A note on diglossia

Diglossia refers to a situation in which two languages (or variants of the same language) are used within a community, often by the same speakers but under

different conditions, typically in colloquial, informal settings and in formal settings in education and public life. Along with the complex orthography of written Arabic, it has been proposed that the unique sociolinguistic properties arising from diglossia may affect reading and the acquisition of literacy. There are many different versions

of colloquial Arabic depending on the country in question. Thus, the situation regarding the effect of diglossia may vary among countries in which MSA is the official language. Some scholars think that diglossia has an effect on the acquisition of basic academic skills in Arabic during the early years of education (e.g. Ayari, 1996). There are differences between colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic

regarding the vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, and grammar, which means that the language in which children read is not the same as the one they generally use with family and other social contacts. Ayari (1996) has argued that Arabic diglossia results in difficulties in the acquisition of reading skill. He attributed this to

differences in pronunciation between colloquial Arabic and MSA which may imply two separate phonological lexicons. Many Arabic children are not exposed to literary Arabic until the first grade, when it is similar to a second language. It has also been suggested that the phonological distance between the first language and MSA may play a part in visual word recognition which relies on non-phonological resources but requires matching between sounds and letters (Saiegh-Haddad 2005; Saiegh- Haddad, & Geva 2008). Children have to learn unfamiliar phonemes and match those to MSA letters without being able to match many of the words and sounds they already know to print.

One study examining the impact on reading acquisition of early exposure to literary Arabic found that children exposed to literary Arabic in the pre-school stage achieved higher reading comprehension scores at the end of grades 1 and 2 than children who had been exposed only to spoken Arabic (Abu-Rabia, 2000). These findings confirmed those of Iraqi (1990) who investigated the effect of daily reading of stories in literary Arabic to preschool age children on their oral skills as well as their listening comprehension. The experimental group who listened to stories in

literary Arabic for 15-20 minutes daily for five months demonstrated higher levels of oral ability as well as listening comprehension compared with a control group who had been exposed to daily stories in spoken Arabic. This may be related to the acquisition of vocabulary.

Vocabulary is considered a prerequisite for success in reading comprehension (Joshi, 2005; Salah, 2008). It has been estimated that, in English, a vocabulary of 5,000 or above is needed for normal everyday reading; below that level, which represents some 95% of the words likely to be encountered, reading comprehension is considered to be inadequate. The comparable figures for Arabic generated by one study were a vocabulary size of 6,000 which represented was 90% of the words likely to be encountered in Arabic (Salah, 2008). It is interesting that the percentage for Arabic is lower than for English. Although Salah was concerned with the large size of vocabulary required, the lower percentage may also indicate the role of deduction of meaning in reading an Arabic text.

It has been shown in some studies that MSA and colloquial Arabic act as separate language systems in the brain (e.g., Ibrahim & Aharon-Peretz, 2005). This implies that literate Arabic speakers may be bilingual, assuming that they have achieved a sufficient level of spoken fluency in both. Ibrahim, Eviatar and Aharon- Peretz (2007) conducted a comparison of reading measures in children in the first grade; some were Arab monolingual, some Hebrew monolingual, and others were bilingual in Hebrew-Russian. Measures were accuracy and rate of reading text, pronunciation errors in reading single and non-words, and correct answers to the phonological awareness test. This test asked children to identify the initial sound (not syllable) of each of 20 words spoken by the researcher, to identify the final sound (not syllable) of each of 20 words spoken by the researcher, and to pronounce 20

words but to delete one the syllables in the words. Despite the fact that Arabic native speakers achieved higher scores than Hebrew monolinguals in terms of their

phonological awareness, this did not help them to read more easily; they read more quickly but made more errors. The researchers concluded that the native Arabic speakers experienced more difficulty than Hebrew monolinguals and bilinguals in language processing, which they proposed might be related to the visual complexity of Arabic orthography.

Bentin and Ibrahim (1996) found that the reaction times for recognising printed Arabic words by Arabic speakers were longer than those for recognition of Hebrew words by Hebrew speakers and hypothesized that this reflected the fact that diglossic Arabic speakers were less familiar with the written language. This was partly based on an unusually large frequency effect which was three times larger in printed words than in spoken ones and partly on slower responses to transliterations of their spoken Palestinian dialect, even in a delayed naming task. A separate study reported that response times for printed Hebrew stimuli were more rapid than those for Arabic word recognition (Ibrahim, Eviatar, & Aharon-Peretz, 2002). Eviatar and Ibrahim (2004) investigated the initial stage of learning to read Arabic using two tasks (a lateralized (CVC) identification task and a letter matching task) among Arabic, Hebrew and English speakers. English speakers required the shortest exposure duration for letter identification, Arabic speakers required the longest duration, and Hebrew speakers required an exposure duration between the two. These findings provide additional evidence of the complexity of word recognition in Arabic.