Screening Out Chinese–English Biliterate Kindergarten Children with Handwriting Difficulties

ABSTRACT

Aims: This study aimed to (1) develop and validate the Chinese and English Handwriting Screening Test for Kindergarten Children (CHEST) to screen children for handwriting difficulties in their final year of kindergarten education in Hong Kong, and to (2) identify common types of problems encountered by those children before their formal primary education.

Method: One-hundred and fifty-one K3 (final year of kindergarten) children were recruited. The CHEST demonstrated good to excellent content validity, and test–retest and inter-rater reliabilities.

Results: The CHEST scores for typically developing children were skewed to the higher endtypically developing, whereas those for children identified with handwriting difficulties were significantly lower, in Chinese and/or in English. The latter group of children showed difficulty reproducing the correct strokes and maintaining the appropriate proportions of Chinese characters, and they demonstrated difficulty maintaining the appropriate proportions of strokes within letters and along the lines in English.

Conclusions: The CHEST is the first screening test developed for evaluating kindergarten children’s handwriting performance in both Chinese and English through having them copy a group of familiar words. It provides an objective measure to identify and describe children’s problems in their copying performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese
• English
• handwriting difficulties
• screening
• kindergarten children