Chinese handwriting performance of primary school children with dyslexia

Writing to dictation and handwriting performance among Chinese children with dyslexia: Relationships with orthographic knowledge and perceptual-motor skills

“…Moreover, in order to produce legible handwriting outputs, the writers need to pay attention to the formation of some 31 major stroke forms and six major stroke sequencing rules (see Law, Ki, Chung, Ko, & Lam, 1998, for illustration), and to write every character within the boundary of a square grid (Lam et al, 2011). This is different from the English writing system that requires writers to produce written words from the fixed set of 26 letters on the horizontal grid lines (Figure 1).…”

“…Despite such high prevalence of co-morbidity, CHINESE WRITING IN DYSLEXIC 5 researchers reported that the literacy learning difficulties among Chinese children with dyslexia were specifically related to their difficulties in performing cognitive-linguistic tasks such as rapid automatic naming (RAN), orthographic processing, and morphological processing tasks (Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Ho et al, 2005;McBride-Chang, Chung, & Tong, 2011). More recently, it was found that Chinese children with dyslexia might manifest difficulties in performing copying tasks more often than children with typical development (Lam et al, 2011;McBride-Chang et al, 2011). Lam et al (2011) suggested that the expression of handwriting difficulties among Chinese children with dyslexia, which include a slow handwriting speed, a great average and variability of character size, and a low accuracy in copying, might underpin an immaturity of perceptual-motor and orthographic skills.…”

“…More recently, it was found that Chinese children with dyslexia might manifest difficulties in performing copying tasks more often than children with typical development (Lam et al, 2011;McBride-Chang et al, 2011). Lam et al (2011) suggested that the expression of handwriting difficulties among Chinese children with dyslexia, which include a slow handwriting speed, a great average and variability of character size, and a low accuracy in copying, might underpin an immaturity of perceptual-motor and orthographic skills. Stroke errors such as missing strokes and producing concatenated strokes (i.e., inappropriate linking of two separate strokes into one single stroke) in handwriting were especially common among Chinese children with dyslexia (Lam et al, 2011).…”

“…Lam et al (2011) suggested that the expression of handwriting difficulties among Chinese children with dyslexia, which include a slow handwriting speed, a great average and variability of character size, and a low accuracy in copying, might underpin an immaturity of perceptual-motor and orthographic skills. Stroke errors such as missing strokes and producing concatenated strokes (i.e., inappropriate linking of two separate strokes into one single stroke) in handwriting were especially common among Chinese children with dyslexia (Lam et al, 2011). Another study reported that the ability to copy unfamiliar scripts could uniquely explain 6% of Chinese word reading and 3% of word dictation performance among children with or without dyslexia in the Chinese school population (McBride-Chang et al, 2011).…”

“…Learning to write is a core part of the school curriculum in many Chinese-speaking regions, where children start their practice of writing from preschool years (Cheung & Ng, 2003;Lam, Au, Leung, & Li-Tsang, 2011). Primary school children are regularly assessed with writing-to-dictation tasks to evaluate their weekly learning outcomes (Cheung & Ng, 2003).…”