Effect of teaching methods on dyslexic students mastering Chinese characters in Singapore

The aim of this preliminary and exploratory research study was to examine the effects of two different teaching methods for Chinese, namely the Analytical method (形声识字法）and the Whole word method (独体识字法) for students with dyslexia in Singapore.

For the Analytical method, the phonological radicals embedded within Chinese characters were identified and used as clues in helping Dyslexic children to read the Chinese characters. The Analytical method broke down the components in the Chinese characters and emphasised the phonetic parts within the Chinese character, which reduced the cognitive visual memory load for the dyslexic students (Ho & Sigel, 2011) . Whereas, the Whole word method referred to reading the whole Chinese characters by sight or memorization of the Chinese character(Chartier, 2004; Shu and Anderson,1999).

The participants of the present study were 39 students selected from 2 primary schools in Singapore: 20 students were readers with no dyslexia (normal readers), while 19 students were readers who were diagnosed with dyslexia.The students’ ages ranged from 9 years old to 11 years old, and they were in Primary 3 to Primary 5.

During each learning session, the participants learned to read the pre-selected 30 Chinese characters under the two experimental conditions: the Analytical method and the Whole word method. All participants recognised and read aloud the word list using two instructional methods.The correct responses of each student for each condition was then recorded. A character was considered learned when the character was correctly pronounced in 3 successive post-tests.

The results revealed that the Analytical method was more effective in helping the students with dyslexia recognise  Chinese characters as compared to the Whole word method. The results of the study suggested that using the appropriate instructional method to learn to read Chinese characters was important for students with dyslexia.

Abstract from my masters dissertation published in 2018