Role of Phonological Awareness in Arabic in Learning English Essay

Abstract

This research paper seeks to answer the question: Does phonological awareness in Arabic L1 contribute to reading in English foreign language? In carrying out this research, ten students of an average age of 8-9 were used, five girls and five boys, who were picked from a school randomly. Arabic was the language that these children could speak at home and school as their primary language. Various measures like rhyming, segmentation and blending were utilized in examining their phonological awareness in Arabic. They were also tested on English pseudowords and word reading. Most children showed a relatively good phonological awareness in Arabic, and the same could be traced to reading the pseudowords and the English words. It was, therefore, concluded that phonological awareness in Arabic L1 contributes towards learning the English language.

Introduction

Over the last few decades, the literacy field has experienced a momentum increase in phonological awareness. This is the sound of language awareness, which entails onsets and rhymes, phonemes, and syllables. It is, therefore, the awareness of an individual of words’ phonological structure (sound). The significant aspects that can be used to measure this awareness include; the fusion of syllables, words segmentation into syllables, sentences segmentation into words, syllables segmentation into phonemes, and phonemes segmentation, as well as fusion in single-syllable terms. Various investigations have been conducted on language acquisitions and have shown the existing relationship between reading ability and phonological awareness. They have indicated that phonological awareness is one of the skills and processes required when executing a complicated process like reading in a foreign language or mother tongue. Despite schools taking the responsibility of ensuring that children are taught reading skills, the children coming to school possess varying preparedness levels to learn the reading skill. Some may come from rich writing and reading environments, while others come from backgrounds with little or inadequate preparation. This has formed the basis of this research paper.

Research question

Given the differences regarding phonological transparency, shallow vs. deep, for Arabic and English, respectively, this study came to answer the following question:

• Does phonological awareness in Arabic L1 contribute to reading in English foreign language?

Literature Review

Learning the Arabic language is not an easy task (Almehrizi et al., 2020). According to the author, language exists in two primary forms. The first form is the Modern Standard Arabic, which is dominant informal as well as written contexts. The second form is Spoken Arabic, which is prevalent in conversational and the Arabs’ everyday communication. The author provides that although Modern Standard Arabic is the official language shared by all Arab countries, Spoken colloquial Arabic differs in each of these Arabic countries. The author proceeds to examine the spelling and reading skills of Bahraini Arabic-speaking children drawn from grades 1 to three. Testing was done on these children’s crafts to reading single words, their capacity to spell, non-word reading, and their Modern Standard Arabic’s phonological awareness. The researchers utilized two metrics of measuring phonological awareness to test both rhyme awareness and the extent to which early literacy is affected by the decoding of novel letter strings. The results showed that reading and spelling could be predicted by both word and non-word rhyme. This indicates the potential significance of phonological awareness skills among young learners as an early literacy predictor. Word recognition and spelling were also predicted by phonological awareness in an adult literacy acquisition processes study (Durguno-lu& Ouml 2002). Arabic contains six vowel sounds, whereby three are long while three are short. It lacks dedicated letters representing short vowels, unlike English. Diacritics (marks that are put below or above letters) represent short vowels. However, they have been on a disappearing trend, leaving it for the readers to use their language knowledge to find out the missing vowels. This has made it difficult for young learners to process the language automatically. Though it is a phonetic language, Arabic’s language structure makes it a complex language to read. This presents to beginners a big challenge, particularly in writing as well as reading Standard Arabic.

Saiegh-Haddad (2003) also provided evidence on the phonological awareness’ significance in learning to read Modern Standard Arabic. According to the author, 65 Arabic-speaking children from a local public school in North Palestine were examined on phonological awareness. To investigate the children’s ability to isolate both initial and final phonemes in the Modern Standard Arabic and the spoken dialect. The outcome was presented in three forms. First, the first graders outperformed the kindergarteners. Secondly, as compared to the spoken dialect, isolating phonemes was more difficult in Modern Standard Arabic. Third, as compared to initial phonemes’ isolation, it was easier to isolate final phonemes. The conclusion made by the author was, therefore, that the Arabic, as well as English phonemes’ manipulation, are different.

According to Saiegh-Haddad & Geva (2008), research has established a relationship between phonemic awareness in Arabic and English languages. Morphological awareness plays a central role in developing the reading skill in an alphabetic orthography because phonemic awareness’s major role has been developed in English. Although scanty evidence exists as a result of limited research, English monolingual children’s evidence confirms that a relationship exists between reading development skills as well as morphological awareness. According to the author, there is a relationship between these two languages’ phonological awareness (English and Arabic). Therefore, phonological awareness is a relatively independent construct when compared to differences in cross linguistics.

According to training conducted on phonological awareness for 140 readers drawn from three initial elementary grades, the outcome indicated a progression development across the three involved grades on the tested tasks (Almehrizi et al., 2020). The tasks tested were syllable deletion, word segmentation, rhyme oddity, and initial sounds identification. The Arabic alphabet letters (28 in number and which are all consonants) change shape based not only on their position but also on the neighboring letters within the word. Because of this, three different forms may be shown by some notes as to when they appear at the end, middle, or even the beginning of a word. According to the author, this is a challenge that all early Arabic readers must face since recognizing these letters and their writing rules based on positions leave a great demand on the learner’s shoulders. In addition, even for children with hearing impairment, their reading problems and performance can be improved and developed by improving their phonological awareness (Saeidmanesh et al., 2018).

Research has confirmed that phonological processing predicts reading success (Layes et al., 2015). According to the author, this applies to all languages studied so far, including Arabic. As a result, therefore, deficits in phonological processing have universally marked difficulties in reading across various orthographies. The author further states that evidence shows that children who have dyslexia experience challenges in the entire phonological processing, like phonological memory. This, according to the author, results in impairments in the trans-coding of written words by applying relevant conversion rules into the correct pronunciation. This close relationship shows that awareness in one language contributes to learning another language (Kozminsky &Kozminsky, 1995).

Methodology

Participants

The study participants were ten students (5 boys and five girls) third-graders with an average of 8-9. They were randomly picked from the researcher’s school. They are all native Arabic speakers, and Arabic is their main language used in school and at home. They were just exposed to English as a foreign language during the English lessons at school. Those students were beginning readers and learners of English, and they learned English twice a week for nine months only at school. All participants took the tests in July and August 2021 during the summer camp at the same school. There were no suspected or verified hearing, speech-language, or learning impairments or disabilities among the participants. The participants came from various socioeconomic backgrounds, and all resided in the same neighborhood near their elementary school.

An Information Sheet was sent to each of the 10 participants’ parents that briefly defined the study’s design. Parents were asked to sign the same Form (appendix 1) if their child accepted to participate in the study.

Measures

The following experimental measures were used to evaluate the association between phonological awareness in Arabic L1 and reading words in English L2: phonological awareness tasks in Arabic and word reading tasks in English.

Phonological awareness tasks in Arabic

Participants received a 1 for correct oral responses and a 0 for erroneous verbal responses or non-responses in all tasks. A total of five words were supplied to each participant in each study.

1. Rhyming task: Participants were asked to match rhyming words to the given word.
2. Segmentation: The participants were instructed to segment the words while tapping before the test items were scored.
   1. Sentence segmentation: Participants were assigned the task of breaking down phrases into spoken words.
   2. Syllable segmentation: This task aimed to check the participant’s ability to identify how many syllables there are in a word (e.g., ta/wi/la). The study consisted of one-syllable words, two-syllable words, and three 3-syllable words. Participants were asked to break down a word into its constituent syllables. Examples: mad/ra/sa, kor/si, mos/tash/fa.
3. Blending: The purpose of this exercise was to assess the participants’ capacity to combine separate sounds into words. The researcher gave the terms, and the participant had to connect them to sound out the words.

Word Reading in English

1. Pseudo word reading.
   1. Participants were asked to read ten words. All words were one syllabic, two or three syllabic, and participants were told at the beginning that those were not actual words. The score they got according to the number of the correct words they readout of 10. They scored 1 for each right word and a 0 for each incorrect reading of the word.
2. Word reading.
   1. Participants were given two sets of words to read. Each group included ten words: one-syllable words and two-syllable words. The test items were selected so that they would be unlikely to be part of the child’s vocabulary and hence would not be segmented and read based on a phonological interpretation from their lexicon. Participants got one round for each set. The total score for both sets was 20. Participants got a score of 0 for every incorrect response.
3. Procedure.
   1. The researchers, fluent in Arabic and English, administered all the tasks and tests to each subject individually. Phonological awareness tasks were administrated first during July. All instructions were delivered in Arabic. The students were tested in Phonological awareness tasks that included: Rhyming words, word segmentation into phonemes, word segmentation into syllables, sentence segmentation, and blending. Each session for each participant lasted for approximately one hour. Regarding the reading words tasks in English, all tasks were administrated at the beginning of August. All instructions were given in English unless there was an urgent need to explain them to the participant in Arabic.

Findings

Whereas there could exist a close relationship between phonological awareness and word reading, this could be true when only one language is involved (Schiff & Saiegh-Haddad, 2018). For this research, however, the relationship between Arabic and English languages was being examined. The table below shows a summary of the outcome of the phonological awareness tasks. It indicates the scores attained by each of the ten respondents on rhyming, segmentation, and blending. Their phonological awareness of Arabic played a significant role in this task because it predicts the reading in Arabic.

Table 1 – Phonological Awareness tasks.

Table 2 below indicates a summary of the participants’ scores on ten pseudowords. Remarkably, only participant 8 managed to read all the terms correctly. It can also be noted that many of the participants could read words that had the fewest letters. For instance, the first word with only three letters could be read by all participants compared to the ninth word with eight letters that only 2 participants could read correctly. A similar relation can also be observed between the fifth word, which had four letters and could be correctly read by all participants, compared to the last word with six letters which could be read correctly by 6 participants out of the 10.

Table 2 – Pseudowords reading scores.

Table3 below shows a summary of scores attained by the participants on word reading. It can be noted that whereas one participant could read all ten syllabic words correctly, neither this participant nor any other participant could read all the 10 two syllabic words correctly. Additionally, many of the participants were able to read more one syllabic words than two syllabic words.

Table 3 – Word Reading Scores.

Discussion

The research question’s examination was to establish if phonological awareness in Arabic (L1) contributes to reading in English foreign language. The participants portrayed different levels of phonological awareness, as evidenced by the summary in table 1. Various tests were utilized to test phonological awareness, including rhyming, sentence segmenting, syllable segmenting, and blending. All these tasks were critical in the examination. Blending, for instance, was aimed at examining the participants’ ability to make words by combining various sounds. It is important to note that the researcher gave these pieces, and the participant was strictly required to sound out the words by connecting them. A participant who scored 5 out of a possible 5 implies great phonological awareness in this regard.

It is critical to note the trend that participants created across the measures used in this research. A participant who showed great skill in blending by scoring 5 out of a possible 5 goes ahead to do well in pseudoword reading as this participant emerges as one of the best performers in this task. If this participant is again tracked to the word reading task, the performance is again among the top performers in this task (participants 1, 2, and 8 are good examples). This shows a close relationship between Phonological awareness in Arabic and learning English, a foreign language. This means that their good performance in reading pseudowords and English words can be attributed to their good Arabic phonological awareness. The same thing can be observed about participants who did not do well in the phonological awareness because they couldn’t do well in pseudoword and word reading tests. Therefore, Arabic reading could be predicted by phonological awareness and English (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008). Further, morphological awareness predicted the fluency in the reading of complex words for both languages. All this evidence indicates that phonological awareness in Arabic (L1) contributes to learning the English language (L2).

Conclusion

Currently, quite a little evidence exists based on research on the roles played by local language phonological awareness on learning a foreign language. As indicated by the results of this research paper, phonological awareness in Arabic, in particular, plays a notable role in learning the English language. This was evidenced by children (participants) with great Arabic phonologic awareness being able to read words in the English language. Further, the participants who struggled with Arabic phonological awareness also struggled in reading the English terms. However, more research is required to establish the relationship between various languages and how understanding one language may affect learning a new one across the various background of the society. This is necessary because, for this research, children from a single learning institution were utilized in concluding. Participants from various backgrounds and learning setups need to be used in future research.

References

Almehrizi, R. S., Al Barwani, T. A., El Shourbagi, S., Al Mahrouqi, B., Al Mandhari, R., Al Sinani, Y.,… & Al Zameli, A. (2020). A Phonological Awareness Test in Arabic Language for Young Learners: Validation Study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 9(6), 58-66.

Durguno-lu, A. Y., & Ouml; ney, B. (2002). Phonological awareness in literacy acquisition: It’s not only for children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 6(3), 245-266.

Kozminsky, L., & Kozminsky, E. (1995). The effects of early phonological awareness training on reading success. Learning and Instruction, 5(3), 187-201.

Layes, S., Lalonde, R., & Rebai, M. (2015). Effectiveness of a phonological awareness training for Arabic disabled reading children: insights on metalinguistic benefits. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 8(4), 24-42.

Saeidmanesh, M., Hajavi, H., & Moradi, V. (2018). Evaluation of phonological awareness training on reading improvement and skills. Auditory and Vestibular Research, 27(4), 208-214.

Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2003). Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: The case of Arabic diglossia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(03), 431–451.

Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Geva, E. (2008). Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English–Arabic bilingual children. Reading and writing, 21(5), 481-504.

Appendix

Word reading tasks in English L2

1. Pseudo-Word Reading. Read the following words
   1. Zat
   2. Fir
   3. Fargo
   4. Kopel
   5. Karmen
   6. Olivet
   7. Hek
   8. Jig
   9. Mota
   10. tamez
2. Word reading task.
   1. Set 1: one-syllable words
      1. Jug
      2. Us
      3. Mid
      4. Tell
      5. Sip
      6. Wig
      7. Cap
      8. Fog
      9. Led
      10. Send
3. Set 2: two-syllable words
   1. Orbit
   2. Planet
   3. Making
   4. Ballet
   5. Indoor
   6. Sender
   7. Filter
   8. Maker
   9. Jogger
   10. relax