Background

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder which occurs in childhood but continues to influence academic and occupational function in adulthood. Recently, a Japanese dyslexia questionnaire and diagnostic procedure was established for primary school children. However, there is currently no procedure for the diagnosis or screening of dyslexia in individuals at or above junior high school age; accordingly, we aimed to develop a questionnaire to screen for reading difficulties in those individuals.

Methods

A questionnaire with various candidate items was developed from two English questionnaires, one Japanese questionnaire, and newly devised items focusing on the Japanese writing system and the most appropriate 28 items were selected. In total, 462 adults and 127 junior high to high school students were enrolled. Of those, 191 participants also took part in reading tests. After the exploratory factor analysis, reliability and validity were evaluated using the above control participants and 12 adolescents with dyslexia.

Results

The questionnaire included three factors, i.e., silent reading sub-scale (four items), writing sub-scale (four items), and aloud reading sub-scale (three items). Five were newly devised items focusing on the Japanese writing system. Cronbach’s alphas of the three factors were 0.706, 0.638, and 0.568, respectively, and the interclass correlation coefficients (2,1) were 0.743, 0.609, and 0.695, respectively. The silent reading and aloud reading sub-scales were positively correlated with word, non-word, and passage reading time.

Discussion

The newly developed questionnaire correlated well with actual reading performance and may be used to screen reading difficulty in Japanese individuals at or above junior high school age.

中文翻译：

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青少年日语阅读困难问卷的编制

背景

阅读障碍是一种神经发育障碍，发生在儿童期，但在成年期继续影响学业和职业功能。最近，针对小学生制定了日本阅读障碍问卷和诊断程序。然而，目前尚无初中或以上年龄个体阅读障碍的诊断或筛查程序；因此，我们的目标是制定一份问卷来筛查这些人的阅读困难。

方法

由两份英语问卷、一份日语问卷和新设计的以日语书写系统为重点的项目开发了一份包含各种候选项目的问卷，并选择了最合适的 28 个项目。总共招收了462名成人和127名初中到高中学生。其中，191 名参与者还参加了阅读测试。探索性因素分析后，使用上述对照参与者和12名阅读障碍青少年评估信度和效度。

结果

问卷包括三个因素，即默读分量表（四项）、写作分量表（四项）和朗读分量表（三项）。其中五个是新设计的以日语书写系统为重点的项目。三个因子的Cronbach's alphas分别为0.706、0.638和0.568，组间相关系数（2,1）分别为0.743、0.609和0.695。默读和朗读分量表与单词、非单词和段落阅读时间呈正相关。

讨论

新开发的问卷与实际阅读表现有很好的相关性，可用于筛查日本初中或以上年龄的人的阅读困难。