Embracing diglossia in early literacy education in Arabic: A pilot intervention study with kindergarten children

ABSTRACT

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 an intervention programme grounded in the linguistic distance between StA and the children’s SpA vernacular in producing gains in children’s metalinguistic awareness in SpA and in StA. The intervention programme lasted for 4–5 weeks and followed two principles: a) train metalinguistic awareness first in SpA and then in StA; b) train linguistic representations in StA as a basis for metalinguistic awareness in StA. Using syllable blending to test phonological awareness and morphological analogies to test morphological awareness, the study produced preliminary experimental evidence for gains in metalinguistic awareness in the intervention group that were significantly larger than those observed in the control group, in SpA and StA. The results, though preliminary, support the effectiveness of diglossia-centred interventions in promoting pre-school children’s metalinguistic awareness in a sociolinguistic context in which two language varieties are used within the same community.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic
• diglossia
• intervention
• morphological awareness
• phonological awareness
• linguistic distance
• literacy
• preschool

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on a larger project that was jointly conducted with Rachel Schiff, Bar-Ilan University and funded by the Israeli Ministry of Education. Special thanks are extended to Rachel Schiff and to our research directors Ola Ghawi-Dakwar and Lina Haj for their collaboration on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2022.2090324

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Ministry of Education, Office of the Chief Scientist [24/7.17]. Grant number: 10208 (2018-2020)

Notes on contributors

Elinor Saiegh-Haddad

Elinor Saiegh-Haddad is a professor of Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She completed her graduate studies at Reading University, England (MA) and Bar-Ilan University, Israel (PhD). She conducted her postdoctoral research at OISE, University of Toronto, Canada, where she investigated reading in young English-Arabic bilinguals. Since then she has engaged in research on reading in bi-dialectal and bilingual contexts, particularly on reading development in Arabic diglossia. She laid the theoretical and methodological grounds of research into the psycholinguistics of reading in diglossia and has published numerous research articles on the topic. She has co-edited two volumes: ‘Handbook of Arabic Literacy’ (Springer 2014) and recently ‘Handbook of Literacy in diglossia and in dialectal contexts’ (Springer, 2022). Saiegh-Haddad has been actively involved in curriculum development for Arabic native speakers in Israel. She is an advisor to the Israel Ministry of Education and the National Authority for Testing and Evaluation, as well as the Israel Centre for Educational Technology. She serves as a member of the editorial boards of Scientific Studies of Reading, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Applied Psycholinguistics.