Abstract
This study addressed the development of and the relationship between foundational metalinguistic skills and word reading skills in Arabic. It compared Arabic-speaking children’s phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness, and voweled and unvoweled word reading skills in spoken and standard language varieties separately in children across five grade levels from childhood to adolescence. Second, it investigated whether skills developed in the spoken variety of Arabic predict reading in the standard variety. Results indicate that although individual differences between students in PA are eliminated toward the end of elementary school in both spoken and standard language varieties, gaps in morphological awareness and in reading skills persisted through junior and high school years. The results also show that the gap in reading accuracy and fluency between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) was evident in both voweled and unvoweled words. Finally, regression analyses showed that morphological awareness in SpA contributed to reading fluency in StA, i.e., children’s early morphological awareness in SpA explained variance in children’s gains in reading fluency in StA. These findings have important theoretical and practical contributions for Arabic reading theory in general and they extend the previous work regarding the cross-linguistic relevance of foundational metalinguistic skills in the first acquired language to reading in a second language, as in societal bilingualism contexts, or a second language variety, as in diglossic contexts.
Highlights
Arabic is a typical case of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), which is a sociolinguistic context in which speakers within a single speech community simultaneously use two varieties of a language: one for everyday communication and another for formal interactions and writing
The present study addressed phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness, and word reading in diglossic Arabic by investigating the development of these metalinguistic skills in Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA), and examining the relationship between metalinguistic skills in SpA and reading in StA for both voweled and unvoweled words
The study examined children from different age groups in the school system, providing a developmental point of view on the link between metalinguistic skills in general, and in relation to voweled and unvoweled word reading in Arabic
Summary
Arabic is a typical case of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), which is a sociolinguistic context in which speakers within a single speech community simultaneously use two varieties of a language: one for everyday communication and another for formal interactions and writing. In Arabic, children grow up speaking Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech at home and in the neighborhood and Standard Arabic (StA) for reading and writing, as well as for formal interaction, as within the classroom All SpA vernaculars are different from StA (Maamouri, 1998) This linguistic distance traverses all linguistic domains and is remarkable in the phonology and in the lexicon. The analysis showed that only about 21% of the words in the spoken lexicon of children consisted of identical words, that is, words that maintain an identical lexico-phonological structure in StA, whereas the remaining words were divided almost evenly between cognate words (with overlapping phonological forms in SpA and StA) and completely different unique forms in SpA and StA (Saiegh-Haddad and Spolsky, 2014)
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