The Need for Cross–Cultural Considerations in Reading Theory: The Effects of Arabic Sentence Context in Skilled and Poor Readers

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate whether Arabic orthography differs from the Latin orthography of English texts regarding context effects among poor and normal readers. Usually, Arabic texts are presented without vowels for normal readers, and with vowels for younger and beginning readers. The Arabic vowels are mostly not alphabetic letters, but strokes above and/or below the letters. The subjects were 60 native Arab eighth graders, 20 poor readers and 40 normal readers of Arabic. Subjects were required to read vowelled and unvowelled words with and without context in Arabic. The results showed that normal as well as poor readers significantly improved their reading accuracy when they read vowelled and unvowelled words in context. Further, normal readers significantly improved their reading of vowelled and unvowelled words in context more than did the poor readers. The findings of this study illustrated the significance of cross‐cultural linguistic considerations for the development of comprehensive reading theory.