Spelling Development among Triangle versus Native Bedouin Arabic Pupils

Abstract

This study compared spelling development of consonants (guttural: /ḥ/, uvular-velar: /q/ and /ġ/, emphatic: /ḏḍ/, /ṯṭ/, and /ðҐ, and dental: /ṯ/) in the written form of Arabic among native Bedouin Arabic speakers from north and southern Israel (N=666), versus native Arabic pupils from the triangle (N=153), learning in second, fourth, and sixth grades. Three tasks were constructed for this study: real word dictation, pseudo-word dictation, and real word recognition. The results show significantly higher scores for spelling among pupils from the triangle versus Bedouin pupils from southern and north Israel in the second grade. Also, Bedouin males from southern Israel scored significantly less than their female counterparts in the group and from all other male pupils who participated in this study at all ages. It is suggested that the gap is unnecessarily gender-oriented, but mainly affected by socio-economic aspects and by the lack of appropriate teacher training for this community.

Qualitative Analysis of Spelling Errors in Arabic among Bedouin Elementary School Pupils

“…In addition, it was found that Bedouin pupils experienced difficulty representing emphatic phonemes in the written form of Arabic, and represented them by a similar phoneme, for example /s/ and /ṣ/, or /d/ and /ḍ/ (for detailed explanation of similar phonemes see : Fragman 2014). Previous studies have related to spelling errors in general and spelling errors of similar phonemes in Arabic in particular among native Arabic pupils explaining them as a result of the diglossic nature of Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003.…”

“…Henkin (2010) have highlighted sociolinguistic aspects and stylistic variation of the Bedouin dialects of the Negev as well. However, only few studies conducted recently (Fragman 2013(Fragman , 2014 focused on aspects of language acquisition and specifically the spelling development of the written form of Arabic among Bedouin pupils in elementary schools from a linguistic point of view. This study seems of importance; Several studies focused on education in the Bedouin sector of the Negev (Abu Rabia A., 2001; Abu-Sa'ad, 1991, 1995, 1996 Al-Haj, 1995, 2003 Dinero, 2002;Elbedour, El-Bassiouny, Burt, and Elbedour 2013;Krä tli, 2000) showed poor achievements among the Bedouin pupils, for example in the "Meitzav" tests in Arabic and additional subjects (Rudnitzky, 2012).…”