Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Domains, questions, and directions
- 2 Language and literacy in Morocco
- 3 The cultural context of schooling
- 4 Doing fieldwork in Morocco
- 5 Learning to read in Arabic
- 6 Social factors in literacy acquisition
- 7 Beliefs and literacy
- 8 Learning to read in a second language and a second literacy
- 9 Functional literacy: School learning and everyday skills
- 10 School dropout and literacy retention: Out of school, out of mind?
- 11 Literacy and poverty
- 12 Linking research and policy
- 13 Literacy, culture, and development: Concluding thoughts about a changing society
- Appendix 1 Cognitive consequences of Quranic preschooling
- Appendix 2 Details of test construction
- Appendix 3 Parent interview
- Appendix 4 Student interview
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
- Plate section
5 - Learning to read in Arabic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Domains, questions, and directions
- 2 Language and literacy in Morocco
- 3 The cultural context of schooling
- 4 Doing fieldwork in Morocco
- 5 Learning to read in Arabic
- 6 Social factors in literacy acquisition
- 7 Beliefs and literacy
- 8 Learning to read in a second language and a second literacy
- 9 Functional literacy: School learning and everyday skills
- 10 School dropout and literacy retention: Out of school, out of mind?
- 11 Literacy and poverty
- 12 Linking research and policy
- 13 Literacy, culture, and development: Concluding thoughts about a changing society
- Appendix 1 Cognitive consequences of Quranic preschooling
- Appendix 2 Details of test construction
- Appendix 3 Parent interview
- Appendix 4 Student interview
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
- Plate section
Summary
Aminagoes to school
Amina Tamandat just today has begun first grade in al-Ksour, and has brought home her paperback textbook, Qiraati (My reading), which the school provides for each student. As she enters her house, she calls to her older brother, Abdulhamid, to come and look at her first very own book. There are lots of letters printed in black and highlighted in places with pastel colors of red, green, and blue. A few letters are printed almost an inch tall, and they are the ones used in the examples for practice. Because she has gone to the local Quranic preschool, she knows all the letters on the page and begins to pronounce all the simple words that use the key letters. She is proud that she can say most of them, and she repeats them over and over, to the considerable pleasure of her brother.
Understanding literacy acquisition in Morocco necessarily requires indepth knowledge about the nature of the Arabic script and how children come to learn to decode, encode, and comprehend Arabic as a written language. From our ethnographic work, we had a relatively good idea of the circumstances in which children and adults come into contact with written materials, from advertising to textbooks. What was less obvious was whether learning to read in Arabic involved the same cognitive skills as, say, learning to read in English or French or Chinese.
Library research and communication with Arab educators had led us to conclude that there was a surprising dearth of research on Arabic reading acquisition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literacy, Culture and DevelopmentBecoming Literate in Morocco, pp. 79 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994