Arabic phonemic awareness (PA): The need for an assessment tool

Abstract

Phonemic awareness (PA), the consciousness of the sounds of the language, plays an instrumental role in reading development; research confirms that individuals with difficulty in detecting or manipulating sounds in words will struggle with learning to read. In spite of the plethora of instruments assessing PA of other languages, there is a dearth of research addressing PA in Arabic, the mother tongue of no less than 400 million people. Benefitting from previous research in the field, this paper is the first to develop and administer an instrument towards this end. Our proposed instrument, which includes 24 carefully selected words based on the standards of familiarity and feature analysis with a reliability coefficient of 0.93 was administered to 100 participants. The tool categorizes participants into three categories, highlights the role of KG, and reports on words the learners found easy and those difficult to segment. The paper calls for more research to investigate the role of Arabic PA in empowering Arab children's reading ability.