The authors report on the development of a brief dyslexia screening measure based on revising the 65-item Hong Kong Behaviour Checklist of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing. Teachers' ratings of 1063 primary students aged 614 years on the behaviour checklist provided data for its psychometric evaluation using traditional measurement and Rasch measurement model analyses. Rasch scaling suggested that the revised 36-item checklist could be regarded as a unidimensional scale that assesses global dyslexic dysfunction, and receiver operating characteristics analysis suggested that a score of 18 could be an optimal cut-off score when it is used as a dyslexia screening measure. The validity of this revised checklist was supported by its substantial and significant correlations with external measures of literacy and cognitive skills. Implications of the findings for the use of adaptive testing to provide an effective procedure for screening are discussed.
[Copyright of International Journal of Disability, Development and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2012.676437 ]

This study examined the overlap of dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) in Cantonese-Chinese-speaking children. Thirty children with a prior diagnosis of SLI and 9 normal controls, aged between 6;0 and 11;3, participated. The children with SLI were tested for language impairment and dyslexia. Seven retained a diagnosis of SLI but were dyslexia-free (SLI-only), 13 received a comorbid diagnosis of dyslexia (SLI-D), and SLI had become history (SLI-H) in the other 10 children with no co-morbid diagnoses of dyslexia. The SLI-only group did worse on textual comprehension, but better on left-right reversal (an orthographic skill), than the SLI-D group. The SLI-only and the SLI-D group shared the same range of cognitive deficits relative to age norms and showed no difference in phonological processing. The SLI-D group did worse than the normal group on phonological representation, and both the SLI-only and the SLI-D group had difficulties with morphological awareness.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888430903242043]

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly reviewed, with emphasis on the cognitive characteristics of dyslexia and its manifestations, in the hope that understanding the profiles of students with dyslexia may help to lay a solid foundation for assessment, curriculum development and intervention. Recent progress in the study of the cognitive deficits of Chinese-speaking readers with dyslexia in Hong Kong and the development of assessment and intervention framework for early identification and intervention is presented. These developments shed light on dyslexia in the Chinese language and provide grounds for further work on research and practice.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2010.495830]