Spelling Accuracy of Consonants in Arabic among Negev Bedouin Students

Abstract

This study explored spelling development of the written form of Arabic among native Bedouin Arabic (BA) speakers in second, fourth, and sixth grades (N = 347) from two recognized authorities in south Israel. Specifically, this study focused on guttural (/ḥ/), uvular-velar (/q/ and /ġ/), emphatic (/ḏḍ/, /ṯṭ/, and /ð̠/̄), and dental (/ṯ/) consonants. Three tasks were constructed for this study: real word dictation, pseudo-word dictation, and real word recognition. The results for the real word task, pseudo-word task, and the word recognition task indicated significant improvement in spelling accuracy of the consonants targeted among fourth graders, however there was no additional improvement among the students in the sixth grade. It was also found that with emphatic phonemes accuracy is significantly lower than with all other phonemic groups at all elementary grades.