Orthographic processing and reading comprehension among Arabic speaking mainstream and LD children

Abstract

Two cohorts of mainstream children (grades 2-5) and one cohort of children with learning disabilities (LD; grades 3-5), all Arabic speaking children in Kuwait, were given measures of reading comprehension fluency and orthographic discrimination to assess the relationship between the two. Additional measures of phonological processing (decoding and awareness), speed of processing (rapid naming) and memory (visual as well as phonological/verbal tasks) were included either because these have been found to be predictive of Arabic literacy or to provide an assessment of alternative interpretations of any influence of the orthographic task. The findings indicated that the orthographic measure predicted variability in the comprehension fluency over-and-above that predicted by the other measures in the study. This was significant in the older mainstream children (grades 4 and 5) when controlling for phonological processing, but was not in the younger grades (2 and 3) where experience text that incorporating short vowel markers is dominant. The LD group showed little evidence of an influence of phonological processing but did of orthographic processing. The findings are discussed in terms of the skills required to process Arabic literacy and potential causes of literacy learning difficulties among Arabic children.

How simple is reading in Arabic? A cross‐sectional investigation of reading comprehension from first to sixth grade

“…These results again support the view that emphasises the differential influence of specific orthographic systems on reading comprehension (Florit & Cain, ). Our results are consistent with several studies that documented the contribution of orthographic knowledge to reading comprehension, including English (MacArthur et al, ; Mehta et al, ; Silverman et al, ), Arabic (Elbeheri et al, ) and Hebrew (Joshi et al, ; Primor et al, ). The observation here that the orthographic contribution was significant in all grade levels is similar to recent findings from Hebrew in second to tenth‐grade children (Joshi et al, ).…”

Examining the double‐deficit hypothesis in vowelized–transparent Arabic in a national representative sample of Grades 3 and 4

“…This may explain the similarity between the DD and PD groups in various measures. In line with previous studies, PA was related to reading accuracy Elbeheri et al, 2011;Elbeheri & Everatt, 2007;Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008;Shany & Share, 2011;Taibah & Haynes, 2010;Vaessen et al, 2009). In fact, these findings reflect the difficulties of reading in Arabic (Eviatar et al, 2004) and support the view that Arabic orthography may not be purely semi-transparent .…”

Arabic Spelling and Curriculum Based Measurement

“…Third, a greater influence of orthographic processing over and above phonological processing could be related to diglossia (the existence of a formal literary form of a language along with a colloquial form used by most speakers) in Arabic. Fourth, the glottal stop in Arabic, referred to as the 'hamza' , although a fully functioning consonant, is treated as a diacritical mark and has many different ways of writing depending on its position in the word, resulting in various complex spelling and reading conventions (Elbeheri, Everatt, Mahfoudhi, Abu Al-Diyar, & Taibah, 2011). Fifth, the 'shaddah' , one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, marks a long consonant.…”