Abstract
The present study examines the impact of both short vowels and context on adult native English speakers’ reading accuracy of Arabic orthography. To this end, two groups of adult Arabic learners with different proficiency levels were recruited: 30 second-year, and 30 third-year learners. Subjects were instructed to read 50 isolated words, 20 sentences and 10 paragraphs in two different reading conditions: vocalized and unvocalized. Findings demonstrated a significant positive influence of both short vowels and context on second-year learners’ word recognition of the target stimuli. That is, second year Arabic learners had better accuracy when reading vocalized texts compared to unvocalized ones and were significantly more accurate at reading paragraphs and sentences than isolated words. However, third-year students’ reading accuracy was only significantly affected by the reading context.
Highlights
Reading is one of the major language skills that is essential for language learners
Third-year learners’ reading accuracy was higher for the vocalized than unvocalized orthography, the difference between their reading scores in the two conditions was not statistically significant
The results revealed that the three groups of adult learners successfully exploited the reading context, that was provided in both sentences and paragraphs, to better read the Arabic texts
Summary
Reading is one of the major language skills that is essential for language learners. As a receptive skill, reading is considered an interactive process that involves various mental processes such as phonological and lexical decoding of letter segments. Whereas some orthographies are transparent or shallow (e.g., Spanish) with one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes, others are opaque or deep (e.g., English) with indirect relationship between the letters and their sounds (Taouka & Coltheart, 2004). In this respect, numerous studies have indicated that orthography consistently seems to affect the reading acquisition process. According to Hansen (2008), for example, reading a deep orthography is found to be challenging for second language (L2) learners because it requires connecting letters with their sounds, which negatively influences the reading process. It is easier for second language learners to read shallow orthography than deep orthography
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