The Development of Academic Vocabulary among Arabic Native Speaking Middle School Pupils: How Much Do They Really Know?

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to obtain a more fine-grained understanding of academic vocabulary knowledge in Arabic as L1 among middle school pupils. Accordingly, 1197 middle school Arabic native speaking pupils, representing the different Arab subgroups in Israel, have participated in this study. In the first phase of the study, a corpus based Arabic academic vocabulary list (AAVL) was developed, setting ground for developing three assessment tests that measured receptive vocabulary knowledge on different levels, commencing from mere recognition to application and production of academic vocabulary in context. In the second phase, differences in academic vocabulary knowledge were assessed in relation to age (7th and 9th grades) and Arab sub-group (General Arab, Druze and Bedouin). Significant main effects were found for age and Arab subgroup. Significantly higher performance was noted among 9th graders when compared to 7th graders with the Druze sub group outperforming the general Arab and the Bedouin subgroup. The latter sub-group, characterized by the lowest socio-economic background showed the poorest performance. Additionally, three-way interaction was found between academic vocabulary knowledge level, age and Arab subgroup. In both 7th and 9th grade, significant differences were found between the Arab subgroups on the academic cloze test and production of academic vocabulary only. Post-hoc comparisons showed that in both age groups, the Druze subgroup achieved the highest performance in both tests. Significant differences between the general Arab and Bedouin subgroups were noted on the academic cloze test but not on the production of academic vocabulary test. The results of the study and its implications are discussed.