Spelling Proficiency of Novel Phonemes in Arabic among Native Hebrew Academic Students

Abstract

This study examined spelling proficiency in Arabic among native Hebrew speaking students (n=50) learning the written form of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) in the Middle Eastern Studies department at one of the largest Universities in south Israel. Specifically, this study focused on ten novel phonemes (guttural, velar-uvular, dental, and emphatic). Three tasks were performed through the computer: a visual task, an auditory task and an audiovisual task. The results support previous studies which found that native Hebrew speakers learning AFL cope with extra linguistic burden, due to the fact that several Arabic phonemes visually resemble other Arabic graphemes while simultaneously corresponding with an Arabic phoneme that is similar to a familiar phoneme from the Hebrew phonemic inventory. The results also indicated that the students had difficulties representing novel phonemes which do not exist in their mother tongue, especially emphatic and dental phonemes. In addition, lower scores were achieved in the auditory task vs. the visual task and the audio-visual task. The students performed significantly better on the auditory task after two years of AFL learning, yet the scores still remained lower than the scores for the other tasks. This may be explained by the AFL curriculum and instruction, which mainly focuses on the development of reading and writing skills, while at the same time neglecting aural-oral skills in Arabic teaching. Thus, it is highly recommended to use aural-oral skills alongside the practice of other aspects of the language in order to establish successful and meaningful learning of Arabic. Arabic is the second official language of Israel, after Hebrew. It is being learned as a second foreign language, after English, in the Educational system in Hebrew schools from seventh to tenth grades. Arabic language, literature and culture are also studied in most Israeli Universities and in some colleges. Recent studies of novel phoneme representations among native Hebrew speaking pupils learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) in junior high school in Israel, indicated that native Hebrew speaking pupils had very low proficiency in grapheme-phoneme representations of novel phonemes even after four years of exposure and practice (Fragman & Russak, 2010; Russak & Fragman,