Abstract
This study is an empirical investigation of the impact of the Arabic writing system in Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) learners’ visual word recognition. The study investigates the effect of unfamiliar graphemes and phonemes, whether the missing vowels inhibit reading speed and comprehension and whether learners are able to apply the system of root and pattern in Semitic morphology to compensate for the lack of vowel information. Participants are 71 learners of Arabic at 3 different proficiency levels and a control group of 24 native speakers. Results indicate that the Arabic writing system represents a major obstacle to the establishment of automatic word recognition, which is a prerequisite for “skilled reading”: Although both pseudoword decoding and text reading improves remarkably from the beginning to intermediate level, progression then stalls. Based on these results, extended and more explicit training of decoding skills in AFL teaching is recommended.
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