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- abstract below
- a PowerPoint presentation is available on the conference CD.
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The Relevance of Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Features of Arabic Diglosssia to the Acquisition of Various Reading Skills in Arabic

Elinor Saiegh-Haddad English Department,Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Faculty of Education, Haifa University (2) OISE/University of Toronto egeva@oise.utoronto.ca

Abstract

The presentation will discuss the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of Arabic diglossia and the relevance of this unique linguistic context to the acquisition of basic reading skills. The term 'diglossia', first introduced by Ferguson (1959), describes a situation that includes the following features: a) a differentiation between the written and the oral modes; b) a rigid socio-functional complementarity of two separate sets of functions performed by two different linguistic codes; c) a rich and dominant written literary tradition; d) linguistic relatedness between the two linguistic codes: the written and the spoken. Work on the impact of the phonemic and lexical distance between spoken and standard Arabic on the acquisition of basic reading processes (phonemic awareness, word decoding) showed that standard phonological structures, phonemes and syllable structures (that are not available to children from their spoken language) were significantly harder to process (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003). Further, phonological structures interact with lexical distance parameters affecting phonological analysis (Saiegh-Haddad, ms.). The results also showed that the effect of the status of the linguistic structure (standard vs. spoken) remained significant even at the end of the first grade. The possible role of these and other linguistic distance parameters on the development of spelling, reading fluency, and reading comprehension will also be discussed.

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