In this paper we study the development of handwriting ability of primary school students by investigating the number of errors appearing in their transcription. More precisely, 1557 primary school students were asked to copy a paragraph in a period of time and then the errors in their samples were collected and statistically analyzed. | JOURNAL OF SCIENCE OF HNUE 2011 Vol. 56 N . 1 pp. 113-122 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF ERRORS IN TRANSCRIPTION OF PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN VIETNAM Nguyen Thi Cam Huong Hanoi National University of Education Yusuke EDA Wakayama University Japan Nguyen Thi Hoang Yen The Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences E-mail nch19381@ Abstract. In this paper we study the development of handwriting ability of primary school students by investigating the number of errors appearing in their transcription. More precisely 1557 primary school students were asked to copy a paragraph in a period of time and then the errors in their samples were collected and statistically analyzed. The results yielded that The fre- quency of errors in the transcriptions tended to increase in grade the upper grade students tend to make more errors than the lower ones in particular among all students the number of students who made errors in grade five is the most and the number of the ones in grade two is significantly the least. Furthermore there is a gender discrimination in the transcriptions. Among the second fourth and fifth grades the proportion of boys who made errors are significantly more than that of the girls. Our results imply the necessity to consider the relationship among handwriting errors speed and legibility in Vietnamese language. Keywords transcription error handwriting primary school students. 1. Introduction The development of writing ability is considered as an essential ingredient for success in school and the failure to attain handwriting competency may affect both academic success and self-esteem of students 2 . A lot of previous researches on handwriting have focused on the two most important factors in handwriting performance - speed and legibility. quite right They reported that the handwriting speed increased along with the age and grade of students however this relationship was not linear 14 6 10 . Graham et al. 6 also indicated that the student s handwriting .
