Providing Stroke Sequence of Chinese Characters Facilitates Handwriting Learning in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder
- Rong-Ju Cherng, Department of Physical Therapy, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
- Yi-Wen Liao, Department of Physical Therapy, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
- Jenn-Yeu Chen, Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan
AbstractThe study investigated whether providing instruction on the stroke sequence would facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing (TD) children. The children wrote six characters, three with stroke sequence instruction and three without. Each character was repeated 40 times. Trajectory, speed, on-paper time, in-air time, and number of changes in velocity direction per stroke (NCV) were measured with Wacom Intuos 5 digitizing writing tablet. The results showed a significant group effect, time (practice) effect and instruction effect but no interaction effects. Both groups of children showed a similar trend of improvement over practice with decreasing trajectory, increasing speed, decreasing on-paper time and in-air time. With stroke sequence instruction, both groups of children learned at a similar rate on most of the writing parameters. Instruction on stroke sequences helped the character writing of both the DCD children and the TD children.