Handwriting as a key to literacy

Abstract

This study aims to explore the connection between the practice of printing the letters of the Arabic script and learning to read in the earliest grades. The participants were fiftytwo students from three different private Lebanese schools aged between five to six years. To collect data, the researcher utilized observations of the way young students develop their writing and reading skills in class. A secondary tool was interviews with the teachers, where they were able to express their views and perceptions about the issue under study. Thus, the approach was to a great extent qualitative, though having a specifically quantitative feature, namely, the number of letters written by the students in a single minute. The analysis of data showed significant correlation between writing and reading skills, and perhaps suggests that competence in the writing skill helps the reading skill more than vice versa.