Early Literacy Model in a Saudi Arabian Preschool: Implementation in a Different Cultural Context

In Saudi Arabia, as in many other Asian and Middle Eastern countries where early childhood education is still expanding, the notion of importing educational programmes has become a pressing issue.A number of Western early childhood curricula have been introduced to preschool education to address the tendency of the policy makers towards providing global educational standard curricula.The current study seeks to understand how literacy practices that are implemented in a different context linguistically and culturally can contribute to early literacy acquisition in Arabic.The study took place in a preschool in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Since the current work is following an ethnographic approach, data have been collected through participant observation, interviews and gathering relevant documents and artifacts.The participants of the study are 18 children and 2 teachers, where the children are aged between 4 and 5 years.The study revealed a number of preliminary findings; a variety of literacy activities are integrated throughout the daily schedule, and the majority of children demonstrated a tendency to write their names in Arabic rather than in English.The results also showed that there seems to be an absence of children's motivation in literacy activities particularly in the interest areas.The initial findings also demonstrated that teachers vary in their interpretation of literacy practices.In brief, these preliminary findings raise the need for further indepth investigation.