Multilingualism, Acquisition, and Development (MAD) Colloquium: Literacy acquisition in Arabic diglossia: Psycholinguistic findings and educational implications

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Abstract

Arabic is a typical case of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959, Albirini, 2016). All native Arabic-speakers grow up in a sociolinguistic context in which different varieties of the same language are used within the same speech community for complementary sets of functions: a spoken variety/ies (referred to using the hypernym ‘Spoken Arabic, SpA’ or ‘Colloquial Arabic’) for everyday speech and a standard, rather uniform variety (Modern Standard Arabic, MSA, StA) for formal language functions and for reading/writing. Two important features characterize diglossia in Arabic: 1) a remarkable linguistic distance between the spoken varieties and MSA; 2) limited exposure and use of the standard. The talk will be divided into three parts. In the first part, we will present data showing that the linguistic distance between the spoken and the standard varieties impacts the quality of linguistic representations in the lexicons of children, phonological processing in memory, phonological and morphological awareness, and StA word reading (for a review, see Saiegh-Haddad, 2022). In the second part, we will share data from two recent studies testing the inter-dependence between skills in SpA and StA. In the third part, we will discuss the educational implications of the findings and describe a diglossia-centered multi-domain intervention program that was implemented with kindergarten children (Saiegh-Haddad, 2023; Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff, 2024). At the end, we will briefly describe BALLS: Basic Arabic Language and Literacy Skills battery that has been recently developed to identify kindergarten and first grade Arabic-speaking children at risk for language and literacy difficulties. The battery uses a web application and it will be available for use soon.

References:

Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2022). A psycholinguistic-developmental perspective on the role of diglossia in reading: Issues, methods, and findings in Arabic as a Testcase. In E. Saiegh-Haddad, Laks, L. & McBride, C. (Eds.), Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and Dialectal Contexts: Psycholinguistic, Neurolinguistic and Educational Perspectives. Springer Nature (pp. 135-165).

Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2023). Embracing diglossia in early literacy education in Arabic: A pilot intervention study with kindergarten children. Oxford Review of Education, 49, 48-68.

Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff (2024). Diglossic and orthographic features of reading comprehension in Arabic. Reading Research Quarterly, 60, 1, https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.598.”

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