Problems Arabs readers have with word recognition in English

1. Problems Arabs readers have with word recognition in English Dr Mick Randall Email: mick.randall @ gmail.com

2. A cognitive contrastive analysis of English and Arab writing systems and their implications for reading and writing in English

3. Why word recognition? • Basic building block of reading • First language speakers can recognise words extremely rapidly • Context less important in internet literacy

4. Agenda • Look at the theories underpinning word recognition in English • Raise the question of the relevance of these theories to other languages • Raise the issue of the possible effects of Arabic recognition processes on English word recognition • Examine the way that Arabic differs from English and the problems this may have for Arab readers of English • Discuss what this research suggests about teaching Arab students

5. How did you learn to reada) in Arabic b) in English/French? • Phonics • Look and Say • ‘Real’ books

6. Top Down Vs Bottom up Uses knowledge of world to interpret message Uses knowledge of print to decode the message 2 Macro theoretical models

7. = Principles of word recognition • Decoding (bottom up) Route 1 • Phonological assembly (non-lexcial route) c + a + t = /k&t/

8. = Principles of word recognition • Decoding (bottom up) Route 2 • Visual pictures ‘logogens’ (lexical route) cat

9. Principles of word recognition • Prediction (top down) • ‘Reading as a psychological guessing game’, Goodman The dog chased the *** =

10. confirm Principles of word recognition • Prediction and confirmation (top down) The dog chased the cat =

11. Evidence for these routes comes from: • Neurolinguistics, e.g. aphasias • Cognitive psychological experiments

12. Dual Route Theory, Coulthard

13. Phonic decoding revisited • The original phonic process was seen as a simple serial process c + a + t • However, this leads to all sorts of problems: c + a + t + c + h =??? • New thinking suggests that words seen as RHYME (RIME) atch ONSET C +

14. Other effects: Letter saliency

15. CRETAION

16. VAIATION

17. INVASINO

18. SALIENCY EFFECTS IN ENGLISH • Initial letters • Final letters • Middle letters Is this the same for Arab readers?

19. Array scanning A

20. Array scanning CAMQG

21. Array scanning APGNC

22. Array scanning BHKLA

23. Array scanning with English subjects Shapes Letters & digits

24. Array scanning with Arab subjects letters (Arabic & Roman), digits & shapes

25. Questions: • To what extent can models developed for English be extended to other languages such as Arabic? • To what extent does the dual route theory extend to other writing systems, in particular Arabic? • Is the dual route theory a response to the difficulties of English spelling? • Can English be read in other ways? • Do reading processes transfer from one language to another?

26. Arabic/English differences and their likely effects on word recognition Spoken Arabic has a regular CVCV syllable structure with no clusters and thus may be read ‘syllabically’ as CV + CV + CV • Arab readers of English will have difficulty with the syllable structure of English with its high use of clusters: sprains /spreInz/ (CCCvCC) • Arab readers will therefore not ‘see’ whole syllables and words

27. Arabic/English differences and their likely effects on word recognition Arabic has highly regular grapheme to phoneme correspondences, it is highly regular and ‘transparent’. • This, combined with the CVCV structure of spoken Arabic, tends to lead to a heavily phonic L1 literacy training: س + ك + ن = سكن = /sa/ + /ka/ + /na/ • Will Arab readers be sensitive to the ONSET + RIME structure of English or to whole word recognition routes?

28. Arabic/English differences and their likely effects on word recognition In ‘consonantal’ languages such as Arabic which do not mark vowels in normal reading texts putting a word into sounds may be a mandatory process • سكن has 3 different realisations and 3 different meanings depending on the context • Observation of readers and Arab colleagues attest to the importance of ‘reading aloud’ or at least subvocalisation as an important reading technique

29. Arabic/English differences and their likely effects on word recognition As normal Arabic script does not mark vowels readers will not pay attention to the vowels in English • English has a much more complicated vowel system than Spoken Arabic • Readers have no experience of the vowel letters being important. They will expect most letters to be consonants (s k n) and thus words like sicken and sacking in English may be difficult to process.

30. Arabic/English differences and their likely effects on word recognition Arabic has an extremely regular morphological structure • Arabic consists of a relatively small inventory of 3 letter roots and generates large numbers of words from these roots by extremely regular transformations e.g. سكن generates about 20 related head words • English has more ‘word families’ but less words in each

31. So, what about Arabic students reading English? • There has been considerable research into users of other non-Roman scripts such as Chinese • We need research into this area to determine the difficulties faced by Arab readers of English • One way of investigating this problems is to examine word knowledge through spelling

32. Why spelling? Context Processor Meaning Processor Spelling Processor Sound Processor Reading Speech Writing

33. TARGET BETTER BIT CROWD BRING GIRL SPELLING BATTER BETT, BET, BAT CRAED, CROWED, CRROUD, CROWDE BRIENG, PRING, BERING GIRAL Some examples from dictation 1

34. TARGET CAUGHT SPELLING CUAT, COUGHT, COUTCH, COOT, COUGH, COUGHT, COTCH, COTE, COT, KOT, CATHE Some examples from dictation 2

35. Free writing - Ways of spelling ‘friend’ (BALC)

36. What does this mean? • Understanding of spelling is important both for writing AND reading • It is important that students pick up automatic word recognition skills • We should pay more attention to bottom-up, coding strategies in our teaching • We must present words to them to show them the important aspects of English spelling (noticing) • These should be based on the differences between Arabic and English • We need research into the sounds and spellings that students have difficulty with

37. Methodological implications 1 • Need to focus learners’ attention on salient aspects leads to more form-focused work as well as meaning-focused work e.g. • Listening should include • phoneme recognition tasks such as minimal pairs • dictation of both of individual words as well as key words in context

38. Methodological implications 2 • Reading should include: • Word recognition exercises with words exemplifying orthographic features • Words extracted from texts on orthographic criteria • Writing should include: • Spelling and testing individual words • Dictation

39. Curriculum implications • Specify the orthographic features students should be familiar with through: • Specifying vocabulary which demonstrates these features • Assessment of student knowledge of core vocabulary

40. Training implications • Emphasis should be placed on training teachers in cognitive contrastive features: • Phonology should be related to specific Arabic/English problems • Phoneme discrimination • Orthographic features as they relate to phonology

41. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING Any questions/ observations?

42. BALC (the BUiD Arabic Learner Corpus) is available at: http://www.buid.ac.ae/buid/page.php?id=1004&pageId=972 It is available for researchers to work with. If you want any further information, you can contact me at: mick.randall@gmail.com