Designing of a Multi-Media Website for Learning Chinese Characters by Dyslexic Children

Dyslexia is a specific language disorder, generally referring to a series of difficulty with reading. Previous research on Chinese dyslexia demonstrated that various types of deficits are associated with reading difficulty. Most of the deficits are the causes of difficulty with Chinese character recognition and decoding by Chinese dyslexic children. The ability of recognizing and decoding Chinese characters is fundamentally crucial for reading in Chinese. For the purpose of training Chinese dyslexic children to recognize and decode Chinese characters, a website will be developed. The design of the website is proposed based on the findings of previous basic research on dyslexia in Chinese characters. The website is multi-media and multi-modular, addressing the visual deficits suffered by most of the Chinese dyslexics by cooperating elements such as colors, size, and visual salience in the materials. Besides, the orthography- phonology- and semantics-based training methods are specifically used for dyslexic children to learn different types of logographic and monosyllabic Chinese characters, including pictographic, indicative, associative and phonetic-compound characters. The website to be developed is beneficial to Chinese dyslexic children for learning Chinese characters.