published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Curriculum and Educational Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

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