The Relationship between Knowledge of Icraab, Lexical Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension of Nonnative Readers of Arabic

This article reports on an investigation into the role played by knowledge of both i c raab and vocabulary in the reading comprehension of American learners of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL). Two groups (46 participants), proficient and less proficient, of nonnative readers of Arabic read an expository text, wrote an immediate recall protocol in their first language to measure their overall reading comprehension, and completed a vocabulary task and an i c raab task. Whereas the analysis of the data revealed that vocabulary knowledge had a significant main effect, i c raab was found not to have a significant role in reading comprehension. Although the issue of i c raab needs further investigation, the results suggest that reading comprehension is independent of a knowledge of i c raab and depends mainly on vocabulary knowledge.