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

by Wong Yiu Chuen Enoch. / Thesis (M.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1980. / Bibliography: leaves 65-68.

阮偉忠. / 據手稿本影印. / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學硏究院敎育學部. / Ju shou gao ben ying yin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-154). / Ruan Weizhong. / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue yan jiu yuan jiao yu xue bu. / 序言 / 論文摘要 / Chapter 第一章 --- 緒論 / 引言 --- p.1 / 活動教學的發展過程 --- p.4 / 研究動機與目的 --- p.12 / Chapter 第二章 --- 有關文獻評述 / 創造力 --- p.19 / 創造力與智力 --- p.22 / 創造力與教學條件 --- p.26 / 創造力與性別 --- p.35 / 創造力與社會經濟地位 --- p.42 / 創造力與學校級別 --- p.47 / Chapter 第三章 --- 研究設計 / 名詞定義 --- p.51 / 假設 --- p.52 / 研究樣本 --- p.53 / 研究工具 --- p.55 / 預試 --- p.60 / 測驗安排 --- p.62 / 評分者之間的信度 --- p.66 / 資料收集與分析 --- p.68 / 研究的限制 --- p.69 / Chapter 第四章 --- 研究結果 --- p.72 / 摘要 --- p.115 / Chapter 第五章 --- 討論與建議 / 討論部分 / 教學法差異 --- p.119 / 性別差異 --- p.130 / 社經地位差異 --- p.132 / 級別差異 --- p.134 / 建議部分 / 研究方面 --- p.135 / 教學措施方面 --- p.137 / 參考書目 / 中文部分 --- p.141 / 英文部分 --- p.149 / 附件 --- p.155

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 / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education