Linguistic characteristics of dyslexic students in Hong Kong — by Dr. Raymond Lam, Division of Arts and Languages
Keywords: Dyslexia, special education needs, pedagogy, Chinese writing, Chinese language education
Accepted: May 29, 2025; Published online: June 7, 2025; Published: June 27, 2025
Dyslexia problems have been playing an important role across the spectrum of special education needs (SEN) throughout the world since the last century. In conservative terms, it is estimated that the number of dyslexic students accounts for more than 10% of the total student population (Kirby, 2020). The global community has been increasingly concerned about the issue, which is exemplified by the active participation of teachers and parents, other than scholars, at academic seminars on the relevant topics.
In Hong Kong, various organisations and institutions have been providing a wide range of services and support for dyslexic students. Scholarly research targeting dyslexia problems (e.g., Chan, 2020; Chung, 2022; Yeung et al., 2017, 2020) has continuously generated encouraging results as well. However, focus of these studies and research has often been placed to a lesser extent on pure linguistic level. It is also noteworthy that the focus of these studies and research lies in individual characters and words, instead of sentences, not to mention discourse matters.
Students with dyslexia problems generally face significant challenges in writing, as manifested in mirror characters, word order confusion, and spelling errors. These students are at a distinct disadvantage in examination against typical students. Many parents and students therefore tend to have the impression that dyslexic students are destined to be losers in language-related subjects under the current education system. Notwithstanding, the future of dyslexic students may be more promising than thought. Data from local examination authorities (see Lam, 2014) surprisingly show that some students with dyslexia problems could performed outstandingly in Chinese essay writing in public examinations, which could serve as a booster for students and the teaching profession. But still, how do dyslexic students perform in discourse-level writing in Chinese subjects at public examination? What are their distinctive characteristics? This article is going to explore these issues to provide insights for further discussion.
Dyslexic students tend to display common characteristics in discourse writing, including colloquial expressions, lack of themes, role-play confusion, frequent repetition of themes, and a preference for dialogue formats.
It is common for dyslexic students to write spoken Chinese – colloquial expressions – even at examination. A student wrote the following sentence in his Chinese essay: “而家就讓我講一講我的睇法先。” (English Literal Translation: Now let me talk about my thought first.) Colloquial expressions literally mean my hands write what my mouth speaks. By putting colloquial expressions into words, dyslexic students are not conforming to the conventions of written Chinese.
Dyslexic students specify subject reference to a person or object at the beginning of a sentence and omit references for the rest of the text. If the text involves a single person or an individual event, this lack of themes will not cause confusion. Yet, if multiple subjects of person or event are involved, use of no-subject Chinese sentences could create comprehension difficulties for the readers.
“小明和小強約好一起去行山，誰不知對方遲大到，把他氣得跳起來。” (English Literal Translation: Peter and John planned to go hiking. Unexpectedly, one of them was late, making the other one furiously angry.) In this sentence, the reference of “對方” (English Literal Translation: one of them) and “他” (English Literal Translation: the other one) are ambiguous. The dyslexic student obviously failed to write from the reader’s point of view by clearly specifying the references of “對方” (English Literal Translation: one of them) and “他” (English Literal Translation: the other one).
Students with dyslexia problems tend to describe their personal experiences themselves, leading to frequent repetition of themes. They will choose to keep a first-person viewpoint even when they are free to switch their perspective.
It is probable that due to innate limitations, dyslexic students prefer to present themselves in dialogue formats. They often narrate stories using dialogue. However, when switching to third-person narration, the above scenario occurs and recurs.
In an examination scenario, challenges faced by dyslexic students are hitched and complicated. Proper handling of one or two issues may shed light on the solution of the problem to certain extent. Apart from the difficulties specific to dyslexic students, both typical and dyslexic candidates have other problems in common: the time concept flows throughout the whole text, less description with abstract concepts, and the number of characters falls short of the specified targets. According to Lam (2014), typical candidates wrote in various sentence forms, such as no-subject sentences, passive-voice sentences, coverbal sentences, and causative sentence and they seemed not to prefer using causative sentences as the structure of such sentences was complicated.
Given that dyslexic students face overwhelming innate challenges, are they pre-destined to be losers in examinations? Are there any tactics for them to overcome the difficulties? A dyslexic student’s writing from the high-scored samples was rated “Excellent” in the writing section of a public examination. His written essay, entitled “Observations Before a School Assembly Begins”, contained only 650 characters with 358 words repeated. How could the student achieve an “Excellent” rating?
In terms of structure, that student started by specifying the frequency the assembly was held at school and stating that students did not like the assembly and the reasons behind. He then adopted the spatial progression technique, with the focus moving gradually from the school gate to the staircases. He described what he saw in front of the school gate – from who the people were to what they were doing. Subsequently, the focus was placed on the scene behind the gate, highlighting the contrast between busy teachers and students who were playing games (on the phone). Finally, the bell rang. Everything came to a halt and the singing of the national anthem brought all the teachers and students together for the assembly.
The essay was written with plain language but captured series of scenarios in a structural manner. This structured approach, characterised by short sentences (typically 5-16 characters), factual observations (with minimal abstract descriptions) and spatial progression, plus an ending with sound effect, distinguished this dyslexic student as a winner in the public examination. The innate limitations somehow are disguised blessings for the benefit of the apparent loser. Believe it or not – every cloud has a silver lining!
Research on Chinese dyslexia in Hong Kong primarily focuses on reading comprehension to develop assessment tools. Many early studies (e.g., Chung et al., 2010, Ho et al., 2014) approach the problem from psychological or medical perspectives, with few analyzing the linguistic features of dyslexic students’ writing. For the rest of this paper, Systemic Functional Linguistics would be employed as the foundation to analyze some essays written by senior secondary dyslexic students in the hope that their writing problems could be overcome.
In linguistics term, Systemic Functional Linguistics concerns material, behavioral, verbal and existential processes which can be categorized as “Concrete Concepts” (e.g., eat, cry, speak, have, etc.) vis-à-vis mental and relational processes which can be categorized as “Abstract Concepts” (e.g., happy, is). In writing, dyslexic students tend to present concrete concepts more effectively than abstract concepts. In other words, they feel confident in presenting tangible concepts such as persons, events, and objects in written form. However, when it comes to personal sentiment, feelings, or abstract ideas, they find it relatively difficult to describe such things in word.
Dyslexic students display less variation in lexical density pertaining to psychological process in writing lyrical, narrative, and argumentative essays. This indicates that students with dyslexia problems are not capable in adjusting mental lexicons in respect of different genre requirements. In general situations, typical students will modify their emotional presentation depending on the title or genre requirements. As opposed to them, dyslexic students will not make substantial changes to the lexical density pertaining to psychological process, regardless of the specific genre. Their sentimental flexibility is relatively lower compared to typical students, but their material process and associated lexicon rate are remarkably higher than normal students by 45% (Lam, 2014).
Simply put, while dyslexic students are good at presenting concrete concepts, their skills in presenting abstract or emotional concepts have yet to sharpen. Findings from the aforementioned sample indicate this clearly. Dyslexic students performed outstandingly in writing narrative essays at public examinations. This could be credited to the nature of narrative writing, which focuses mainly on the objective narration of external elements like persons, events, objects, etc. Sentiment or abstract concepts are rarely touched on. Nonetheless, when it came to logical thinking, abstract ideas, personal feelings, or mental description in writing, dyslexic students’ performance was disappointing. This is especially the case with lyrical essays (抒情文). Therefore, in the scenario of examination, if given an option, it is sensible for students with dyslexia problems to choose to attempt narrative essays, which will be more promising for them.
Other than the tendency to denote concrete concepts, students with dyslexia problems are likely to use connectives more frequently compared to subordinators. The former are often used because they simply link up two separate characters or grammatical units without concerns about logic issues and complicated concepts. By contrast, the latter consider the logic relation between two grammatical units or clauses that dyslexic students usually struggle with. They are less competent in expressing abstract concepts or emotions, ultimately. They are more ready to use alternative remedies to cover this inadequacy, bringing the lexical density of these alternatives to a higher level.
From the education perspective, as dyslexic students display low level of emotionality and logic relation in writing, and as the policy itself fails to adjust lexical volume with respect to different genres, teachers may design custom-made remedies or make-up solutions to cater for the specific needs of the dyslexic students. By optimizing the training in emotional lexicon for dyslexic students, teachers may be able to increase their data bank of the lexicon as a remedy solution (e.g., expressing emotions using concrete concepts). Since the underlying issue lies in a low level of emotionality, it is hoped that through putting forward some remedies or make-up solutions aiming at raising students’ level of emotionality, their emotional lexical density in writing could be increased. Similarly, by fine-tuning the training in subordination and subordinators for them, teachers may enhance their understanding of the possible logical relationships between grammatical units with concrete concepts, enabling them to use subordinating clauses or structures effectively in formal writing. In this manner, they could leverage their strengths in deriving concrete interpretations to the fullest extent.
References
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