What is Specific Learning Difficulties?

Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) is generally defined as abnormal academic performances, for example, obvious difficulties in reading, writing, calculation, coordination of muscles, etc. (Wood, Sheehy & Passenger, 2006). Dyslexia is the most prevalent among all, with around 85% of all individuals with SpLDs (Masover, 1999).

What is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia (also known as specific difficulties in reading and writing) refers to common disorder in reading, writing or word formation. Dyslexic children have poor working memory and information-processing ability. They may also encounter difficulties in phonological and audio/visual processing, differentiating left and right, sequencing and information organization. According to the research results of our Team, the prevalence of dyslexia in Hong Kong is around 9.7 % to 12.6%; with 6.2 % to 8.7 % diagnosed as mild, 2.2% to 2.3% as moderate, and 1.3 to 1.6% as severe (Chan, Ho, Tsang, Lee & Chung, 2007).

Referring to the definition by the International Dyslexia Association in 2002, dyslexia is related to the impairment of one’s nervous system and it is not caused by poor learning environment. These dyslexic learners have regular learning experience and normal intelligence, but encounter great problems in words identification, leading to difficulties in reading comprehension and writing. In recent years, scholars have proved the neurobiological cause of dyslexia through functional magnetic resonance imaging (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2005), saying that dyslexia is caused by a combination of cognitive deficits (Badian, 1997). In addition, a research examining dyslexia of Chinese primary students has shown that deficits in phonological retrieval and orthographic awareness is the most common among Hong Kong local students (Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002; Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004). Also, the British Dyslexia Association has shown that (2008) dyslexic primary school students frequently write wrong words. They will easily get confused between words similar in morphology and pronunciation. In reading, they are unwilling to read aloud a passage, may easily make mistakes in pronunciation or skip lines or words unintentionally. It is even hard for them to understand the main theme and key message of the article.