Learning to Read in Arabic: Reading, Syntactic, Orthographic and Working Memory Skills in Normally Achieving and Poor Arabic Readers

ABSTRACT While many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in Arabic. Arabic orthography is considered deep if it is not vowelized but shallow if it is vowelized. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic, orthographic and syntactic skills in Arabic. The participants were 143 Arab children, aged 8‐11, in Arab villages of central Israel. They were administered working memory, visual, oral close, phonological, word recognition, spelling, orthographic, and word attack tests. The results showed that word recognition test was highly correlated with phonological skills, semantic processing, syntactic knowledge and short‐term memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills, the problems being most significant at phonological and semantic levels and less so at the visual levels. The similarities and differences between the acquisition of reading skills in Arabic and English are discussed.