Pre-screening children for specific learning disabilities (SLDs), e.g., dyslexia, is essential for effective intervention. With a quick and reliable pre- screening result, special education coordinators (SEN- COs) can provide students with early intervention and relieve their learning pressure. Unfortunately, due to the limited resources, many students in Hong Kong receive dyslexia assessments beyond the golden period, i.e., under the age of six. To this end, information technology could establish automatic pre-screening tools to address this issue. However, dyslexia pre-screening for children learning Chinese is challenging due to the lack of sound-script correlation in Chinese. In this paper, an Automatic Dyslexia Pre-screening System (ADPS) is developed to provide a quick test to identify at-risk children. Through a two-stage approach, we first develop a gamified tool based on linguistic characteristics and then evaluate the result by a comparison study. Results from a pilot test on 30 students with dyslexia and 32 students without dyslexia indicate that ADPS can effectively distinguish two groups of students. Furthermore, the interactive design elements can motivate students to conduct the pre-screening independently. Copyright © 2024 IEEE.

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that affects primary school students, which is difficult to tackle through traditional school learning due to limited resources. To this end, large-scale digital learning presents new opportunities to address the need for inclusive education. A unique challenge for students with dyslexia in Hong Kong is learning Chinese characters. In this article, we investigate whether students with dyslexia can learn the writing of Chinese characters independently in an informal learning environment. For that purpose, we developed a mobile application for learning to write Chinese characters with three different writing conditions. First, students learn new Chinese characters in Condition 1: Grid+Contour+Instruction . Then, students strengthen their memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 2: Grid+Contour . Finally, students retrieve the memory of the learned Chinese characters in Condition 3: Grid Only . Students with dyslexia demonstrated a significant improvement after practicing with the three-condition design. For example, they wrote much slower than students without dyslexia before the study but caught up over time. This study contributes an approach to facilitate the self-paced learning of students with dyslexia at scale. © 2023 The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Background: Face-to-face class suspensions during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in 2019 increased telepractice in speech and language therapy. However, little is known about speech and language therapists’ (SLTs) perceived effectiveness of telepractice and its antecedents.Aims: To examine the use of telepractice and the factors affecting its perceived effectiveness in Hong Kong mainstream schools during COVID-19.Methods & Procedures: Seventy-two school-based Hong Kong SLTs completed a 110-item online survey with six structural components: (1) concerns, (2) adoption, (3) student selection criteria, (4) perceived effectiveness, (5) continuous professional development and (6) attitudes/beliefs.Outcomes & Results: Over 90% of respondents adopted telepractice during the pandemic. Confirmatory factor analysis identified reliable constructs from their component measures. These participants reported great telepractice difficulties (especially in therapy preparation and managing students’ attention and/or communication). Mixed-response analysis revealed that psychosocial factors (i.e., students’ engagement and SLTs’ attitudes towards telepractice) but not professional practice skill factors (i.e., student client selection criteria and SLTs’ years of experience in school settings) contributed to SLTs’ self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice.Conclusions & Implications: Our findings suggest that psychosocial factors play a more important role than professional practice skill factors in the self-perceived effectiveness of telepractice. Copyright © 2022 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Background and Objectives: Most primary progressive aphasia (PPA) literature is based on English language users. Linguistic features that vary from English, such as logographic writing systems, are underinvestigated. The current study characterized the dysgraphia phenotypes of patients with PPA who write in Chinese and investigated their diagnostic utility in classifying PPA variants.Methods: This study recruited 40 participants with PPA and 20 cognitively normal participants from San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We measured dictation accuracy using the Chinese Language Assessment for PPA (CLAP) 60-character orthographic dictation test and examined the occurrence of various writing errors across the study groups. We also performed voxel-based morphometry analysis to identify the gray matter regions correlated with dictation accuracy and prevalence of writing errors.Results: All PPA groups produced significantly less accurate writing responses than the control group and no significant differences in dictation accuracy were noted among the PPA variants. With a cut score of 36 out of 60 in the CLAP orthographic dictation task, the test achieved sensitivity and specificity of 90% and 95% in identifying Chinese participants with PPA vs controls. In addition to a character frequency effect, dictation accuracy was affected by homophone density and the number of strokes in semantic variant PPA and logopenic variant PPA groups. Dictation accuracy was correlated with volumetric changes over left ventral temporal cortices, regions known to be critical for orthographic long-term memory. Individuals with semantic variant PPA frequently presented with phonologically plausible errors at lexical level, patients with logopenic variant PPA showed higher preponderance towards visual and stroke errors, and patients with nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA commonly exhibited compound word and radical errors. The prevalence of phonologically plausible, visual, and compound word errors was

The present study investigated the executive functioning of working memory, inhibition, shifting, and planning in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and how they related to Chinese (L1) and English (L2) reading comprehension. Fifty-seven Hong Kong Chinese students at Grade 7 were compared with 57 typically developing readers of chronological-age-matched controls on their performance on working memory, inhibition, shifting, planning, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, and reading comprehension in Chinese and English. Results from the multivariate analysis of variance showed that readers with dyslexia performed worse than the typical readers in executive functioning, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, and reading comprehension. Hierarchical regressions indicated that working memory, inhibition, and vocabulary knowledge were significant predictors of reading comprehension in L1 after controlling for age, IQ, and group membership. Furthermore, working memory, inhibition, shifting, vocabulary knowledge, and rapid naming contributed uniquely to reading comprehension in L2. Taken together, these findings suggest executive functioning difficulties in Chinese readers with dyslexia and highlight the differential contributions of executive functioning to Chinese and English reading comprehension; working memory and inhibition appear to play an important role in reading comprehension across different languages. Copyright ©Springer Netherlands.

The present study investigated the co-occurrence of word reading and spelling difficulties for Chinese first language (L1) and English second language (L2) and the role of morphological awareness in word reading and spelling ability across two languages. A total of 110 Hong Kong Chinese-speaking students in Grade 7, including 55 adolescents with dyslexia (28 males, mean age = 152.11 months) and 55 typically developing adolescents (27 males, mean age = 151.85 months) participated. They were assessed on the cognitive-linguistic measures of morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, word reading, and word spelling in L1 and L2. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that compared with the typical students, adolescents with dyslexia had poorer performance in all L1 and L2 measures except the phonological awareness in Chinese. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that for both groups of students, morphological awareness contributed uniquely to word reading and spelling in L1 and L2; rapid letter naming contributed uniquely to English word spelling. Findings highlight the importance of co-occurring difficulties in L1 and L2 reading and spelling and that morphological awareness may play a critical role in predicting word reading and spelling across languages for Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and those without difficulty. Copyright © Sage Publications Ltd.

Objective This quasi-experimental study reported the results of a structured literacy intervention programme designed for secondary school students of Year 7 to Year 9 with dyslexia. Students of the intervention group (n = 116) participated in 40-week sessions of small-size, classroom-based, and split-group intervention setting with 45-min daily lesson on both Chinese and English language compared with students in the control group who received normal classroom instructions (n = 98). Results Students in the intervention group outperformed the control groups in self-regulated learning scales, which indicated that there was positive change in students' behavioural and cognitive outcomes in learning. Although students demonstrated gains in phonetic skills, posttest results in academic achievement did not exhibit significant improvement when compared with their control group peers. Conclusion The findings provided some encouraging evidence of the effectiveness of intervention programme. Students that demonstrated gains in phonetic skills and improvement in behavioural and cognitive aspects required continuous intervention lessons to become a self-regulated learner, who would be self-motivated to improve methods of learning and adopt strategies for attaining academic goals. The study contributed to the literature by presenting one of the very first school-based, small-size, classroom-based, and split-group intervention programme for secondary school dyslexic students, which included teachers and students training on English and Chinese intervention content (phonological and literacy content), teaching curriculum integrated with school curriculum, and coteaching with school teachers in the mainstream classrooms, whereas most of the existing intervention programmes used pull-out approach involving the first language only.
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