The Chinese writing difficulties of senior secondary students with mild intellectual disability in Hong Kong = 香港高中輕度智障學生的中文寫作困難

Abstract

There have been very few studies on the Chinese writing of students with intellectual disability. This dissertation aims to explore the Chinese writing difficulties of senior secondary students with mild intellectual disability in Hong Kong in the hopes of enriching research theories in writing.

This dissertation consists of two studies. Study One explored the Chinese writing difficulties of 90 research subjects by content analysis. The subjects were in three ability groups. The results showed that their Chinese writing reflected their difficulties in both microstructure and macrostructure. Over half of them were unable to perform according to the expectation of their mental age.

Study Two was case studies which explored the research subjects’ difficulties in their writing process and how these difficulties contributed to the quality of their writing. The “cognitive process model” (Tse, 1993) was adopted as the foundation of the theoretical framework for Study Two. The subjects were six students from three ability groups, with one male and one female student in each ability group. The “Think Aloud” protocol, unobtrusive observations and retrospective interviews were employed to analyze the thinking process during their writing. The results suggested that the subjects experienced writing difficulties at the beginning stage of “generating ideas” because they lacked the relevant subject knowledge and schematic structure knowledge. There was only one subject in the high ability group who had an authentic writing purpose and audience in the pre-writing stage. She used more cognitive strategies such as “pausing” and “revision / amendment” during writing. Compared to the writing of the other subjects, the quality of her writing was better both in microstructure and macrostructure. This showed that the quality of the subjects’ writing was closely related to their thinking process during the whole writing process.

Past research on the Chinese writing of students with intellectual disability tended to use text-based analysis. This is a ground-breaking study as it is the first to employ the “cognitive process models” to analyze the relationship between the thinking process and the writing quality of students with mild intellectual disability.