Beginning Readers in Arabic and the Distance between Literary and Spoken Arabic

Two groups of kindergarten children received a battery of phonological awareness, reading, and general abilities tests across a two-year period. One of the groups received phonological training whereas the other (control) group did not. Results indicated that children who received intervention improved in certain phonological awareness skills tested at the end of kindergarten but not in reading skills tested at the end of 1st year. These findings are in contrast to findings compared to those found by Carlisle (1995) and Lyster (2002) in English, but were in line with the findings found by Ibrahim et al. (2007) in Arabic and support the notion that normal Arab child encounters special difficulties in reading acquisition. The psycholinguistic basis and implications of these findings are discussed.