![Without diacritics: With diacritics:
Simple past
(wrote)
Past passive
(was written)
[ kataba = كتب]
[ kutiba = كتب]
[ kataba = َََبتَك]
[ kutiba = ََبِتُك]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/l1influenceonl2readingak-140818090335-phpapp01/85/L1-influence-on-l2-reading-ak-6-320.jpg)
L1 influence on l2 reading (ak)
- 2. What do you think might be the influence of L1 on L2 reading? What have you found that Arabic speakers perceive as difficult in reading English? What kind of strategies do they seem to use?
- 3. Orthography ◦ 28 consonant letters, and 3 short vowel diacritics (consonant saliency) ◦ Two scripts: fully vowelized (shallow); unvowelized (deep) (MSA) Phonology ◦ Shallow: 1-1 sound-to-letter correspondence ◦ Deep: incomplete information, gaps to fill (default attention to consonants) Morphology ◦ Complex system of roots and word patterns
- 4. Root Related words k-t-b kitaab (book), maktaba (library) yaktub (he writes), kataba (he wrote) d-r-s mudarris (teacher), madrasa (school), darrasa (to learn) s-k-n sakana (he lived), sakan (hostel/house), sukina (was lived - passive form) (Ryan and Meara, 1991:533; Hayes-Harb, 2006:323; Fender, 2008:103; Randall, 2009:125)
- 5. س ْرَد (lesson – dars) ََسَرَد (studied – darasa)
- 6. Without diacritics: With diacritics: Simple past (wrote) Past passive (was written) [ kataba = كتب] [ kutiba = كتب] [ kataba = َََبتَك] [ kutiba = ََبِتُك]
- 7. Vowelised script (novice/poor readers) Unvowelised script (good readers) Reliance on: ◦ Phonological processing (each word has semantic autonomy) ◦ (Some priming assistance from sentence context) Reliance on: ◦ Prior knowledge of word morphology (attention to consonants) ◦ Sentence context (lack of semantic autonomy)
- 8. Arabic may be ‘the only language in which skilled readers must first understand the sentence in order to recognise the word’ (Abu-Rabia, 1998:116)
- 9. How many different ways can you think of spelling the following English vowel sounds? /eɪ/ (e.g. say) /ɔ:/ (e.g. or) How many different ways can you think of pronouncing the following English letters in words? ‘a’ ‘ea’
- 10. /eɪ/ (e.g. say) ◦ mate; grey; eight; wait; great /ɔ:/ (e.g. or) ◦ form; call; war; cause; saw; walk; taught; thought; four ‘a’ ◦ cat; tall; save; what; cart; ◦ national; nationality; nationalisation ‘ea’ ◦ read; dreamt; steak; ear; earth; heart
- 11. Orthography ◦ 26 letters, 5 vowels ◦ No 1-1 sound-to-letter/letter-to-sound correspondence Phonology ◦ vowel saliency, 5 vowels but over 20 vowel sounds ◦ the influence of word stress on pronunciation of vowels Morphology ◦ regular but different system from Arabic ◦ variations in pronunciation of words in word families
- 12. Variation in levels of confidence with differences in exposure to, use of, and comfort with reading English texts Frequent use of higher-level processing strategies Prevailing tendency for automatic reliance on context for comprehension regardless of L2 reading proficiency
- 13. Limited use of word-level strategies: ◦ dependence on electronic dictionaries or guessing with resulting miscues ◦ defaulting to Arabic phonological processing Gaps in knowledge of English: ◦ phonological – default to Arabic decoding ◦ orthographic – perception of “no rules in English” ◦ morpho-syntactic – word forms, verb/noun endings, etc., the interrelatedness of all for word processing and reading comprehension
- 14. We need to guide learners to increased efficiency and effectiveness in reading by: paying attention to gaps in learners’ linguistic knowledge of English e.g. pronunciation, spelling, word forms helping learners to develop lower-level processing strategies more suited to English e.g. attention to vowels, word forms, grammatical information
- 15. Abu-Rabia, S. (2002) ‘Reading in a root-based-morphology language: The case of Arabic’. Journal of Research in Reading 25 (3), 299-309 Abu-Rabia, S. (1998) ‘Reading Arabic texts: Effects of text type, reader type and vowelization’. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, 105- 119 Abu-Rabia, S. (1997) ‘Reading in Arabic orthography: The effect of vowels and context on reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers in reading paragraphs, sentences, and isolated words’. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26 (4), 465-482 Fender, M. (2008) ‘Arabic literacy development and cross-linguistic effects in subsequent L2 literacy development’. in Learning to Read across Languages: Cross-Linguistic Relationships in First and Second Language Literacy Development. ed. by Koda, K. and Zehler, A. M. London: Routledge, 101-124 Fender, M. (2003) ‘English word recognition and word integration skills of native Arabic-and Japanese-speaking learners of English as a second language’. Applied Psycholinguistics 24, 289-315 Fender, M. (2001) ‘A review of L1 and L2/ESL word integration skills and the nature of L2/ESL word integration development involved in lower-level text processing’. Language Learning 51 (2), 319-396
- 16. Perfetti, C. A. and Dunlap, S. (2008) ‘Learning to read: general principles and writing system variations’. in Learning to Read across Languages: Cross- Linguistic Relationships in First and Second Language Literacy Development. ed. by Koda, K. and Zehler, A. M. London: Routledge, 13-38 Randall, M. (2009) Second language reading proficiency and word recognition: The concept of saliency and its application across different scripts issues in second language proficiency. in Issues in Second Language Proficiency. ed. by Benati, A. G. London: Continuum International Publishing, 116-131. Ryan, A. (1997) ‘Learning the orthographical form of L2 vocabulary – a receptive and a productive process’. in Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. ed. by Schmitt, N. and McCarthy, M. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181-198 Ryan, A. and Meara, P. (1991) ‘The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words.’ Reading in a Foreign Language 7 (2), 531-540 Saigh, K. and Schmitt, N. (2012) ‘Difficulties with vocabulary word form: The case of Arabic ESL learners’. System 40, 24-36