The Influence of Arabic Vowel Signs on the Accuracy and Speed of Reading - Essay Example

The Influence of Arabic Vowel signs on the Accuracy and Speed of Reading Affiliation: Introduction: The type of orthography is an essential aspect that requires investigating with regards of reading acquisition context. Orthography consistency has a significant role that affect reading acquisition process (Abu-Hajaj, 2006; Furnes & Samuelsson, 2009; Georgiou, Parrila, & Papadopoulos, 2008; Goswami, Ziegler, & Richardson, 2005; Taibah & Haynes, 2011). It implies that the high correspondence between letters and sounds can ease the word decoding and fluency of reading. Arabic can be either a shallow orthography if the script is subject to vowelize or can be a deep orthography if the script is unvowelized (Abu-Rabia, 2000; Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 2003; Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006; Mahfoudhi et al., 2011; Mohamed, Elbert, & Landerl, 2011). Skilled readers are used to deducing unviable short vowels; however, beginning readers are presented to vowelized scripts as they are still developing their literacy (Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006; Hussien, 2014; Mahfoudhi et al., 2011; Taibah & Haynes, 2011). The current study investigated the influence of vowelized and unvowelized types. It is well-known that reading acquisition is a developmental process that requires be teaching and improving throughout school grades in simultaneous, gradual, and continuous way. This process depends on many factors among them the nature of the orthography and teaching methods. Most the art of reading principles and propositions are established from Latin orthographies research, mostly from English studies while little is to known about Semitic orthographies (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic). When comparing the existent reading literature, Hebrew studies outnumber Arabic studies; in fact, the majority of Arabic studies are done in Hebrew country (Israel) by Arab Israeli. In the Israeli educational system, children are introduced with unvowelized scripts in third grade (Sharon,) while in most Arab countries; vowelized scripts are introduced to children in primary schools. Partially vowelized and unvowelized texts are subject to introduce in elementary and secondary school. It is the 7th grade in Saudi educational system the context of the study. Therefore, the decision of whether to introduce unvowelized textbooks or not and what is the suitable educational stage, is an important issue that needs to be a research-based decision. Therefore, this study will investigate whether Saudi 4th graders are ready for introduction with unvowelized scripts or not by testing their reading ability (accuracy and speed) to a list of unvowelized words which they already exposed to from 3thrd grades reading textbook. This study also will investigate if there will be significant differences in reading vowelized and unvowelized words. A secondary purpose for conducting the study is to investigate if vowelization is still had a positive influence on adult readers’ university students. The same methods for 4th graders will be subject to use but with different words. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that: 1- Saudi 4th grader will quickly and accurately read unvowelized words list as they already have encountered to these words 2- Vowelization will facelated reading for both groups as vowelized word recognition will be faster and more accurate than unvowelized words. The findings of the study were unable to confirm the first hypothesis as 4th graders find difficulties in naming unvowelized word list. Various results were obtained for the second hypothesis while vowelization reported having positively influenced on 4th graders naming Task University students were negatively read vowelized word list as it slower and makes less accurate. 2. The writing system of Arabic language: In spoken Arabic, a total of twenty-nine consonants and eight vowels exist (three short vowels, three long vowels, and two diphthongs). The majority of Arabic letters differ from each other in form depending on their position in a word. It implies that the difference exists while depending on whether they appear right from the beginning, from the middle part or the end section of a word. As one can see, the consonants are subject to write as cursive characters while the vowels are subject to write as diacritics that are subject to attach to these cursive characters, be it above or below them. The three short vowels are subject to the representation by diacritics, whereby two stands are present above letters, and one stand is present below them. Similarly, the diacritical distinguishing dots among them do not have phonetic value. The names of the vowel signs for the three short vowels are ‘fatHa’, ‘damme’ and ‘kasra’. Even though these are not letters by their own, they combine with consonants into forming CV syllables that end with a short vowel. In addition, there exist the ‘double fatHa’, the ‘double damme’, and the ‘double kasra.’ The lists of these three signs are only useful and subject to pronounce at the end of nouns and adjectives. In most case, these adjectives and nouns do not grammatically exist in the definite form. Although the letters ‘alif’, ‘wow’ and ‘ja’ represent consonants when written together with another consonant, these three letters represent the three long vowels of Arabic. The two diphthongs of Arabic are subject to write with ‘waw. or ‘ja’ when these are subject to combine with a consonant letter. In addition to the diacritics for the short vowels, the long vowels, and the diphthongs, there are four other reading signs as listed below: (a) ‘skoon’: the sign is an indication that there is no short vowel to follow; (b) ‘shaddeh’: the sign is subject to locate above a consonant letter as an indication of doubling of the letter; (c) ‘maddeh’: the sign is written above the consonant letter alif to indicate doubling of this letter; (d) ‘hamzeh’: the sign is a signal of a glottal stop. With the exception of “hamzeh”, these reading signs lack the phonetic value. It thus implies that they are merely instructions to the reader to process the letter string in a particular way (Jensen, 1970). 3. Literature review: It is well-established in the reading literature that reading skill is a developmental process. Reading acquisition process develops in four phases as Harris and Coltheart (1986) proposed whereby “children learning to read pass through an identifiable series of distinct stages in the acquisition of the skill” (Ellis, 1993: 78). The first stage is the sight vocabulary phase. It is the stage whereby children have the capacity for reading small number of words by ‘sight’ as they view these words as a whole picture. At this phase, children have no potential for reading unknown words. There is proven evidence indicating that some children do not just attend to the whole shape of the words, but in the same capacity also they have some knowledge of the single letter shapes that occur in sequences. When children reach the age of starting to attend school while at this time they also begin reserving formal reading instruction, this is the stage whereby they become ready to move into the next stage. The stage is subject to refer as a discrimination-net phase. At this stage, children start discriminating between the words that they are reading by making use of fragmented cues in words. At this stage, they are putting into use the whole-word method to read words of which they seem to be appearing in some shapes. When children see a new word they look for cues that match the already learned words. For example, if a word from the known words list has ll (e.g., small) children at this phase read any word contains ll (e.g. balloon as small). The same can be said for long words, for instance, the telephone can be generalized to any long word they encounter and be read telephone. At this phase when children see a word, they do not rely on letters- sounds correspondence rules instead they recognize words as salient graphic features. As children’s reading vocabulary grows, the discrimination net method of reading getting harder, so children move to the next stage that is the phonological recording phase. It is the phase of which children are developing towards grapheme-phoneme relation. It is also implied that it is the phase of which children’s auditory vocabulary becomes well-developed, and as they come across a new word they have never encountered before. At this stage, they have the potential of translating the unseen word to speech, and then translate the unrecognizable letter into forming recognizable phoneme. The next step is subject to follow by their potential of using phonological recoding potential into converting written words to speech. All of these techniques aid the children into reading non-words. The last stage is the orthographic phase. It is the phase of which the children are shifting from recognizing written form as a base of letter-sound analysis into recognizing the way of which it is subject to write (orthographic wholes) (Frith, 1985 & Harris and Coltheart,1986). It is worth mentioning that these phases are a rough sketch and cannot be generalized to all languages because of the influence of the linguistic and orthographic features that particular language has beside teaching methods (Share, 2008). In Chinese language, for examples, there is no phonological recoding stage since their characters do not correspond with their sounds (Harris and Coltheart, 1986). The issue was solved by teaching Pinyin in early learning reading stage. Pinyin is the Roman alphabet and beginning Chinese readers encounter to Chinese characters with their transcriptions in pinyin. Grapheme-to-phoneme relationships have been subject to research among different alphabetic orthographies (e.g. Katz & Frost, 1992; Forst, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Oney & Goldman, 1984). According to orthographic depth hypothesis, alphabetic writing systems varies regarding orthographic depth as there are two different orthographies, a language with shallow orthography has one to one relation between letters and the corresponding sounds. In contrast, deep orthography language has complex relations between graphemes and phonemes as the consistency of grapheme-phoneme is low. It could either because of that grapheme-to-phoneme relation in these orthographies is often irregular as individual graphemes represent many different phonemes in various words. It could also because of the phonology of the words are incompletely subject to depict at the grapheme stage. A deep orthography language in which heavily has been subject to research is English. Its orthography is complex in one hand it has different sounds representation for the same letter. For example, the sequence of letters like ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘th’, or ‘ph’ is the same letter alignments that give an indication of other sounds. On other occasions, one could use three letters in making a sound. For example, a word like ‘scotch’ has three letters of which the ‘tch’ provides an indication of the correct pronunciation. In the other the same sounds can be represented by different letters. On the other hand, a language such as Serbo-Croatian its orthography considered to be a shallow orthography as every single letter has only one phoneme to represent it (Feldman & Turvey, 1983). Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew (Semitic languages) have two orthographies: shallow orthography (vowelized words) and deep orthography (unvowelized words). Shallow orthographies are those that can easily support the process of word recognition that may involve the language phonology. Contrasting it is the deep orthographies that encourage the reader into processing words through the process of referring to their morphology basing on the words printed through visual-orthographic structures. In these languages, beginning readers encountered with vowelized texts as they need the vowels signs to help them to carry on reading. It is because they are developing their reading skill they gradually encounter to the unvowelized texts (Share, 2008). Frost, Katz and Bentin (1987) compared to three different languages Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian and English to test the validity of the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis by measuring naming and lexical decision times for words and non-words. Their results showed that in shallow orthographies naming process lexicon has minor effects compared with lexicon role in the process of lexical decision. As a sequence the shallowest orthography, Serbo-Croatia, has the greatest difference between naming and lexical decision times that are naming times were faster than lexical decision times. The deepest orthography Hebrew the unvowelized version lexical decision and naming reaction time showed quite a similarity. They concluded that “in shallow orthographies phonology is generated directly from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is subject to derive from the internal lexicon” (1987, p.104). Many Hebrew studies (e.g. Koriat, 1984; Navon & Shimron, 1981; Frost, 1994) have investigated the role of vowelization to examine whether vowels can facilitate reading. The argument is that since vowels provide more phonological information so the processes of reading become cognitively less demanding. Shimron & Sivan (1994) for example compared reading Hebrew with vowelized text to unvowelized text to investigate whether each orthography has an influence on reading time and comprehension. Their findings showed that the Hebrew vowelized texts were more effectively on comprehension than was Hebrew unvowelized texts. Regarding the speed of reading results the vowelized Hebrew texts was better than unvowelized text. Similar results were subject to report in Shimron’s (1999) study of Hebrew of beginning readers as reading texts were found better recalled and comprehended when they were vowelized. It could be subject to conclude that vowels sign in Hebrew faster the recognition of the word even when, in fact, there are more processing for graphical input. Although the role of vowelization in Arabic studies is under searched, similar findings have been obtained in Arabic studies. Abu-Rabia conducted several studies that demonstrated the significant role of vowelization as a facilitator of reading for both beginnings and skilled Arabic readers. For example, Abu-Rabia (1997) investigated the influence of Arabic vowels and context on the accuracy of reading of tenth-grade poor and skilled readers. He also investigated the effect of the context types as narrative stories and newspaper articles were used. The subjects of the study read aloud vowelized and unvowelized paragraphs and a set of word lists. The results showed that vowel signs and context was an important facilitator for word recognition for both poor and more advanced readers. Regarding the types of text reading there was no influence reported. Abu-Rabia concluded that the benefit of vowelized over unvowelized words was additional phonological coding that ease word recognition, reading accuracy, and comprehension. In another study, Abu-Rabia (2001) tested the role of vowels and context on the accuracy and comprehension of reading of skilled adult native Arabic speakers in Arabic and Hebrew, their second language. Vowelized materials in both languages were reported to have significant effects on accuracy and comprehension of reading when compared with unvowelized materials. Abu-Rabia (1995) examined the reading acquisition of 143 Arab children aged between 8 to 11 years old. The results reviled that similar to English in Arabic language there was a high correlation between word recognition and important variables; phonological skills, syntactic knowledge, semantic processing and short-term memory. The findings suggested that the knowledge of grapheme–phoneme transformation rules is an important component of the Arabic reading process. In this regard, it may facilitate words decoding speed perhaps even more than in English because in Arabic letter–sound correspondence, which provided by vowelization, is more direct. 4. Methodology: Participants The study was able to include thirteen (13) native Arabic speakers. The participants were subject to divide into two groups classified as skilled and beginning readers. Skilled readers (university student) five females and three males were subject to enrol from different faculties at the university who have been reading unvowelized text for long time. Beginning readers (4th graders) were collected from different elementary schools in Madenah four boys and one girl who have not been subject to expose to unvowelized reading text. All the children that participated in the study were able to express their willingness to participate verbally. Materials A set of two measures were subject to design for the purpose of testing accuracy and reading time for isolated words. Vowelized words and unvowelized. In each task, participants were asked to read aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. The total time will be recorded to measure the speed of reading, and the number of correct words will be subject to conduct. University students group: Vowelized word naming task: A list of 30 words from an Arabic book called ‘with teachers.’ The chosen words were consists of 3 to 6 letters. The words are unvowelized in the book . Therefore, an Arabic language lecturer was asked to provide the vowels form for the words and to judge the words’ moderately frequents. Unvowelized words are naming task: A list of 30 different words from vowelized word list was chosen from the same book and met the same conditions. 4th graders group: Vowelized word naming task: A list of 30 words from a third-grade book. The chosen words were consists of 3 to 6 letters. The words are vowelized in the book. Therefore, the vowelization was omitted an Arabic language lecturer were asked to provide the vowels form for the words and to judge the words’ moderately frequents. Unvowelized words are naming task: A list of 30 different words from vowelized word list was chosen from the same book and met the same conditions. See Appendix A for full words. Measures Reading accuracy - To score reading accuracy the raw number were subject to count on the correct response (correctly decoded words) that participants were asked to read aloud from each of the isolated word lists. The correct decoding was subject to score as 1, and incorrect decoding was scored as zero then the accurate reading was collected and then average was collocated. Reading speed - the total time in seconds was the method to score reading speeds that subjects were subject to task into reading{"status":"TOOLBAR_READY","toolbarId":220280897} the word lists as rapidly as it is possible. The average speed was subject to collocate. Procedure Participants were subject to test on individual basis basing on a set of two Arabic isolated word lists and each word list was subject to administer separately in the following order: vowelized words and unvowelized words. Participants were verbally asked to read the printed words aloud. The experimenter had the same words lists paper to assess the correct and incorrect response the symbols used in front of each word for every participant. For reading speed measurement, a timer was used the start of the experiment start when the experimenter says “start” the timer stopped immediately after the participants completed the list. Results The study is conducted to investigate whether reading accuracy and speed 4th graders and university students differed among naming tasks of unvowelized and vowelized words. Table of Results Classification Reading speed on unvowelized words Reading speed on vowelized words 4th Graders 7/30 words with speed of 1:50 minutes 24/30 words with reading speed of 53 seconds University Students 28/30 words with average speed of 51 seconds 21/30 words with average speed of 1:20 minutes The first hypothesis predicted that Saudi 4th grader would quickly and accurately read unvowelized words list as they already have encountered to these words. The findings, however, did not confirm the first hypothesis. After introducing a unvowelized word, 4th grader found reading the unvowelized word is difficult as they accurately read on average seven words out of 30 and reading speed came to 1:50 minutes. Regarding the second hypothesis, which predicted that vowelization would faselated reading for both groups (4th graders and university students) as vowelized word recognition will be faster and more accurate than unvowelized words. Different results were found depending on the group. To 4th grade groups, their performance in reading vowelized was significantly outperformed unvowelized words in both variables accuracy and speed of reading they read 24 correctly out of 30 words with an average speed of 53 second. In contrast, the reading accuracy and speed of university students were better in reading unvowelized words. They read 28 words correctly out of 30 with an average speed of 51 seconds whereas, in vowelized words, they read correctly 21 out of 30 with an average speed of 1:20 minutes. Discussion The general purpose of this study was to investigate influence of short vowels on reading Arabic orthography among university readers and 4th grade readers it also tried to find out whether 4th grade readers are ready to read unvowelized reading materials or not For this purpose, a naming task was used with vowelized, unvowelized real Arabic words, as naming times and accuracy were subject to collect from participants. Beginning Arabic readers used to read shallow words (vowelized words) because their orthographic lexicon is still not fully developed. On the hand, skilled readers who used to read deep words (unvowelized words) as they depend on whole-word recognition using the orthographic lexicon that subsequently increase the identification and fluency of the word. Accordingly, this study was able to hypothesize that words 4th grade readers would read more accurately and more quickly in the unvowelized list as they already have encountered to these words before. However, the findings did not confirm this hypothesis as the results reported negative performance of 4th graders and that they are still in the phonological-recoding stage and they properly are not ready yet to be transferred to the orthographic phase. In contrasts to 4th-grade Saudi students, Hebrew 4th graders are able to read unvowelized reading texts as they gradually become an expert after completing grade three (Shimron, 1999). In the same manner, grade seven Saudi student starts to read unvowelized text. It seems that Arabic language is more complex than Hebrew. The same claim is subject to supported by Ibrahim et al. (2002) study. The study was able to test young native Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals that performed oral and visual versions of the Trail Making Test (TMT) in both languages. The feedback was able to indicate that the visual recognition of Arabic letters was slower than of Hebrew letters. The interpretation of these findings was basing upon the visual complexity of the Arabic orthography. With regards to the final hypothesis that vowels signs have positive effects for both groups on accuracy and speed of reading different results were subject to obtain. Children were reported to benefit from vowelization as their results showed better performance in both variables compared with unvowelized reading lists. Although university students showed higher performance as experts in reading vowelized and non-vowelized words, their results on reading vowelized word list were surprising as the vowels signs have negative influence making their reading slower and less accurate. However, it was expected that Arabic readers would benefit from vowels and produce greater accuracy pronunciation since vowels supply more phonological information (Frost, 1994; Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 1995; Abu-Rabia, 1996, 1998). Vowelization as Saiegh-Haddad & Geva indicated (2008) provides “regular and consistent representation renders any additional morphological information, even when present, superfluous, especially when readers are not timed” (2008, p. 498). However, the study findings reviled disadvantage of vowelization on both variables for university readers this results are inconsistent with prior Hebrew’s literature (Koriat, 1984; Navon & Shimron, 1981; Frost, 1994) and Arabic’s literature (Abu-Rabia & Siegel, 1995; Abu-Rabia, 1996, 1998) where the findings constantly demonstrated the role of vowels in improvement the accuracy of reading for all different readers poor and skilled ones, young and adult ones. One explanation could be that previous studies did not include the speed factor in their studies as they focus on accuracy giving the participants their time to produce the given task. In contrasts, this study asked the participants to read as quickly and accurately as possible with the timer that count their speed that probably make them focus on completing the task in short time. Another explanation is that Saudi university readers seems to have not read much vowelized Arabic texts for long time because by the 7th grade vowelized reading texts omitted from words and when they exposed to these short vowels that are subject to locate above and below the letters they got distracted by them. Actually that was reported by the majority of university readers when they asked about their opinion about reading with vowelization. Roman and Pavard’s (1987) were able to confirm the study as they examined eye movements on two Arabic type’s orthographies, vowelized and unvowelized. The results reviled that short vowels have negative effects as vowels impaired reading processes. If we consider Frith’s (1985) claim that word recognition ability rely on phonological and orthographic skills we could then understand the negative influence of the vowels that reported in this study as university readers are proficient readers who depend more on visual orthographic information such as spelling and orthographic codes rather than phonological decoding. Consequently, it seems that skilled readers have transferred from phonological recoding phase provided by vowelized information to an orthographic phase in where reading texts are not contain vowels which provides sound -letter representation so readers directly identify words as visual form, not as sounds. Conclusion This study examined the role of signs vowel on Arabic reading of two groups of readers expert readers (university students) and beginning readers (4th grade students) in two variables: accuracy and speed of reading. The naming task were subject to use as a measurement for three words lists namely vowelized, non-vowelized. The findings showed that each group used different coding strategies when the orthographic feature of stimuli varies (vowelized vs. non-vowelized). While young readers reported to positively benefit from vowelization in both accuracy and speed of reading, skilled readers negatively read the vowelized words list as vowels slower their reading and make it less accurate. One can conclude that that reading written Arabic is cognitively complex. In order to give better understanding of the effects of vowel signs on accuracy and speed of reading, future research is recommended to use all grades as samples to investigate literacy acquisition. Moreover, future studies should have the capacity of examining the influence of different orthographic and linguistic factors that might have play roles on the visual complexity of Arabic such as the connectivity factor and consider different genre, for example stories and poetic materials. Additionally, the fact that the samples of this study were small is considered to be a weakness point for this study. Therefore, future studies should include larger subjects in order to verify the reported results of this study. Finally, the reported results provide general implications for teaching Arabic reading in L1 and L2. Schools need to encourage reading in every possible way, such as activate the role of library, holding reading clubs, and holding groups reading and discussion sessions on interesting books that suit the level and age of the readers. Read More