The impact of diacritic marking on listening comprehension skills in Arabic orthography

Abstract

Research reveals that although the effect of diacritics) the symbols that tell the reader how to pronounce a letter) on reading and reading comprehension was examined in a series of studies, the influence of diacritics on listening comprehension, especially in the Arabic orthography, was not examined. Therefore, this study attempted to examine this issue, which may add an additional layer of knowledge to the reading and comprehension process of Arabic in the listening comprehension area. Sixty students participated in the study from two seventh grade classes whose age average is 13 years old. They were sampled from regular classrooms and every week they study 8-10 hours of Arabic weekly. In the study, two texts in the area of listening comprehension in the Arabic language were presented orally to the students in two reading conditions: The first with full diacritics and the second without diacritics. The findings indicate that adding short diacritics to texts improves the listening comprehension on two levels: explicit and implicit. In addition, there is no significant difference between listening comprehension text type (with or without diacritics) regarding the two levels of comprehension separately.