A test of characters
Dyslexia in Chinese children is of a different nature from that in Western children and requires a specialist approach
Amy Li's heart aches whenever she finds her son struggling without success to memorise the Chinese characters he has learned in school during the day.
"Once he asked me why he couldn't learn the words by heart and read properly like others. I didn't know what to tell him. I felt helpless," says Li, who has quit her job to spend more time helping her eight-year-old son, Alex, with his schoolwork.
Like many children with dyslexia, Alex cannot read fluently, nor write to dictation even after putting in enormous effort. He omits or adds extra strokes to the characters when copying, and finds it hard to make words fit in allotted spaces.
It is estimated that about 10 per cent of schoolchildren in Hong Kong suffer from different forms of specific learning disabilities (SpLD). Dyslexia is the most common of these.
Dyslexia is a reading disability that results from the brain not being able to interpret or recognise particular characters. The developmental disorder, which affects people with normal or superior intelligence, takes different forms. These become apparent with dyslexic children who struggle with Chinese, a language based on pictograms.
