Teaching different sub-types of Chinese dyslexic children double-character words

Ho & Elliott (1998) found that the treatment effects of the analytic and whole-word approaches to reading instruction had different consequences for surface and deep dyslexic children when teaching single-character and double-character words. The purpose of this investigation is to further examine the treatment effects of analytic and whole word approaches on teaching the dyslexic children the four types of double-character words, i.e., regular-regular character (RR), regular-irregular character (RI), irregular-regular character (TR) and irregular-irregular character (II) words. Regular characters refer to those characters, which contain phonological components. Irregular characters are those characters, which give no phonological information within the characters. The results show that the surface dyslexics performed much worse than the deep dyslexics in II and RI word recognition and that the analytic approach is a more effective teaching method than the whole word approach in teaching the II character words. It was concluded that the nature of reading disabilities as well as the regularity of characters should be taken into consideration when teaching the dyslexic children.