Students should sound out the words and form the letters as they write NOT TRACE. Mapping sounds also allows the teacher to observe the students sound-letter correspondence. The act of writing letters (not tracing) as they say the sounds (not letter names) reinforces the sound letter correspondence. This is further applied in larger words where students say the chunks and then spell chunk by chunk. This reinforces the reading strategy of reading by chunks. Then when writing or copying connected text students say phrases/groups of words as they write. This reinforces phrasing while reading.

The advice to teachers should be use pencil and paper and skip the sand and shaving cream. Golf pencils for K-1 are great. Practice letter formation a lot.

Multi sensory approaches skirt too close to learning styles which we know definitely are pseudoscience.

David Share (the self-teaching hypothesis) speculates that the reason why spelling instruction improves reading even better than decoding instruction is because students are uniting seeing the letters with writing the letters, simultaneously activating the visual with the kinesthetic.

Spelling as a self-teaching mechanism in orthographic learning, Daphna Shahar-Yames and David L. Share, Journal of Research in Reading, 2008

"Even when spelling highly familiar words, the writer is obliged to retrieve the elements of the visual form of the word whereas reading only requires recognition (Perfetti, 1997). When spelling, furthermore, the writer must process each and every letter. In reading, on the other hand, the orthographic representation may be less than fully specified yet sufficient for word identification, particularly when encountered in meaningful context (Holmes & Carruthers, 1998)."

Having students say the phoneme while writing the grapheme further reinforces the sound-spelling connection necessary for orthographic mapping.

I have seen students who view tracing like making an art project, with no connection to the real purpose of the activity. They can complete pages of traced letters, and have no more letter knowledge at the end. For some of my students, sand trays, textured letter cards, and shaving cream (I hate the stuff!), do help kids to learn letters. Whether it is because of the novelty and paying closer attention or the act/motion of writing the letters, I don't know. Perhaps these techniques also slow down the process, again teaching kids to look at the sub-letter level. I have also had great success with students writing letters in the air, especially my MLs, who may struggle with directionality.

After the experience of having my own child with quite severe dysgraphia, which severely interfered with his story writing and spelling, I now put more emphasis on letter formation at an early age including tracing. I have seen in articles strong recommendations in the value of handwriting and its likely benefits for hyperactivity as well.

I am keen on proper pencil grip since I have observed older students who held a pencil with an iron grip as if they were stirring porridge and consequently needed to stop writing and shake their hand because they had cramp.

My conclusion is that letter formation should be an exercise combining the importance linking sounds and graphemes and fine motor control since both, for small children can take some time to develop. I am also a bit of a stickler for explicit instruction in sensibly formed letters .which includes chanting up down and around etc. I have experimented with children doing repeated lazy eights and the clockwise and anti clockwise classification of letters in desperation to try and improve the ghastly illegible handwriting of dysgraphics.

I’m a handwriting specialist with Handwriting Without Tears training. Some have mentioned handwriting instruction with tracing. If you are working one-on-one you may be able to monitor the child and make sure they are tracing the letters properly. I would NOT recommend tracing in the classroom for learning letter formation. Kids will trace the letters any which way and they will not learn proper formation. Even with numbers and arrows on the letters, they ignore them. Much better to have them practice making each stroke properly and checking that they’re doing it correctly, perhaps in small groups.

Again, as a former classroom teacher, I find myself bristling with frustration as I read this.

As a recovering person with German ethnicity, I want to put in all caps: Well, get on with it then, researchers!

Release thousands of teachers from the burden of doing something that is not necessary!

I've personally let go of doing air-writing (I'm a Barton tutor), and instead do a sound-association thing where I tell the student that we're going to work on 3 words that are spelled in a way that you wouldn't expect. I say the first word, and ask how many sounds they hear in it. (So they need to have digraph sounds, letter sounds, and segmenting down pretty well.)

Then we draw horizontal lines for the sounds. Together, we fill in the lines with what makes the most sense. Sometimes, it's an opportunity to mention that English words don't end with a v, or something equivalent.

The student highlights the "tricky spelling, and then erases the word, sound by sound. (dry-erase board) Finally, they write it themselves, saying each sound as they write the letters.

Based loosely on Reading Simplified's lessons on orthographically irregular words.

It seems to be working just as well as the other procedure I'd been taught to do, but I'd sure love to see some research, especially with retention of these words by kids with dyslexia.

That is all.

Thank you for broaching the topic.

Beth-
There is some research showing that when it comes to teaching handwriting, having students trace letters does make a positive contribution to their development.

tim

Harriet-
Writing does everything that you describe -- tracing does none of those.

tim

Anonymous--

You can believe all of that, but there is no research evidence supporting it, neurological theories have moved on from that, and there is some empirical evidence on tracing suggesting that it is more likely to confuse children than to help them learn.

tim

Mari--

There is no question that seeing a word and saying a word simultaneously. I suspect the verbal/linguistic part of that is what is important rather than the motor portion of the activity. This could easily be studied by having some kids think a word when they saw it or imagine making that sound. You could get a small fall off from some subjects who didn't think the word/sound (you couldn't tell for sure), but otherwise I'd bet they would do equally well.

tim

Yaneth--

Basically, teaching decoding minus tactile-kinesthetic exercise, getting kids to look at words and say them, having kids trying to write words from memory and then checking their spellings against the standard, encouraging invented spelling.

tim

Bonjour Tim !

I've been teaching dyslexic kids for 20 years. I did use tracing following OG training but found that it made no difference, and took up precious time that could be used for more useful work. What does seem to work much better is saying, listening and writing the words (not tracing letters).

The tracing of letters, not knowing if it really works or not, reminds me of one of my high school students who's teacher spent hours if not entire weekends correcting her students spelling tests with a sophisticated colour coding. When I ask M-A what "classe de mots" (not sure if you call these "word classes" in English : noun, verb, article, adjective ...), he answered without skipping a beat : C'est le orange, Mme Lise. I still laugh about it 10 years later. He was much more into colours than "classes de mots" lol

Always interesting reading you!

Lise

PS
TS: "After 100 years, I still can’t tell you if tracing improves learning when it comes to reading."
LLH : I've met you. You are definitely not that old ! ;-)

We use tracing as a strategy to decode a word. When the student encounters a word they have the skills to decode but they aren't able to read it just by looking at it, we prompt them to trace it on the tabletop as they say the sounds. It works like magic. They've written the grapheme countless times so perhaps that movement triggers the sound for them (especially helpful with vowels), or perhaps it just slows them down enough to get the sounds in the right order (bulb instead of blub), or perhaps it helps them focus, but regardless, they're far more accurate (and confident that they're right) than when they utilize their stand-by of guessing and hoping.

That does not seem to be the process that's being discussed here. Are you referring to looking at words and copying them in an effort to build automaticity or accuracy?

Karen--
Yes, trying to "copy" words but without the words being visually available. Look at the word, remove the word, and then try to write the word. In other words, what you are doing is trying to fix a detailed representation of the word in memory (detailed in the sense that it is based on knowing the sequence of letters and not shape or some distinctive feature).

tim

Muscle memory is built through repetition. In sport, the movements requiring fine tuning are often accompanied by verbal instruction that we repeat in our heads while memorizing these movements. This is true when learning a new choreography. It was true when we learned to associate the letters of a keyboard to the finger required to be most efficient. James & Engelhardt (2012) did in fact measure 5-year old children's abilities to associate symbols to sounds. "Preliterate, five-year old children printed, typed, or traced letters and shapes, then were shown images of these stimuli while undergoing functional MRI scanning. A previously documented “reading circuit” was recruited during letter perception only after handwriting—not after typing or tracing experience. These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading. Handwriting therefore may facilitate reading acquisition in young children."

Palmis, Velay, Fabiani, Nazarian, Ancton, Habib, Kandel & Longcamp (2019) also measured the contribution of handwriting to orthographic process. "These results constitute direct evidence that orthographic and motor processes occur in a continuous and interactive fashion during writing."

In a typically developing brain and body, automated motor movements require less and less time in order to be executed accurately. In time, cognitive load is reduced and access occurs without much effort. If one can argue that seeing the letters more frequently can help the learner retrieve the pertinent information more quickly, then one can hypothesize that this also applies to frequent motor practice involving tracing letters while learning about the letter sounds and names (teaching both in unison yields more benefits then teaching one or the other). There are many studies that have studied the process of the graphomotor movement required to become a fluent writer, and they do include building up to automatized letter writing on command through activities like tracing or using dotted lines at first - like anything else, a template always helps set the stage for precise movement : the key is knowing when to remove the prompt and foster independence (Goigoux, et al. 2016). With proper instruction with respect to directionality, writing fluency will lend itself well enough to cursive movements, for the most part.

Goigoux et al. (2016). Lire et écrire au CP. Institut français de l'éducation. https://ife.ens-lyon.fr/recherche/thematiques-de-recherche/projets/la-recherche-lire-et-ecrirecp

James, K. H. & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children, Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), pp. 32-42, ISSN 2211-9493, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2012.08.001

Palmis, S., Velay, J.-L., Fabiani, E., Nazarian, B., Ancton, J-L., Habib, M., Kandel, S., & Longcamp, M. (2019). The impact of spelling regularity on handwriting production: A coupled fMRI and kinematics study. Cortex, 1113, pp. 111-127.

Michelle-
There is no reason to believe that the effects of writing and spelling on reading has anything to do with graphomotor movement. Cognitively it is markedly different than tracing.

tim