Effects of exposure to literary Arabic on reading comprehension in a diglossic situation

Reading difficulties in Arabic in elementary school are usually attributed to the diglossia of the Arabic language, whereby the spoken language is totally different from literary Arabic, the language of books and school instruction. Educators, teachers, and parents still believe that exposure of young Arabic speakers to literary Arabic in the preschool period is a burden for them, and is not useful. The present post hoc study examined the influence of exposure to literary Arabic of preschool children on their reading comprehension of literary Arabic stories in grades 1 and 2. Participants in the study were 282 children, 135 from grade 1 and 147 from grade 2. Of the participants, 144 constituted the experimental group, and were exposed to literary Arabic throughout their preschool period. The 138 participants of the control group were exposed not to literary but to spoken Arabic during that period. These children were tested for reading comprehension at the end of grade 1 and grade 2 and compared with the control group. The results generally indicate better reading comprehension results for the children who were exposed to literary Arabic than for the children who were exposed only to spoken Arabic.