Online learning platform for students with specific learning difficulties on learning narrative writing

As there are limited existing interactive materials for students with specific learning difficulties (SpLD) in junior secondary level, our team worked collaboratively with Hong Kong local teachers to develop an online learning platform in Chinese, aiming at enhancing reading and writing skills of students with special educational needs. The platform aimed at providing students with the opportunity to self-learn the skills in narrative writing. An ideal piece of narrative writing in this platform consisted of three components: dialogue, psychological description and environmental description. A number of 62 students of Grades 7 and 8 from two Hong Kong secondary schools were recruited for the study. Thirty-five students were average readers while the remaining half were students with SpLD. Results showed that both types of students showed poorer performance on the psychological and environmental tasks compared to the dialogue tasks. The students with SpLD in general performed poorer than those without SpLD on the psychological and environmental tasks. Copyright © 2020 ARWA.