Examination of Factors Causing Difficulty in Writing Kanji: Japanese Elementary School Children

Abstract

The present study examined 2 factors considered to be causal in the basic skills involved when writing kanji: verbal memory and visual memory, in order to examine their role in extremely low achievement in writing kanji. The participants were 3,040 elementary school pupils from the 2nd through 6th grades. Tests for detecting parts of kanji characters, knowledge of kanji radicals, and the sequence of the strokes used to write kanji were used to evaluate the children's basic skills in writing kanji. A test of verbal memory and a test of visual memory for random shapes were administered in order to evaluate the pupils' memory. The results were as follows: (a) the children whose scores on the tests of writing kanji were below the 5th percentile made significantly more blank answers than the other children did; (b) those children who were judged by their teachers to need more accommodation when learning kanji scored in the 12th to 28th percentile; (c) those children who had difficulty in writing kanji (scores below the 5th percentile) as well as reading kanji (scores below the 10th percentile) had significant odds ratios for low performance on the tests of verbal memory and of kanji radicals (scores below the 10th percentile); (d) the odds ratios of the children who were judged by their teachers to need accommodation were lower than the scores of the children whose kanji writing test scores were below the 5th percentile; (e) the children who had difficulty only writing kanji had significant odds ratios for low performance on the tests of verbal memory and kanji radicals. Evaluation of possible causal factors in writing kanji, as well as supportive interventions to avoid any negative effects of causal factors, might be effective in decreasing children's difficulty in writing kanji. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)