Does Tracing Help Children Remember Spellings?

Tracing helps children form letters but does little for remembering spellings. What the research says, and the step to add after tracing that builds memory.

Spelling · Chapter 1 Research 5 min read

Key takeaways

The short answer

Tracing helps a young child learn to form letters. It does very little to help them remember how a word is spelled. What makes a spelling stick is writing the word from memory and then checking it. So keep the tracing, and add a step after it.

Trace, then write from memory A ruled line with the word friend traced in dots on the left, a dashed fold line in the middle, and the same word written from memory on the right. Only the right-hand step makes the child recall the spelling. friend friend 1. Trace it forms the letters 2. Fold, write from memory recalls the spelling, then check fold line: the model is hidden from here on
The step that builds spelling memory is the one where the model is out of sight.

What tracing is good for

For a child still learning what the letters look like and which way the pencil goes, tracing is useful. In a 2025 study of 50 children who could not yet read, copying or tracing letters by hand led to better letter learning than typing them. Numbered arrows and a start dot on each letter make tracing better still, because they show the movement as well as the shape. The stroke order chapter covers those.

Why it does little for spelling

When a child traces friend, the word is on the page the whole time. Their hand follows the dots, but nothing asks them to remember that the vowels are i then e. Classroom studies of tracing words, going back a century, show no clear benefit for reading or spelling, and where tracing seemed to help, the likely reason was simply more time spent looking at the word. A memory study found that the benefit of writing a character dropped when people were told to trace it instead.

A brain-imaging study of five-year-olds points the same way for letters: the parts of the brain used in reading responded to letters the children had printed freehand, and not to letters they had traced or typed.

The UK Department for Education's 2025 writing framework goes further for handwriting itself. It warns that asking children to "trace around dotted letters or practise without supervision can hinder their ability to build a strong mental model" of how letters are formed.

What builds spelling memory

Two findings point the same way. The first is the generation effect: across 86 studies, people remembered words they produced themselves better than words they only read, and the gap grew after a day or more. The second is retrieval practice. In a classroom study, first and second graders who heard a word, wrote it from memory and checked it remembered far more spellings a day and five weeks later than children who did rainbow writing.

The same idea works for letter formation. First graders who studied a letter with numbered arrows and then wrote it from memory improved more than those who only copied it.

How to turn tracing into memory practice

  1. Trace the word once, saying each sound as you go: f, r, ie, n, d.
  2. Fold the page so the traced word is hidden.
  3. Write the word from memory.
  4. Unfold and check it letter by letter.
  5. Fix it if it was wrong, then try it again later in the week.

As the letters get steadier, fade the support: dotted, then faded, then a model to read with nothing to trace. The spelling worksheet generator prints each row this way, with the tracing on one side of a fold line and room to write from memory on the other, and its look-say-cover-write-check sheet is the next step once tracing is no longer needed.

Sources

The warning about unsupervised tracing is quoted from the Department for Education's The writing framework (2025, page 32).

The century of tracing research is summarised in literacy researcher Timothy Shanahan's review of the tracing research. The finding that free printing, not tracing, engaged the reading areas of the brain is from James and Engelhardt's brain-imaging study of five-year-olds (Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 2012).

The generation effect figures are from Bertsch and colleagues' meta-analysis of the generation effect (Memory and Cognition, 2007), and the classroom result is Jones and colleagues' retrieval practice versus rainbow writing (Educational Psychology Review, 2016).

The letter-formation result is Berninger and colleagues' study of 144 first graders (Journal of Educational Psychology, 1997), and the typing comparison for older children is Ouellette and Tims' study of second graders (Frontiers in Psychology, 2014).

Does Tracing Help Children Remember Spellings?: FAQ

Should my child stop tracing?

No. Keep it short, keep it supervised, and follow every traced word with one written from memory and checked.

How many times should a child write each spelling word?

Writing a word ten times while looking at it is still copying. Two or three tries from memory, each one checked, do more.

Is typing spelling words just as good as writing them?

For young children learning letters, handwriting does better. For older children practicing new spellings, one study of second graders found no difference between writing and typing.