Reading in English and Arabic for young learners

This study, conducted in the United Arab Emirates, piloted a curriculum to increase early grade reading fluency. A curriculum with enhanced perceptual features, such as font size and spacing was used with grade one students in four schools to detect any significant difference in students' reading speed and reading accuracy after one year. Three hundred forty-five grade one students participated in the pilot-174 in the intervention group and 171 in the control group (ds= 0.33 0.47). At the end of the year, students in the intervention group read more letters and words correctly on average in one minute (p < .01) and in an entire text (p < .01 for letters; p < .001 for words) than those in the control group. These results suggest that curriculum with perceptual enhancement may be useful in facilitating early Arabic reading fluency. ‫اﻟﻤﻠﺨﺺ‬

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.2, 2014   
                                                                                                                                                            Pp.167 -186
                                                                                                                                                                                                                     



English Varieties and Arab Learners in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries: Attitude and Perception

Wafa Shahada Zoghbor
Zayed University
United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi



Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of post-secondary Arab learners towards native and non-native varieties of English. A stimulus tap was incorporated within semi-structured interviews where respondents listened to 6 speakers (an Indian, Arab, Thai, British, American, and Canadian) and then answered 5-Point Likert scale questions. The findings revealed that the interviewees encountered difficulties identifying the speakers’ first languages. Whilst the British and Canadian speakers were perceived more positively than the other speech samples and were easier to understand than the Thai speaker, they were less understandable to the interviewees than the Arab and Indian speakers. The American speaker was perceived less positively than the other speech samples and was also the least understandable. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and specific recommendations that could facilitate improving Arab learners’ tolerance of their own (as well as other non-native) varieties of English. The data in this paper forms part of a broader study investigating the attitude of Arab learners towards the shifting ownership of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).
Keywords: Arab learners; English as a lingua franca (ELF); native speaker (NS) / non-native speakers (NNS) of English; accent; attitude.

Bio: Josephine O"Brien has worked in several Arabic speaking countries over the last twenty five years and currently teaches English and Arabic in Dublin, Ireland. She also works as a teacher trainer. Her main areas of linguistic interest are psycholinguistics, the influence of the L1 on language learning and acquisition, language systems and geosemiotics. One of her primary concerns in language teaching is the washback effect of the learning of English on the learner"s mother tongue.