Arabic Writing: Arabic Vs. English Writing System

Arabic versus English writing systems
Arabic writing is from right to left, whereas the English writing system follows the rule of writing from left to right. Another feature is that Arabic can be written only in cursive form, whereas English can be written in both cursive and unconnected print forms. As discussed above, the diacritics play an important role in Arabic and this differentiates it from English, where such marks are a minor feature in reading
(Sampson, 1985). Similarly, the variation of orthographic forms, from vowelized to non-vowelized depending on the literary form (e.g., from early readers and formal
Arabic books to more advanced text and popular writings), is different from English where the same form is used across different
This work included comparisons across grades levels and the impact of training, and has indicated an advantage for reading vowelized text. For example, Abu-Rabia (1999) found that both grade 2 and grade 6 children answered more comprehension questions about a text when it was vowelized, and Abu-Rabia (2000) found that children exposed to literary
Arabic were better readers than those children who were trained with spoken Arabic. In another study by Abu-Rabia (2001), the reading ability of adult readers of Arabic and
Hebrew was considered. These participants were tested on their reading of vowelized and non-vowelized Arabic and Hebrew words and paragraphs. Consistent with the data from children, these adult readers also showed better performance in vowelized versions of Arabic and Hebrew.
Abu-Rabia (1995) tested native-Arabic speaking 15-year-old participants living in
Canada. The results of this study indicated that poor and skilled readers depended on the context within which a word occurs when it was presented in non-vowelized
The research reported in this thesis aims to promote further understanding through the development and assessment of measures of reading comprehension and related skills in Arabic.
Reading comprehension was deemed the focus of the work, because text comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading and the findings of Abu-Rabia that context plays an important role in reading, particularly when reading non-vowelized texts that are experienced by most readers. Based on Abu-Rabia's work, this context effect in nonvowelized texts appears consistent across all levels of reading ability in Arabic and so assessment of comprehension-level skills may be vital in differentiating ability levels across Arabic individuals, possibly more so than in languages such as English.
Therefore, reading comprehension was the focus of the current work, though additional skills, initially focused on phonological processing (again due to the work of Abu-Rabia outlined above), also were considered in order to understand the processes that occur in
Arabic text comprehension. Children living in a primarily Arabic-speaking culture were the target population for the work to overcome the potential