This study investigates the role of diglossic and orthographic features in reading comprehension in Arabic. Specifically, it probes the independent contribution of language, metalinguistic, and decoding skills in the spoken language and in Standard Arabic to reading comprehension in the "abjad" writing system of Arabic. A sample of 112…

All Arabic-speaking children grow up in diglossia. They use a spoken Arabic vernacular (SpA) for everyday speech but Standard Arabic (StA) for reading/writing. The current study reports a pilot diglossia-centred intervention among Palestinian-Arabic-speaking kindergarteners (N = 290; mean age 64.52 months). The study examines the effectiveness of…

The study examined the relationship between children's explicit knowledge and awareness of diglossia (EKAD) and learning Arabic in school. Additionally, this study addresses the interrelationships between EKAD and oral comprehension, lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic awareness upon the transition to reading to learn. Thirty typicaly…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of dual language development and cross-linguistic influence on morphological awareness in young bilinguals' first language (L1) and second language (L2). We examined whether (a) the bilingual children (L1/L2 Arabic and L1/L2 Hebrew) precede their monolingual Hebrew- or…

Compliments are expressions of positive evaluation that commonly occur in everyday conversational encounters. This paper aims at raising second language cross-cultural pragmatic awareness through investigating the use of complimenting expressions in Palestinian Arabic which are related to certain social variables, namely, gender, age, education…