Arabic orthography and reading acquisition

Abstract

The study of reading acquisition in the Arabic language has been the subject of relatively little scientific research. The present paper reports one art of a comprehensive study of literacy acquisition in Morocco which sought to investigate the nature of the psycholinguistic skills which beginning readers of Arabic must master in becoming proficient readers. Overall, the findings suggest that learning to read in Arabic has much in common with other alphabetic scripts, particularly in terms of the importance of decoding skills for building subsequent reading skills