Papers by Salim Abu-Rabia
Curriculum and teaching, 1999
Page 1. Curriculum and Teaching Volume 14 No. 2 1999 Editor Dr Joseph Zajda Contents NOTES AND CO... more Page 1. Curriculum and Teaching Volume 14 No. 2 1999 Editor Dr Joseph Zajda Contents NOTES AND COMMENTS . . . . . 3 Articles TEACHER BURNOUT, PERCEIVED SELF-EFFICACY ...
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2012
Three different models predict the relationship between parents' attitudes toward reading, their ... more Three different models predict the relationship between parents' attitudes toward reading, their behavior and the learning environment that they provide, and their influence on the reading performance of their children in first grade. The first model specifies the direct influence of each of the independent variables (attitudes, behavior and learning environment) on the dependent variable (reading performance of the child). The second model emphasizes the behavior as mediator between attitudes and reading performance, and also the direct influence of learning environment on performance. In contrast, the third model relates to the influence of attitudes on reading performance, with behavior as a mediator just in a supportive learning environment. In order to examine these models, we investigated a population of fifty firstgrade pupils and their parents, measuring these variables with the help of questionnaires, interviews, observations and reading tests. The findings suggest that parents' supportive attitudes have a significant positive influence on the reading performance of their children in first grade. This conclusion is actually consistent with all three models. The more specific conclusion, however, is that attitudes are partially mediated by parents' behavior in a supportive learning environment, which partially supports the third model.
Creative Education
Background: This study examined the effectiveness of digital books in improving reading and readi... more Background: This study examined the effectiveness of digital books in improving reading and reading comprehension among seventh-grade Arab students who have been defined as having difficulty reading. Method: This study sampled 120 students. Sixty students studied Arabic using a digital book, and sixty students at another school studied the same material in a printed version. The students are Arabic-speakers and are considered poor readers. The study population were located at the beginning of the school year based on the results of the AMIT assessment (a tool for mapping students' ability in reading comprehension) in order to test the effectiveness of digital books on strengthening reading skills and comprehension. This study examined students in Arabic. The students were administered a test of reading and reading comprehension using digital texts. Results: The study indicated that using digital books did indeed improve reading comprehension skills in Arabic (in all dimensions of understanding) among Arab students struggling to read. On the other hand, the use of the digital books did not seem to affect reading accuracy skills among these students. Conclusions: Learning Arabic via digital books can improve poor Arabic readers in Arabic.
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2012
The present study examined whether an improvement in English as a second language causes an impro... more The present study examined whether an improvement in English as a second language causes an improvement among poor readers in Hebrew as the first language. This assumption is named in the present study "The Cognitive-Retroactive Transfer (CRT) hypothesis of linguistic skills". The participants were 20 sixth-grade poor readers from Israeli elementary schools, with Hebrew as their first language, and who learn English as their second language. All the students in the program participated in small group instruction sessions that emphasized linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in the second language (English). The program, which was administered over a 5-month period, involved approximately 40 hours of contact with a trained instructor. The participants were administered various tests which measured their basic linguistic skills in English as well as in Hebrew. The tests were as follows: phonological awareness, phonological processing, word identification, reading fluency, reading comprehension, morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, orthographic knowledge and spelling. The tests in both languages were given to the participants before and after the intervention program. The test results indicated significant differences both in English and in Hebrew before and after the intervention program for all linguistic skills (except orthographic knowledge). The findings provide scientific support for the Cognitive-Retroactive Transfer (CRT) hypothesis, which means that an improvement in linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in a second language will be expected to give rise to a similar improvement in the first language as well. The results are discussed in light of the findings in the literature as well as suggestions for future research.
Journal of Educational Research, Apr 1, 2020
This research examined differences between dyslexic, poor and normal readers who learn in the sam... more This research examined differences between dyslexic, poor and normal readers who learn in the same educational framework, across various linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1) and English as a foreign language (FL), following an intervention program focusing on English linguistic skills. The participants included 124 sixth graders divided into an experimental and a control group, where each group was divided into dyslexic, poor and normal readers. The experimental group participated in an intervention program in English, constructed to the requirements of this research, in addition to the regular sixth-grade English curriculum. All participants were administered a battery of tests in English and Hebrew: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, orthography, decoding, word recognition, reading fluency, dictation, spelling and reading comprehension before and after the intervention program. More significant differences in most linguistic and meta-linguistic skills improvement in English and in Hebrew were found in the experimental group compared to the control group, with the most significant improvement exhibited by the dyslexic readers. The findings indicate the contribution of the intervention program in English for improving linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in both languages among all readers, and especially among dyslexic readers. Enlargement of the curriculum in English appears to expand their potential, and their improvement is better than that of the poor and normal readers.
Educational Psychology, Jun 1, 1999
... SALIM ABU-RABIA Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel ... pot social context, Isr... more ... SALIM ABU-RABIA Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel ... pot social context, Israeli society is not culturally tolerant to different cultural and ethnic groups, which makes the newcomers more loyal to their first language and culture (Cummins & Swain, 1986; Cummins ...
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Feb 4, 2019
The purpose of the present review is to examine the studies that tested the role of short vowels ... more The purpose of the present review is to examine the studies that tested the role of short vowels in reading Arabic. Most of the studies are reviewed in this paper and two contradicted data are presented: data that support positive contribution of short vowels in reading Arabic, and the other data that reject the assumption that short vowels contribute to the quality of reading, and suggest that these short vowels do not add any positive contribution and maybe the opposite; short vowels hinder reading in Arabic orthography. The results are criticized indicating some methodological problems and suggestions for further studies are presented.
Language, Culture and Curriculum, 2004
... Awareness? Salim Abu-Rabia Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31... more ... Awareness? Salim Abu-Rabia Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905, Israel ... The poor readers had to read aloud the list of isolated words. The list of isolated words was administered individually to all the partici-pants. ...
Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2021
The study tested whether cognitive retroactive transfer (CRT) of language skills from English to ... more The study tested whether cognitive retroactive transfer (CRT) of language skills from English to Hebrew takes place; specifically, whether an improvement in linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in English as a foreign language (FL) would lead to an improvement in these skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1). The participants consisted of 124 students in Grade 6 who were randomly assigned to an experimental group or a control group. Each group was further divided into readers with dyslexia, poor readers, and typical readers groups. The experimental group participated in an English intervention program designed for this study. All participants were administered a battery of pre- and post-treatment tests in linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in Hebrew and in English. The findings supported the existence of CRT from skills in English to skills in Hebrew with reference to most of the variables in the domains of reading, writing, and language skills. The improvement in most of th...
Reading Psychology, 2020
This article presents a review of studies that investigated the advantage of morphological awaren... more This article presents a review of studies that investigated the advantage of morphological awareness and knowledge of basic morphemes that comprise verbs in Arabic among normal and dyslexic native Arabic readers, and discusses the role of Arabic morphology in reading. The review included studies on Arabic as well as some studies on Hebrew, since they are both Semitic languages. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of morphology in the organization of words, and its effect on the reading process. Studies investigating normal and dyslexic readers usually focused on the role of phonology in different orthographies, rather than on the role of morphology. It is important to study the orthography of the specific language, due to its specific nature, and the different effect that each orthography type may have on the reading process. The present review discusses most of the recent studies on Arabic morphology and focuses on the contribution of morphological awareness for acquisition and fluency in reading and its effect on the reading process of normal and dyslexic readers. The findings of these studies, as well as future research directions are discussed.
The Journal of Educational Research
Abstract The goal of the present study was to examine improvement in English as a foreign languag... more Abstract The goal of the present study was to examine improvement in English as a foreign language (EFL) among different levels of readers with dyslexia, after an intervention program over a defined period. A total of 180 sixth-grade pupils from schools for learning disabilities in the Arab sector participated in the study, and 90 of the students who participated in an EFL intervention program had dyslexia. The students were divided into three levels of dyslexia in their Arabic mother tongue: severe, moderate, and light. Findings revealed the skills of the students in the intervention group to be better than those in the control group. The research findings also did not indicate any differences between the groups in the context of skills measured in terms of time, and it is from here that the higher-level skills of the students in the intervention group were reflected in aspects relating to ability (number of correct answers) and not necessarily to processing speed.
Annals of Dyslexia, 2021
The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among ty... more The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2 years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two priming paradigms: masked priming and the cross-modal immediate repetition task. We conducted two visual lexical decision tasks (Experiment 1 for verb pattern, Experiment 3 for verb roots), and two auditory decision tasks (Experiment 2 for verb pattern, Experiment 4 for verb roots). In the visual tasks, the participants were asked to decide whether a visual stimulus was a real word or not by pressing the laptop keyboard’s “yes” or “no” button. The auditory experiments were conducted similarly to the visual experiments, except that the stimuli were auditory, to clarify the locus of the morphological deficit observed in the visual test of the dyslexic students, should there be such failures. Analysis of Experiment 1 showed that verb patterns are not lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among typical and dyslexic readers of different ages. However, Experiment 3 indicated that roots do indeed constitute lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among normal and dyslexic readers of different ages. In Experiment 2, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the word pattern test was stronger among dyslexic and young readers than among more skilled readers, and contributed to speeding up lexical decisions more than its quality, among all research groups. In Experiment 4, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the root test was stronger than the visual effect among all participants, and contributed to hastening lexical decisions and improving the quality of the answers (success percentage). The results showed that roots contribute to the reading process. However, their contribution is different among dyslexic readers. Its construction is slower and different from that of typical readers, whereas word patterns have no lexical representation among the three reader groups that are likely to facilitate lexical decisions. The results are discussed with reference to the latest research literature on morpheme type (root or pattern).
Creative Education
The current research examined the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language amongst both Arab st... more The current research examined the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language amongst both Arab students and Jewish students, for whom it is their mother tongue, studying in bilingual schools. Their achievements in Hebrew were compared to their peers' achievements in monolingual schools: Jews were compared to their Jewish peers in Hebrew monolingual schools and Arabs were compared to their peers in Arabic monolingual schools. The students were given various assignments in Hebrew to test words recognition, pseudowords, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, morphology, syntax judgment, working memory, spelling and reading comprehension. The data was analyzed by one-way ANOVA and Tukey post hoc test. The results that stand out are that Hebrew as a second language does not come at the expense of birth tongue skills amongst Arab students and that the birth tongue of Jewish students was not impaired either. The consequence was that all students "earned" a second language. This study was compared to other similar researches conducted in other countries with spoken languages, and was discussed in the context of meta-linguistics theories, Cummins theory of mutual threshold, the monolingual facilitation theory and the Structural Sensitivity Hypothesis.
This study examines the influence of diglossia on syntactic proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic... more This study examines the influence of diglossia on syntactic proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) among 63 fourth-graders in central Israel, divided into two groups: regular and struggling. They were given three examinations constructed especially for this study: translating sentences from Spoken Arabic Vernacular (SAV) into MSA, a cloze test, and an oral exam, in which the pupils were asked to describe pictures in MSA. The findings revealed errors in the use of connectives, the use of prepositions, sentence integrity, and verb conjugation. No significant differences were found between regular and struggling pupils in average test scores in terms of errors in syntactic elements. In using prepositions, regular pupils made more errors than did struggling pupils; this was because the latter did not answer questions relating to this element. Several factors explain the effect of diglossia on syntactic proficiency: the similarity of MSA and SAV, the influence of the surroundings, scanty reading of books, the teaching methods used in Arab schools, the influence of Hebrew on the Arab student, and the lack of encouragement from the establishment and the education system. Future research should investigate this effect on a larger sample in order to obtain more representative outcomes.
Creative Education, 2022
The goal of the present study is to investigate how Arabic is acquired among Jewish pupils who le... more The goal of the present study is to investigate how Arabic is acquired among Jewish pupils who learn it as a second language (SL) in Israel and how Arabs acquire the Arabic language as their first language (L1). Both groups study Arab together in bilingual schools. This topic has not been investigated in bilingual schools in Israel. Such a study of this topic may clarify the developmental process of Arabic among Arab and Jewish students compared with their peers in regular monolingual schools. The research population comprised of random samples of 30 Arabic pupils and 30 Jewish pupils from each grade level: An overall sample consisted of 180 participants from bilingual schools. Similar sample was sampled from regular monolingual Arab and Jewish schools. The statistical analysis revealed no significant differences between pupils' groups in the 3 rd grade, particularly about Arab pupils learning in bilingual schools and Arab pupils learning in monolingual schools. However, the result of the higher grades revealed that bilingual pupils, Arabs and Jews, received better abilities regarding Arabic than their Arab peers learning in monolingual schools, which supports the idea of the advantages in providing bilingual education from an early age for both Jews and Arabs in Israel.
Reading Psychology, 1996
This study investigates the relation of attitudes and cultural background of Israeli‐Arab student... more This study investigates the relation of attitudes and cultural background of Israeli‐Arab students learning Hebrew, and Israeli‐Jewish students learning English, to their reading comprehension in familiar/ unfamiliar cultural stories. It compares two different social contexts: Israeli Arabs as a minority group learning the language of the majority group, and Israeli Jews as a majority group learning English as the language of the world. Participants were 80 Jewish and 70 Arab 14‐15 year‐old students (total 150) from two schools in central Israel. The instruments were an attitude questionnaire, stories in Arabic, Hebrew and English, and multi‐choice comprehension questions about each story. Results indicated that when students read texts with familiar cultural content they scored higher on tasks of reading comprehension than when they read texts with unfamiliar cultural content. Further, results of the attitude questionnaire indicated that the motivation of Arab and Jewish students in learning their second...
The Journal of Social Psychology, 1996
Page 1. Cross-Cultu the results can be Attitudes of Arab Minority Students in Israel and Canada T... more Page 1. Cross-Cultu the results can be Attitudes of Arab Minority Students in Israel and Canada Toward Learning a Second Language SALIM ABU-RABIA School of Education University of Haifa, Israel ATTITUDES OF ARAB ...
Journal of Research in Reading, 2002
The reading process in Arabic as a function of vowels and sentence context is reviewed. Reading a... more The reading process in Arabic as a function of vowels and sentence context is reviewed. Reading accuracy and reading comprehension results are reviewed in the light of cross-cultural reading, in order to develop a more comprehensive reading theory. Phonology, morphology and sentence context are considered key variables in explaining the reading process in Arabic orthography. Phonology (in the form of short vowels) affects reading accuracy as well as reading comprehension, regardless of reading level, age, material and reading conditions. Initial visual-orthographic processing identifies the morphology (i.e. the triliteral/quadriliteral roots of Arabic words) which then enables access to the mental lexicon. Sentence context is also essential in reading Arabic orthography regardless of the reader's level, age, material and reading condition. The phonology, morphology and sentence context of Arabic are presented in two suggested reading models for poor/beginner Arabic readers and for skilled Arabic readers.
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Papers by Salim Abu-Rabia