Abstract
This study examined whether helping poor readers improve their reading and writing language skills in English as a third language/foreign language (L3/FL) would also bring about an improvement in those same skills in Arabic (L1) and Hebrew (L2). Transferring linguistic skills from L3/FL to both L1 and L2 is termed “Cognitive Retroactive Transfer” (CRT). A battery of tests, administered to the experiment and control groups, assessed orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, reading accuracy and reading comprehension in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The treatment group was provided with an intervention program in English, but not in Arabic or Hebrew, both before and after the experiment. Findings indicated a significant improvement in the treatment group’s achievements in all linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in all study languages after the intervention, except for orthographic knowledge in Arabic and Hebrew. The results are discussed in light of the international data.
Highlights
Israel is a pluralistic, highly functional, multicultural, multilingual, and multi-religious society
According to the research findings, the research assumption was fully confirmed, meaning that a significant improvement was seen in the treatment group’s achievements in all linguistic and meta-linguistic skills after intervention, and in all three languages, except for Arabic and Hebrew orthographic knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that Cognitive Retroactive Transfer (CRT) did occur from English L3 to both Arabic L1 and Hebrew L2, in all of the skills investigated in this study, with the sole exception of orthographic knowledge transfer, which was found to be language-specific
The findings revealed that the improvement rate in all Arabic language skills in the treatment group, before and after the intervention, was higher in comparison with the improvement in Hebrew language skills
Summary
Highly functional, multicultural, multilingual, and multi-religious society. This reality requires that Israeli Arabs—the country’s largest ethnic minority—learn three languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Arab children speak Arabic as their mother tongue/first language (L1) and are schooled in it. They formally begin studying the Arabic language in the first grade. They must learn the country’s main official. How to cite this paper: Abu-Rabia, S., & Shakkour, W. Cognitive Retroactive Transfer (CRT) of Language Skills among Trilingual Arabic-Hebrew and English Learners. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 4, 1-20.
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