A Study on the Chinese writing difficulty of junior secondary students with dyslexia in Hong Kong = Xianggang chu zhong du xie zhang ai xue sheng de Zhong wen xie zuo kun nan yan jiu

Abstract

According to the statistics of the Education Bureau, 6248 junior secondary students had been identified with special learning difficulties in 2014. The incidence rate of this group of students suffering from dyslexia is about 80%. This dissertation explores and investigates the Chinese writing difficulties of the junior secondary students with dyslexia encountered from the perspectives of teachers and students.

The research consists of two studies. Study1 aims atinvestigating the language teachers’ perceptions of the difficulties of dyslexia students in Chinese writing, teachers’ strategies of helping them, and their related professional training. By using a tailor-designed survey, a profound understanding about the teaching measures applied on dyslexic students can be reached. Throughout the study, 106teachers (with 40 Primary 4-6 teachers and 66 junior secondary teachers) were invited to fill in the questionnaires. The study showed that only about 30% of the respondents were trained to teach the students with dyslexia. Other respondents gave advice to students upon their own judgments, which failed to tackle the difficulties comprehensively. The respondents also stated the writing problems of dyslexic students which include inadequate words, misuse of vocabularies, poor grammatical sentences, and problems in orthographical encoding process. Teachers could mainly use brainstorming and mind-mapping to help students solving their writing problems.

Case studies were conducted in Study 2 for 3 students (Grade 7, 8, 9) with dyslexia (aged13, 14 and 15respectively), who were diagnosed by educational psychologists. This study used the framework of Process-writing to analyse the processes of dyslexia students in writing their composition. By employing the Chinese Writing Scale, “Think Aloud” protocol and interview, the stages of pre-writing, writing and reviewing of the dyslexia students were disclosed while they were composing their writing and investigated the difficulties they were confronted with. The finding showed that dyslexic students were in lack of planning strategy in their pre-writing stage. Thus, students experienced “Pause” and “Edit” processes mainly due to slow decoding of the Chinese characters. As dyslexic students rarely reviewed their products, they faced the problems of lacking cognitive strategy and serious problems in orthographical encoding process. In addition, with their poor ability to put oral language into written form, dyslexic students often missed and failed to present the ideas in full.

The groundbreaking aspect of this study is that this thesis is the first to employ the process-writing model, think-aloud protocol and students interview as the framework for qualitative analysis of the Chinese writing difficulties confronted by dyslexic students in Hong Kong. Through this comprehensive framework, the new processes in the Chinese writing and their difficulties were identified which will shed light on the analysis of the difficulties of dyslexia students in future research in Chinese writing or bilingual writing.