Developmental dyslexia is a learning disability caused by neurological differences in language processing, affecting approximately 5-10% of the U.S. population’s ability to speak, read and write. Difficulties with literacy within this culture have social and emotional implications that can influence a sense of otherness. Artmaking is a significant form of expression for students with dyslexia during early education, and influences emotional and social development, such as identity formation. There are findings indicating that the development of an artistic identity during adolescence has implications for the continued cognitive, emotional, and social growth during higher education. This multiple-case study examines the educational experiences and artistic practices of three visual art graduate students with dyslexia. Patterns of cognitive and instructional experiences are considered, such as dyslexic characteristics, learning strategies, special assistance, educational environments, subject interests, and artistic identity formation. Emotional and social experiences that contribute to psychosocial development during education are discussed, such as the students’ experience realizing their difference from peers, the sense of social otherness, being misunderstood by educators, labeling, harassment, exclusion, and stigmatization. Coping strategies, such as artmaking, are discussed, along with the importance of the sense of social belonging during education. Participants’ artistic development is considered in terms of the significance of being an exceptional artist, the arts as an emotional outlet, and their orientation towards figuration during high school and college. In college, participants’ artistic development is compared to post-formal patterns of development, such as dualism, multiplicity, relativity, multiple conflicting commitments, and social awareness. Findings show the significance of the visual arts during identity formation and social development, and of participants’ ability during college to continue progressing towards their potentials. Implications for ideal educational environments, the full immersion of the visual arts into all classroom subjects, and significance of the arts for self-actualization for dyslexic students are discussed.

This thesis is aimed at analyzing dyslexic students’ features of written texts in Hong Kong using systemic functional linguistics. Text analytic method was adopted in comparing the texts written by dyslexic students with those written by normal students based on the systems of transitivity, theme, mood and modality. The study has further developed the concept of word density within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, putting forward the proposition of using “functional word density”, i.e. transitivity density, theme density and mood density, to analyze the language features of students with dyslexia, in the hope of shedding some light on teaching writing skills to these students. Research findings indicate that dyslexic students generally display strong capabilities in presenting specific concepts while their emotional concepts, however, are relatively weak. These students’ density of lexicon regarding material, behavioral and existential processes is higher than that of normal students but their word density of psychological and relationship processes is comparatively lower. When writing descriptive essays, narrative essays and argumentative essays, dyslexic students’ lexical density of psychological process indicates less variation than normal students. This shows that students with dyslexia are generally less flexible in expressing emotions and always fail to adapt to different genres by adjusting remarkably their use of psychological words. As a matter of fact, dyslexic students tend to be insufficient in expressing emotions. When it comes to essay writing, this “low-level of emotionality” reduces their lexical density of psychological words which will in turn undermines students’ performance in descriptive essays. Nevertheless, when doing narrative or commentary writing, these students’ proven word density is somewhat higher than that of normal students. The findings may pave the way for further research on alternative approaches in teaching writing skills to the students. It is also noteworthy that dyslexic students display similar tendency to normal students in terms of theme, mood and modality density. However, these students are good at using conjunctions while weak in connectives and modal adjunct. From the perspective of education, remedial and alternative approaches may be considered for the sake of dyslexic students. It is proposed that these students, in order to compensate for their lack of emotional lexicon, may express feelings by narrating daily occurrences and teachers may support by providing them with lexicon of relevant genres to strengthen their data bank on emotional lexicon. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

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. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education