What Tracing Practice Does, and When to Move On From It

In 1988 the Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology published a paper by Masato Onose (in Japanese) on combining tracing and copying practice. It looked at how practice on top of a model (tracing) and practice next to a model (copying) should be combined to help children write better.

Most kana workbooks, in Japan and for learners abroad, start with tracing faint characters. Parents and learners sometimes wonder whether all that tracing actually leads to writing on your own. This article sets out what tracing teaches and what it leaves out, based on the research, and then gives my view on when to move on from it.

A study comparing tracing and copying

Onose’s study had two experiments.

In the first, 178 first graders were split into five groups: one traced for three days, one copied for three days, one traced on day one and copied on days two and three, one copied on days one and two and traced on day three, and one did no practice. The practice used a few kanji with few strokes.

The group that traced first and then copied improved the most. That result, though, was for first graders who had been learning to write at school for over half a year.

In the second experiment, 63 children aged five and six were compared in the same way. For them, tracing followed by copying worked no better than copying alone.

I read this not as “tracing is pointless” but as “tracing pays off when it leads into the next step.” You trace to learn how the lines move, and then you write on your own while looking at the model. For children who were already used to writing, that sequence worked. The abstract does not explain why there was no difference for the younger children.

What tracing teaches

I think tracing teaches three things.

• Stroke order. Which line comes first and which way it goes. Following the model puts the order and direction into the movement of the hand.
• The shape of each line. Straight or curved, where it turns, whether it ends in a sweep. Tracing lets the hand follow movements that are hard to see by eye alone.
• Rough size and position. Because you stay inside the model, the size of the character does not go badly wrong.

For a child writing for the first time, building a character from nothing on a blank page is harder than it looks. Tracing lowers that first step.

What tracing leaves out

While you trace, the model decides where every line goes. Where to start, how far to extend a line, how to balance it against the others: tracing leaves all of that building of the shape to the model.

There is also brain research on this. In a 2012 study by James and Engelhardt, 15 children aged four to five practised letters in three ways: writing them freehand in a blank box, tracing dotted outlines, and typing on a keyboard. When the children later looked at the letters, a clear response in brain areas involved in reading appeared only for the letters they had written freehand. It did not appear for the letters they had traced or typed.

It is a small study, and you cannot draw a firm conclusion from it alone. But it does suggest that building a shape yourself while writing does something tracing does not.

Three steps

I think of the path from tracing to writing on your own as three steps.

1. Trace. Learn the stroke order and how the lines move.
2. Copy. Put the model to one side and write it in an empty space. This is the first step of building the shape yourself.
3. Write from memory. Hear the name or sound of the character and write it without looking.

In Onose’s study, the combination that worked best was going from step 1 to step 2. Rather than tracing for weeks, I think it is better to mix in the next step even within the same session: trace, then copy.

Signs it is time to move on

I would decide when to stop tracing character by character, not by age. These are the signs I look for.

• The hand moves before the model does. You already know where the next line starts before the model shows it.
• The stroke order can be said aloud. You can put the order into words, such as “across, down, sweep.”
• The traced line stays close to the model. Your hand keeps up with the shape of the line.

When a character shows these signs, move it to the copying step. There is no need to move every character at once. Copy the ones you know well, and go back to tracing for new or difficult ones. Moving on can happen one character at a time.

If the shape falls apart at the copying step, that is not going backward. I think it falls apart precisely because you have started to build the shape yourself. When that happens, put the character next to the model and look together at which line is out of place.

Paper and tracing apps

Tracing works on paper and in apps, and I think each has its own job.

Paper lets you practise holding a pencil and drawing a line on a real surface. Schools use paper, so writing on paper is where you want to end up. For pencil grip, see How to Teach Pencil Grip.

An app can animate the model in stroke order, and you can erase and rewrite as many times as you like. In a paper workbook, you have to work out for yourself where each faint line starts. In an app, the direction in which the model line grows shows the stroke order directly.

Learn the stroke order and the movement of the lines in the app; practise copying and using a pencil on paper. That is the split I think works best.

Changing the tracing steps in StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer

StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer is an iPhone and iPad app for practising hiragana and katakana stroke order. When you choose a character, the model draws itself one stroke at a time in the correct order. Write one stroke with your finger or a stylus and lift, and the next stroke appears while the model for the previous stroke disappears. After the last stroke the model disappears and only your own writing is left. It does not score or judge your lines.

Because each earlier stroke’s model disappears, from the second stroke on you write the next line while looking at the lines you wrote yourself. The model does not cover every line all the way through. What remains at the end is your own character, and you can press the redo button to play the model again and compare it with what you wrote.

To move toward writing on your own, you can use the large, medium and small buttons and the cross guide as steps. Start large with the guide on, move to medium once you are comfortable, and finish with small and no guide. The smaller you write, the closer it feels to writing in a paper notebook. Practical tips describes this approach too. Once a character works at that stage, I think it is ready for copying on paper.

It covers 142 characters: hiragana and katakana with their dakuten and handakuten forms. Combined sounds such as きゃ and small characters such as っ are not included. There is no grid on the screen; the large, medium and small sizes change the size of the model character. A speaker button plays the reading of the character. It is a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases. On iPhone it runs in landscape.

For characters whose stroke order often goes wrong, see Hiragana Stroke Order: The Characters Learners Most Often Get Wrong and Katakana Stroke Order Mistakes. For the order in which to learn them, see What Order to Teach Hiragana In. For a first session, see Getting Started with StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer.