Narrative styles of Palestinian Bedouin adults and children

Abstract

This paper contrasts natural oral narratives of Bedouin adults and children (ages 8- 11) in the Negev Desert (South Israel). The analysis showed some striking stylistic differences, on both developmental and genre-related grounds. Adults, narrating tribal legends in a stylized, performed idiom. used distinct styles for the textual levels of orientation, plotline, and direct speech; the children told folktales and anecdotes in a relatively undifferentiated, near-conversational style. Adults set out from a concrete, non-past stage and shifted to a past plotline; whereas the childrens folkloristic openings, in the distant past, drifted to a concrete, relived present. There were significant differences in rhetorical means for perspectivizing, information packaging. connectivity, and tempo control. The children's narrative style was found to be much "flatter" and less evaluative than the adults, in keeping with developmental findings. However, some of the older children displayed global text organization, using diverse cohesive means typical of the folktale. This may show these children to be more sensitive to global genre structure than to local rhetorical means.

Text complexity and variety factors in narrative retelling and narrative comprehension among Arabic-speaking preschool children

“…Before we address the impact of language variety on narrative skills, it is noteworthy that even though two of the stories were presented in MSA, participants chose to retell all narratives in PA, including those presented in MSA. This finding accords with earlier reports (Asli-Badarneh et al, 2022; Henkin, 1998; Ravid et al, 2014) and it might reflect the difficulty that children have in producing a text in MSA. Alternatively, children might have been following internalized sociolinguistic patterns of the distribution of codes in Arabic diglossia as it is played out in storybook reading especially in preschool, namely, a text is read/heard in MSA, usually by the teacher or a parent and then paraphrased or retold in PA (Iraki, 1992).…”

“…The development of preschoolers' narrative abilities within Arabic diglossia has only rarely been investigated. Henkin (1998) investigated oral narratives of Bedouin from south Israel and showed that when children (aged 8-11) were read stories to in MSA at school, they usually chose to retell these stories in the colloquial dialect. The same finding was observed by Ravid et al (2014) who found that despite the fact that the story was presented to children in MSA, younger children retold the story primarily in the colloquial Palestinian dialect.…”

Acquiring Noun Plurals in Palestinian Arabic: Morphology, Familiarity, and Pattern Frequency

“…Although there have been a few studies of diverse aspects of children's acquisition of contemporary Arabic (Abu‐Haidar, 1979; Al‐Akeel, 1998; Badry, 1983, 2005; Henkin, 1998; Ibrahim & Eviatar, 2009; Levin, Saiegh‐Haddad, Hende, & Ziv, 2008; Omar, 1973; Saiegh‐Haddad, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007; Saiegh‐Haddad, et al, 2011), including morphology (Boudelaa & Marslen‐Wilson, 2005) little has been published on the native acquisition of Arabic plural forms.…”

Spelling Accuracy of Consonants in Arabic among Negev Bedouin Students

“…Most of the researches so far focused on mapping the Bedouin dialects (Abdel-Massih & Bahig, 1978;Abu El-Hij'a, 2012;Al-Wer & De Jong, 2009;Blanc, 1970;Fischer & Jastrow, 1980;Holes, 1995a;Holes, 1995b;Shawarba, 2007), with specific attention to the Bedouin dialect of the Galilee in north Israel (Rosenhouse, 1980(Rosenhouse, , 1984(Rosenhouse, , 1995a(Rosenhouse, , 1995bRosenhouse & Katz, 1980), the Bedouin dialects of central and southern Sinai (de Jong, 2011), and outside Israel, for example Bedouin dialects in Jordan (Palva, 2008), Egypt and eastern Lybia (Mitchell, 1960), Iraq (Palva, 2009), and Kuwait (Ayyad, 2011); sociolinguistic aspects and stylistic variation of the Bedouin dialects of the Negev (Henkin, 1992(Henkin, , 1994(Henkin, , 1996(Henkin, , 1998(Henkin, , 2000(Henkin, , 2005(Henkin, , 2007a(Henkin, , 2007b(Henkin, , 2009a(Henkin, , 2009b(Henkin, , 2010(Henkin, , 2011; Bedouin poetry (Bailey, 1991;Holes & Abu Athera, 2007;Jargy, 1989); anthropological aspects of Bedouin society (Borg, 1999(Borg, , 2001Borg & Kressel, 1995, 2001; Bedouin manners from socio-linguistic point of view (Piamenta, 1979). However, none of these studies has ever explored aspects of language acquisition and specifically the spelling development of the written form of Arabic among Bedouin students in ...…”