DIGITAL DILEMMAS

Are oral language and handwriting on the decline?

By Georgina Oldfield

There’s no question that technology is changing the way schools operate and transforming the education system.

While there are many advantages to these changes, research shows that it is having an effect on some children’s oral language skills. In 2020 RNZ reported on a study by director of the Child Well-Being Research Institute, Professor Gail Gillon that there were an “alarming number of children starting school with very poor language skills, with some only speaking like two-year-olds”. Education specialists say screen time, time-poor households and poverty are all partly to blame. With devices now compulsory in many schools and technology integrated into the school curriculum, Waimate Main School primary teacher, Lucy Lowery says she is seeing the effects it is having on her own students first hand. “Kids are coming through at the moment with really, really low oral language and compared to when I was at school, I think the main reason is parents aren’t talking to them as much and when they go home there’s an outside influence and then they go onto their iPad.” Lucy, who teaches years three and four, believes technology could be one of the main contributing factors to the decline in oral language. “It just comes back to technology; there’s so much.

“I was even talking to the kids about it the other day; when I got home, I’d be straight out on the bike, straight out on the farm, straight out doing all this stuff, where-as these kids, they come home and they literally go straight to the iPad and because there’s so much more available now, they’re not having that talking opportunity.” But oral language isn’t the only thing that is being affected, Lucy says. Because of the increase in tablet use in the classroom and the added pressure to get so much done in the day, handwriting has also taken a bit of a back step too. “I mean kids still need it but sometimes it’s really hard to find time in the day. “I have eight reading groups and four maths groups, so that takes up my morning and then writing plus the modelling and everything like that added into it, and then your PE and your health and your science – there’s so much more pressure to teaching now. “Sometimes with handwriting I will do it in a quick 10 minutes and it could just be at the end of spelling, or I’ll say ‘right let’s focus on the letter ‘p’, or I notice what the kids are struggling on, but it definitely is taking a backstep.”

Education specialists say screen time, time-poor households and poverty are all partly to blame.

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